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David Koch, Billionaire Who Fueled Right-Wing Movement, Dies at 79

A man-about-town philanthropist, he and his brother Charles ran a business colossus while furthering a libertarian agenda that reshaped American politics.

By Robert D. McFadden

David H. Koch, an industrialist who amassed a multibillion-dollar fortune with his brother Charles and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape American politics, died on Friday at his home in Southampton, N.Y. He was 79.

Charles G. Koch announced the death in a statement, which noted that David Koch had been treated for prostate cancer in the past. “Twenty-seven years ago,” the statement said, “David was diagnosed with advanced prostate cancer and given a grim prognosis of a few years to live. David liked to say that a combination of brilliant doctors, state of the art medications and his own stubbornness kept the cancer at bay.”

Hitching his star to the soaring ambitions of Charles, his older brother, David Koch (pronounced coke) became one of the world’s richest people, with assets of $42.2 billion in 2019 and a 42 percent stake in the family enterprise, Koch Industries, a Kansas-based energy and chemicals conglomerate. He also became a nationally known philanthropist and the early public face of the Koch political ascendancy, as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president in 1980.

Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ money-fueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the Tea Party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.

A gregarious, socially prominent New Yorker who loved the ballet, Mr. Koch saw his name emblazoned on cornices at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital — the Manhattan institutions on which some of his $1.2 billion in charitable gifts  were bestowed.

He was a familiar figure at society galas, a 6-foot-5 former college basketball star who long held the single-game scoring record — 41 points — for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology team, the Engineers. He also had what New York magazine called a “seemingly limitless storehouse of Elks club-inflected jokes, which are often followed by his loud, wheezy honk of a laugh.”

In addition to Southampton, Mr. Koch had palatial homes on Park Avenue in Manhattan, in Aspen, Colo., and in Palm Beach, Fla. He kept a yacht in the Mediterranean for summer getaways and rented it out for $500,000 a week. His friends and acquaintances included Bill and Melinda Gates, Prince Charles and Winston Churchill’s grandson Winston Spencer Churchill.

He had both bad experiences and good luck. He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people at Los Angeles International Airport. He broke down in tears on a witness stand in Kansas during  a civil trial  that nearly tore his family apart over money. And for years, he and Charles faced, and denied, accusations of having exploited libertarian principles for self-serving purposes.

They insisted that they adhered to a traditional belief in the liberty of the individual, and in free trade, free markets and freedom from what they called government “intrusions,” including taxes, military drafts, compulsory education, business regulations, welfare programs and laws that criminalized homosexuality, prostitution and drug use.

An Electoral Force

Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million — some estimates put it at much more — to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.

But they said they had not given money to any Tea Party candidates. “I’ve never been to a Tea Party event,” David Koch told New York magazine in 2010. “No one representing the Tea Party has ever even approached me.”

Still, he and his brother acknowledged roles in founding and contributing money to Americans for Prosperity, the right-wing advocacy group that was widely reported to have provided logistical backing for the Tea Party and other organizations in election campaigns and the promotion of conservative causes.

Among the groups they supported was the  American Legislative Exchange Council , an organization of conservative state legislators and corporate lobbyists. Alec, as the group is known, drafts model state legislation that members may customize for introduction as proposed laws to cut taxes, combat illegal immigration, loosen environmental regulations, weaken labor unions and oppose gun laws.

As part of their longstanding crusade for lower taxes and smaller government, the Koch brothers in recent years opposed dozens of transit-related initiatives in cities and counties across the country,  a review by The New York Times found . Campaigns coordinated and financed by Americans for Prosperity fought state legislation to fund transportation projects, mounted ad campaigns and public forums to defeat transit plans, and organized phone banks to convince citizens that public transit was a waste of taxpayers’ money.

By early 2017, Charles and David Koch, with a combined net worth of more than $100 billion, had become the leaders of a libertarian juggernaut loosely allied with the Republican Party, which, after eight years in the wings, again controlled the White House, both houses of Congress and many state legislatures.

Under the administration of Donald J. Trump, the Koch brothers’ prospects in Washington seemed improved, at least superficially. But beneath the surface lay substantive political and personal differences between the Kochs and Mr. Trump.   While the Kochs did not endorse him, David Koch attended his election night victory party and later met with the president-elect at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach. The Kochs contributed heavily to Vice President Mike Pence’s two campaigns for governor of Indiana, and counted a half-dozen close allies among the president’s cabinet choices and Republican advisers.

“The Kochs will be key figures in any discussion about what direction the party takes after 2016,”  The Times reported  in September that year, “and they are determined to steer it toward their free-market vision.”

That proved prophetic. As the 2018 congressional elections approached, the Kochs’ frustrations with Mr. Trump broke into an ugly and open exchange between Charles Koch and the president. Charles denounced Mr. Trump’s restrictive trade and immigration policies as divisive, and threatened to withhold the family’s support for Republican candidates who opposed the free-trade, government-shrinking policies at the heart of the Koch political philosophy. Mr. Trump struck back on Twitter, calling the Koch political apparatus “overrated” and “a total joke in real Republican circles.”

Politics and Profits

Critics accused the Kochs of buying influence and using their political machine to manipulate elections and government policies under a guise of patriotism and freedom. Those efforts, the critics said, cloaked an agenda to cut taxes and federal regulations governing business, the environment and other interests, primarily to benefit the Koch family and its enterprises.

Jane Mayer, the New Yorker writer and a critic of the Koch brothers, said in her book “Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right” (2016), that the libertarian policies they embraced benefited Koch chemical and fossil fuel businesses, which were among the nation’s worst polluters, and paid millions in fines and court judgments for hazardous-waste violations.

“Lowering taxes and rolling back regulations, slashing the welfare state and obliterating the limits on campaign spending might or might not have helped others,” Ms. Mayer wrote, “but they most certainly strengthened the hand of extreme donors with extreme wealth.” The Koch brothers rejected the allegations.

Koch money also funded initiatives to undercut climate science and to counter efforts to address climate change. As Ms. Mayer put it in her book, “The Kochs vehemently opposed the government taking any action on climate change that would hurt their fossil fuel profits.”

In interviews after the book was published , Ms. Mayer said that investigators who she believed were hired by the Koch brothers had tried to intimidate her by digging up false information, including accusations of plagiarism, to smear her reputation.

While the brothers portrayed themselves as equal partners promoting libertarian ideas, Charles was the major decision maker, just as he was the dominant voice in Koch enterprises, according to Daniel Schulman’s 2014 biography, “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty.”

There were other differences. Charles has lived most of his life in a walled compound in Wichita, Kan., a secretive kingpin surrounded by lawyers, public relations retainers and security guards. By all accounts he reads economics, history and political philosophy, listens to opera, eats lunch in the company cafeteria  with his employees and rarely gives press interviews.

David, by contrast, was an extrovert who attended several dinner parties a week and bantered with reporters, politicians and friends in New York society. His outgoing personality was on display in a  nationally televised interview  with Barbara Walters on ABC in 2014. His vice-presidential run with Ed Clark, an oil company lawyer nominated as the Libertarian presidential candidate, drew nearly a million votes.

Brothers Against Brothers

David Hamilton Koch was born in Wichita on May 3, 1940, the third of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, an oil engineer and entrepreneur, and the former Mary Clementine Robinson, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a Kansas City physician.

David and his brothers — Frederick, seven years older; Charles, five years older, and David’s twin, William — grew up in Wichita under the discipline of an emotionally distant father, who taught them to fight and compete with one another. That spirit carried into adulthood, engendering feuds and lawsuits that became public displays of avarice and fraternal malice.

Fred Koch made millions in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries in the Soviet Union, Nazi Germany and elsewhere in Europe and the Middle East. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the right-wing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.

After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, his sons inherited significant stakes in the company. Charles became chairman, chief executive and the strategist behind its expansion into chemicals, pipelines and consumer goods, eventually making Koch Industries the nation’s second-largest private conglomerate, with interests in 60 countries, more than 100,000 employees and annual revenue of more than $100 billion.

David graduated from the exclusive Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts and studied chemical engineering at M.I.T., earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s in 1963. He worked for engineering firms in Cambridge, Mass., and New York City before joining the family company in 1970 as a technical services manager. But he did not settle in Wichita, as Charles had.

Instead, he founded a Koch Industries office in New York City, where he had already put down roots. He was known as a playboy whose penthouse parties were attended by models. In 1979, he was named president of his own division, Koch Engineering, which later morphed into Koch Chemical Technology Group. He became executive vice president of the parent company in 1981.

The oldest brother, Frederick, was the only sibling who took no active role in the family business; he attended Harvard and Yale and became a collector and patron of the arts. He was estranged from his father, who disowned and partly disinherited him, but Frederick’s shares in Koch Industries made him wealthy and proved critical later in a family fight for control of the company.

After earning a doctorate in chemical engineering, David’s twin, William, joined the company as a consultant in 1971, but never fit in. He moved from one job to another and complained that Charles was devoting too much money to libertarianism. In 1980, William attempted a boardroom coup to seize control of the company. It failed, and he was dismissed.

In a series of lawsuits that  dragged on for years , William and Frederick claimed that Charles and David had cheated them out of $2 billion in a 1983 settlement that paid $1.1 billion for their 5.5 million shares of Koch Industries. Accusations of instability, greed and nefarious conduct peppered the trial, and at one point David sobbed as he testified of family tensions so bitter that private investigators had been hired to pilfer trash and bribe janitors to dig up dirt.

In 1998, a federal jury in Topeka, Kan., finally ruled that the plaintiffs were owed nothing more, and in 2001 Charles, David and William reconciled, signing a settlement whose terms were not disclosed. They shared a meal for the first time in nearly two decades.

Setbacks and a Retirement

On Feb. 1, 1991, a Boeing 737 USAir flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Los Angeles, carrying 89 people, including David Koch, crashed into a small commuter plane on landing. All 12 people on the commuter plane and 22 passengers on the jetliner were killed. In a smoky, crowded cabin, Mr. Koch pried open an exit and leaped to the tarmac, escaping with cuts and burned lungs.

He learned he had prostate cancer in 1992. He had surgery and radiation and hormone treatments that kept the disease in check for decades. All his brothers had prostate cancer and were said to have been cured.

Mr. Koch stepped away from his political and business interests in June 2018. In a letter to employees of Koch Industries announcing his brother’s retirement, Charles Koch said that David’s deteriorating health had made it impossible for him to continue working. The letter did not disclose the nature of his illness. David’s presence in social and political circles, which once ran at the highest levels, had been declining for several years.

A bachelor until he was 56, Mr. Koch married Julia Flesher, a former Adolfo fashion assistant, in 1996. They had three children: David Jr., Mary Julia and John Mark. All survive him.

Mr. Koch’s philanthropies went mostly to medical, educational and cultural institutions. He listed gifts of more than $395 million in recent decades. The largest was $150 million to Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center to build the David H. Koch Center for Cancer Care in a 23-story structure in Manhattan.

At Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the ballet venue became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after he pledged $100 million. Another $100 million went to NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital for an ambulatory center, and he gave $65 million to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where he was a trustee, for the reconstruction of its plaza along Fifth Avenue. Both were named after him.

A dinosaur buff as a boy, Mr. Koch also gave millions to the American Museum of Natural History in New York for the David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing and to the National Museum of Natural History, part of the Smithsonian in Washington, for the David H. Koch Hall of Fossils , which opened in June.

“David is more of a philanthropist in the classic sense of the word,” Mr. Schulman, the Koch biographer, said in  a “Fresh Air” interview  on NPR in 2014. “He funds medical research, science; he funds the arts. Charles’ lifelong mission has been to change the political culture and mainstream libertarian ideas.”

An earlier version of this obituary, using information from a family spokesman, misidentified Mr. Koch's place of death. It was at his home in Southampton, N.Y., not at his home in Manhattan.

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David Koch obituary

David Koch, who has died aged 79, was ranked as the eleventh richest person in the world. Alongside his older brother Charles , he built his family’s company into one of the US’s biggest conglomerates and each brother’s share was estimated to be worth more than $50bn. They used their fortunes to influence American politics in a rightward direction following their libertarian ideology.

Charles wanted to “minimise the role of government and maximise the role of the private economy ... and personal freedoms”, but the brothers’ philosophy was self-serving, protecting their worth and working against regulation of their business interests.

David was the more public of the two, his philanthropy extending beyond the brothers’ massive spending on rightwing thinktanks, academic programmes, activist organisations and campaign funding; he was a major donor to the arts and medicine, especially in New York , where he maintained homes in Manhattan and the Hamptons.

He moved between them, Aspen (Colorado), Palm Beach (Florida) and a yacht in the Mediterranean while Charles lived in a walled estate in Wichita, Kansas, where Koch Industries has its headquarters. And though most of their work was behind-the-scenes, in 1980 he was the Libertarian party candidate for vice-president of the US.

Charles and David were two of the four sons of Fred and Mary (nee Robinson) Koch. Fred was an engineer who made his fortune from inventing an improved refining process to extract petrol from crude oil. His libertarian ideas came from the efforts of larger oil companies to stymie his firm’s growth using government-regulated patent laws; his hatred of socialism came from his experience, after building refineries in Britain, of supervising the construction of the Soviet Union’s largest installation.

When the Russians decided they could proceed on their own, Fred turned to Nazi Germany, with whom his firm Winkler-Koch collaborated from 1934 on building refineries. In 1958 he was a founding member of the ultra-rightwing John Birch Society , dedicated to fighting the infiltration of American politics by communists, among whose number it identified the Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower.

David was born in Wichita. Fred was a harsh father, encouraging competition among his sons, from which Charles emerged as the undisputed leader, and David his second, while David’s twin, William , fell behind and the eldest son, Frederick , described as being most like their mother, a Wellesey College graduate with artistic interests, was the odd one out.

They were subjected to frequent corporal punishment, as well as hard labour on the family farm. David went to Deerfield academy, in Massachusetts, and then, like his father and two of his brothers, took an engineering degree at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, where David, 6ft 5in tall, played basketball, setting an MIT scoring record with 41 points in one game.

After adding a master’s degree in 1963, he worked for engineering companies in Cambridge and New York. When Fred Sr died in 1967, Charles replaced him as chairman and chief executive of the renamed Koch Industries, and in 1970 David joined to open a New York office. In 1979 David became president of Koch Engineering, later Koch Chemical Technology, and in 1981 became number two to Charles as executive vice-president of Koch Industries.

No longer bound to his father’s political dictates, David broke with the John Birch Society. Along with Charles, he attended the Freedom School, which advocated the free-market theories of Friedrich Hayek , which were such an influence on Thatcherism in the UK. Although he and Ed Clark, the Libertarian candidate for president in 1980, attracted only 1.1% of the vote, the Kochs’ focus on politics led to a family feud that lasted for 20 years.

Before their father’s death, William is said to have recalled participating with Charles and David in an attempt to blackmail their oldest brother into relinquishing his inheritance by threatening to tell their father he was gay, which he denied. William regretted his actions, and in 1980 he and Frederick sued for control of the company, alleging Charles and David’s political interests were damaging its business.

In 1983 they settled for a buyout of $1.1bn, but in 1985 they sued again, claiming their brothers had undervalued the company’s worth in the settlement. The case was eventually settled in Charles and David’s favour in 1999, but not until 2001 were they publicly reconciled.

Fred Sr’s will required the sons to give the interest on their inheritance to charity; thus their political donations went to organisations structured as tax-exempt charities or academic institutions.

In the 1980s, Richard Fink, at the Koch-funded Cato Institute , developed a three-stage plan for activism . It started with the creation of an intellectual platform for ideas, at places they funded such as George Mason University. Then thinktanks would turn those ideas into policies to be brought to political reality by advocacy groups, which David called “a sales force”.

Although the Kochs strongly denied any connection, the nascent Tea Party movement was backed by another Koch-funded group, Americans for Prosperity . This worked in parallel with the American Legislative Exchange Council , through which the Kochs funded campaigns for Republican control of state legislatures.

In 1991, David narrowly escaped death as a passenger on a US Air jet that collided with a small commuter plane while landing at Los Angeles airport, killing 34 people. In 1992 he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, for which he received treatment for many years. His private life, which had been compared with Hugh Hefner’s, slowed down, and in 1996 he married Julia Flesher, an assistant at the Adolfo fashion brand.

Spurred by court decisions overturning limits on political spending, the Kochs became power brokers in Republican politics. Bitterly opposed to President Barack Obama, they poured money into the 2010 Congressional elections, and when the Republican John Boehner took the gavel as Speaker of the House in 2011, David was present in his office.

Their influence was revealed when Scott Walker, the newly elected governor of Wisconsin, took a phone call from a Koch representative, agreeing to a plan to remove collective bargaining from state employees. The caller was an impostor who made the tape public.

In the 2016 presidential campaign, the Kochs spent nearly $1bn on Republican candidates, but not on Donald Trump , whose protectionism was antithetical to their beliefs. Though David attended the victory party at Mar-a-Lago after Trump’s election, their criticism of the new president saw Trump label them “not true Republicans”, calling them “a total joke in Republican circles and highly overrated”. Like many Trump pronouncements, it downplayed the reality of the situation.

Koch is survived by his wife, his sons, David Jr and John, his daughter, Mary, and his brothers.

David Koch, businessman and political donor, born 3 May 1940; died 23 August 2019

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David Koch, billionaire and industrialist who funded conservatives, dies at 79

David Koch, the industrialist and libertarian who used his fortune to transform American politics while also donating more than $1 billion to philanthropic causes, has died. He was 79.

The death was confirmed by Koch spokeswoman Cristyne Nicholas.

Koch, whose net worth of about $59 billion in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index tied him with his brother as the world’s seventh-richest person, derived most of his wealth from a 42% stake in Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries, which has annual revenue of about $110 billion. It is one of the nation’s largest closely held companies, and its spectacular growth included the 2005 acquisition of Georgia Pacific for $21 billion.

A resident of New York’s Upper East Side and the city’s richest person, Koch once joked that Koch Industries was “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” The conglomerate has interests ranging from oil and ranching to farming and the manufacturing of electrical components.

But he and Charles Koch, 83, became better known for pushing their views than their business acumen, pumping millions into conservative causes and candidates. The operation they built includes more than 700 donors who give $100,000 or more a year and a group called Americans for Prosperity that has chapters in 35 states. It’s rivaled only by the Republican Party in its influence on the conservative agenda in the U.S.

The Koch brothers and other wealthy donors were able to expand their influence on elections following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that paved the way for unbridled spending, both directly and indirectly, by outside groups.

“David Koch’s imprint on the American political scene will endure long into the future,” said Daniel Schulman, who wrote “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty,” published in 2014. “The Kochs helped to give rise to the age of the megadonor, an era of unprecedented political spending in which wealthy individuals, as well as corporations, can influence politics as never before. His political legacy is huge.”

Koch money incubated a generation of political figures, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Yet all those men but Walker worked for President Donald Trump, who has upended the free-market views the Kochs have tried to foster within the Republican Party. That has prompted clashes with Trump, especially on trade and immigration policy.

The brothers didn’t support Trump in his 2016 campaign, although they praised his efforts to cut taxes and regulations.

Koch was the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1980. But as his health failed, he became less prominent in the Koch political operation. Charles Koch has served as the philosophical and hands-on leader, while David was chairman of the foundation that oversees AFP, their flagship political organ.

In June 2018, Charles Koch told company employees that his brother would step down from the business and political empires because of health problems. Charles Koch’s letter didn’t provide details, although he noted that David Koch had announced in October 2016 that he’d been hospitalized the previous summer.

“Unfortunately, these issues have not been resolved and his health has continued to deteriorate,” the letter said.

Koch was diagnosed with prostate cancer more than two decades ago. Through personal donations and contributions from the David H. Koch Foundation, he pledged or contributed more than $1 billion to cancer research, medical centers, educational institutions, arts and cultural institutions, and to assist public-policy organizations, according to his official biography.

“A lot of billionaires make their contribution and their name is on the board of directors, but they have no intention of showing up to the meetings,” said New York philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. “He came to meetings. He was always hands on.”

Arsht said David Koch never acted like Manhattan’s wealthiest person.

“He was most understated,” she said. “There was nothing about anything that he did that made you think he was anything but a man from Kansas.”

But the Koch brothers played a massive role in politics, helping shape state and federal policy.

“By lavishly underwriting candidates, policy organizations, and advocacy groups — often through untraceable donations — they have pulled American politics toward their own arch-conservative, pro-business, anti-tax, and anti-regulatory agenda,” Jane Mayer, who has covered the Koch brothers for the New Yorker, wrote in June 2018.

The brothers were credited with helping underwrite the limited-government tea party movement that helped Republicans take control of Congress in 2010. “They helped to unleash a political insurgency that in turn set the stage for our present state of extreme polarization, an outcome I don’t think they expected or desired,” Schulman said.

The brothers favored ending the minimum wage, eliminating so-called “corporate welfare” for new factories and stadiums and backed union-weakening laws. While their efforts got the most attention in Washington, AFP’s nearly nationwide on-the-ground presence meant their influence was felt in state and local matters that included fights against gas-tax increases and referendums on local projects.

Organizations that the brothers help found or fund, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, and the Manhattan Institute, have supported some of their ideas through studies and media interviews given by resident scholars.

Characterizing himself as a social liberal, David Koch was pro-abortion rights when it came to abortion and supportive of same-sex marriage and stem-cell research. Further confounding liberal critics, the brothers supported efforts to free nonviolent prisoners and overhaul sentencing, changes they argued would reduce recidivism, save taxpayers money and remove barriers to opportunity.

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“He believed he had a responsibility to a world that had given him so many opportunities to succeed,” his family said in a statement Friday. “David’s philanthropic dedication to education, the arts and cancer research will have a lasting impact on innumerable lives.”

He opposed the Affordable Care Act and was skeptical about the need for government to deal with global warming, giving money to groups that raised questions about the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring. In 2011, David Koch called then-President Barack Obama “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” pointing to damage he thought Obama had done to the free-enterprise system.

“David was smart, really smart,” said Frayda Levin, a Koch network donor and former New Jersey book distributor who served with him on the board of Americans for Prosperity. “He could hone in on any issue and ask insightful questions.”

David Hamilton Koch, whose grandfather was a Dutch immigrant, was born on May 3, 1940, in Wichita to Fred and Mary Robinson Koch. Their father, after helping Soviet dictator Josef Stalin develop oil-refining plants, became an early supporter of the anti-communist John Birch Society. That group was often in conflict with the movement conservatism that fueled the rise of figures like former President Richard Nixon, so the family’s politics have long been an uneasy fit in the Republican Party’s mainstream.

David and his twin brother, William, were the youngest of four siblings. David and Charles successfully fought Fred and William in court for control of the company.

David Koch attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He went on to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s a year later. Koch, who was 6-foot-5, averaged 21 points per game on MIT’s basketball team and held the single-game scoring record of 41 points that stood for 46 years, according to his official biography. He also played for the Boston Rugby Football Club.

Koch worked initially as a consultant and engineer for firms such as Arthur D. Little before joining the family business in 1970. Charles had taken over following the death of their father three years before.

The company then was an oil-refining business worth about $70 million. The brothers turned it into an industrial behemoth with interests in oil refining, pipelines, commodities trading, ranching and paper and pulp products that include brands such as Dixie cups and Brawny paper towels.

While Charles ran Koch Industries from Wichita, David opened the company’s New York office in 1970, rising to executive vice president as his brother reigned as chairman and chief executive officer.

Using his New York base, David lavished money on museums and arts institutions such as the $100 million he gave to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, which was renamed the David H. Koch Theater.

He also supported medical research, especially after he survived a USAir accident in 1991 at Los Angeles International Airport. Shortly afterward, he discovered he had prostate cancer, a disease that afflicted his brothers.

“When you’re the only one who survived in the front of the plane and everyone else died — yeah, you think, ‘My God, the good Lord spared me for some greater purpose,” he told portfolio.com.

The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation gave $150 million to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to build a state-of-the-art outpatient medical facility, the largest single gift the institution had then received. He gave $100 million to MIT to create the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In 1996, at age 56, he married the former Julia Flesher, a former assistant to designer Adolfo. They had three children: David Jr., Mary and John.

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Covert Operations

By Jane Mayer

On May 17th, a black-tie audience at the Metropolitan Opera House applauded as a tall, jovial-looking billionaire took the stage. It was the seventieth annual spring gala of American Ballet Theatre, and David H. Koch was being celebrated for his generosity as a member of the board of trustees; he had recently donated $2.5 million toward the company’s upcoming season, and had given many millions before that. Koch received an award while flanked by two of the gala’s co-chairs, Blaine Trump, in a peach-colored gown, and Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg, in emerald green. Kennedy’s mother, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, had been a patron of the ballet and, coincidentally, the previous owner of a Fifth Avenue apartment that Koch had bought, in 1995, and then sold, eleven years later, for thirty-two million dollars, having found it too small.

The gala marked the social ascent of Koch, who, at the age of seventy, has become one of the city’s most prominent philanthropists. In 2008, he donated a hundred million dollars to modernize Lincoln Center’s New York State Theatre building, which now bears his name. He has given twenty million to the American Museum of Natural History, whose dinosaur wing is named for him. This spring, after noticing the decrepit state of the fountains outside the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Koch pledged at least ten million dollars for their renovation. He is a trustee of the museum, perhaps the most coveted social prize in the city, and serves on the board of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, where, after he donated more than forty million dollars, an endowed chair and a research center were named for him.

One dignitary was conspicuously absent from the gala: the event’s third honorary co-chair, Michelle Obama. Her office said that a scheduling conflict had prevented her from attending. Yet had the First Lady shared the stage with Koch it might have created an awkward tableau. In Washington, Koch is best known as part of a family that has repeatedly funded stealth attacks on the federal government, and on the Obama Administration in particular.

With his brother Charles, who is seventy-four, David Koch owns virtually all of Koch Industries, a conglomerate, headquartered in Wichita, Kansas, whose annual revenues are estimated to be a hundred billion dollars. The company has grown spectacularly since their father, Fred, died, in 1967, and the brothers took charge. The Kochs operate oil refineries in Alaska, Texas, and Minnesota, and control some four thousand miles of pipeline. Koch Industries owns Brawny paper towels, Dixie cups, Georgia-Pacific lumber, Stainmaster carpet, and Lycra, among other products. Forbes ranks it as the second-largest private company in the country, after Cargill, and its consistent profitability has made David and Charles Koch—who, years ago, bought out two other brothers—among the richest men in America. Their combined fortune of thirty-five billion dollars is exceeded only by those of Bill Gates and Warren Buffett.

The Kochs are longtime libertarians who believe in drastically lower personal and corporate taxes, minimal social services for the needy, and much less oversight of industry—especially environmental regulation. These views dovetail with the brothers’ corporate interests. In a study released this spring, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute named Koch Industries one of the top ten air polluters in the United States. And Greenpeace issued a report identifying the company as a “kingpin of climate science denial.” The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

In a statement, Koch Industries said that the Greenpeace report “distorts the environmental record of our companies.” And David Koch, in a recent, admiring article about him in New York, protested that the “radical press” had turned his family into “whipping boys,” and had exaggerated its influence on American politics. But Charles Lewis, the founder of the Center for Public Integrity, a nonpartisan watchdog group, said, “The Kochs are on a whole different level. There’s no one else who has spent this much money. The sheer dimension of it is what sets them apart. They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. They are the Standard Oil of our times.”

A few weeks after the Lincoln Center gala, the advocacy wing of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation—an organization that David Koch started, in 2004—held a different kind of gathering. Over the July 4th weekend, a summit called Texas Defending the American Dream took place in a chilly hotel ballroom in Austin. Though Koch freely promotes his philanthropic ventures, he did not attend the summit, and his name was not in evidence. And on this occasion the audience was roused not by a dance performance but by a series of speakers denouncing President Barack Obama. Peggy Venable, the organizer of the summit, warned that Administration officials “have a socialist vision for this country.”

Five hundred people attended the summit, which served, in part, as a training session for Tea Party activists in Texas. An advertisement cast the event as a populist uprising against vested corporate power. “Today, the voices of average Americans are being drowned out by lobbyists and special interests,” it said. “But you can do something about it.” The pitch made no mention of its corporate funders. The White House has expressed frustration that such sponsors have largely eluded public notice. David Axelrod, Obama’s senior adviser, said, “What they don’t say is that, in part, this is a grassroots citizens’ movement brought to you by a bunch of oil billionaires.”

In April, 2009, Melissa Cohlmia, a company spokesperson, denied that the Kochs had direct links to the Tea Party, saying that Americans for Prosperity is “an independent organization and Koch companies do not in any way direct their activities.” Later, she issued a statement: “No funding has been provided by Koch companies, the Koch foundations, or Charles Koch or David Koch specifically to support the tea parties.” David Koch told New York , “I’ve never been to a tea-party event. No one representing the tea party has ever even approached me.”

At the lectern in Austin, however, Venable—a longtime political operative who draws a salary from Americans for Prosperity, and who has worked for Koch-funded political groups since 1994—spoke less warily. “We love what the Tea Parties are doing, because that’s how we’re going to take back America!” she declared, as the crowd cheered. In a subsequent interview, she described herself as an early member of the movement, joking, “I was part of the Tea Party before it was cool!” She explained that the role of Americans for Prosperity was to help “educate” Tea Party activists on policy details, and to give them “next-step training” after their rallies, so that their political energy could be channelled “more effectively.” And she noted that Americans for Prosperity had provided Tea Party activists with lists of elected officials to target. She said of the Kochs, “They’re certainly our people. David’s the chairman of our board. I’ve certainly met with them, and I’m very appreciative of what they do.”

Venable honored several Tea Party “citizen leaders” at the summit. The Texas branch of Americans for Prosperity gave its Blogger of the Year Award to a young woman named Sibyl West. On June 14th, West, writing on her site, described Obama as the “cokehead in chief.” In an online thread, West speculated that the President was exhibiting symptoms of “demonic possession (aka schizophrenia, etc.).” The summit featured several paid speakers, including Janine Turner, the actress best known for her role on the television series “Northern Exposure.” She declared, “They don’t want our children to know about their rights. They don’t want our children to know about a God!”

During a catered lunch, Venable introduced Ted Cruz, a former solicitor general of Texas, who told the crowd that Obama was “the most radical President ever to occupy the Oval Office,” and had hidden from voters a secret agenda—“the government taking over our economy and our lives.” Countering Obama, Cruz proclaimed, was “the epic fight of our generation!” As the crowd rose to its feet and cheered, he quoted the defiant words of a Texan at the Alamo: “Victory, or death!”

Americans for Prosperity has worked closely with the Tea Party since the movement’s inception. In the weeks before the first Tax Day protests, in April, 2009, Americans for Prosperity hosted a Web site offering supporters “Tea Party Talking Points.” The Arizona branch urged people to send tea bags to Obama; the Missouri branch urged members to sign up for “Taxpayer Tea Party Registration” and provided directions to nine protests. The group continues to stoke the rebellion. The North Carolina branch recently launched a “Tea Party Finder” Web site, advertised as “a hub for all the Tea Parties in North Carolina.”

The anti-government fervor infusing the 2010 elections represents a political triumph for the Kochs. By giving money to “educate,” fund, and organize Tea Party protesters, they have helped turn their private agenda into a mass movement. Bruce Bartlett, a conservative economist and a historian, who once worked at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a Dallas-based think tank that the Kochs fund, said, “The problem with the whole libertarian movement is that it’s been all chiefs and no Indians. There haven’t been any actual people, like voters, who give a crap about it. So the problem for the Kochs has been trying to create a movement.” With the emergence of the Tea Party, he said, “everyone suddenly sees that for the first time there are Indians out there—people who can provide real ideological power.” The Kochs, he said, are “trying to shape and control and channel the populist uprising into their own policies.”

A Republican campaign consultant who has done research on behalf of Charles and David Koch said of the Tea Party, “The Koch brothers gave the money that founded it. It’s like they put the seeds in the ground. Then the rainstorm comes, and the frogs come out of the mud—and they’re our candidates!”

The Kochs and their political operatives declined requests for interviews. Instead, a prominent New York public-relations executive who is close with the Kochs put forward two friends: George Pataki, the former governor of New York, and Mortimer Zuckerman, the publisher and real-estate magnate. Pataki, a Republican who received campaign donations from David Koch, called him “a patriot who cares deeply about his country.” Zuckerman praised David’s “gentle decency” and the “range of his public interests.”

The Republican campaign consultant said of the family’s political activities, “To call them under the radar is an understatement. They are underground!” Another former Koch adviser said, “They’re smart. This right-wing, redneck stuff works for them. They see this as a way to get things done without getting dirty themselves.” Rob Stein, a Democratic political strategist who has studied the conservative movement’s finances, said that the Kochs are “at the epicenter of the anti-Obama movement. But it’s not just about Obama. They would have done the same to Hillary Clinton. They did the same with Bill Clinton. They are out to destroy progressivism.”

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Oddly enough, the fiercely capitalist Koch family owes part of its fortune to Joseph Stalin. Fred Koch was the son of a Dutch printer who settled in Texas and ran a weekly newspaper. Fred attended M.I.T., where he earned a degree in chemical engineering. In 1927, he invented a more efficient process for converting oil into gasoline, but, according to family lore, America’s major oil companies regarded him as a threat and shut him out of the industry. Unable to succeed at home, Koch found work in the Soviet Union. In the nineteen-thirties, his company trained Bolshevik engineers and helped Stalin’s regime set up fifteen modern oil refineries. Over time, however, Stalin brutally purged several of Koch’s Soviet colleagues. Koch was deeply affected by the experience, and regretted his collaboration. He returned to the U.S. In the headquarters of his company, Rock Island Oil & Refining, in Wichita, he kept photographs aimed at proving that some of those Soviet refineries had been destroyed in the Second World War. Gus diZerega, a former friend of Charles Koch, recalled, “As the Soviets became a stronger military power, Fred felt a certain amount of guilt at having helped build them up. I think it bothered him a lot.”

In 1958, Fred Koch became one of the original members of the John Birch Society, the arch-conservative group known, in part, for a highly skeptical view of governance and for spreading fears of a Communist takeover. Members considered President Dwight D. Eisenhower to be a Communist agent. In a self-published broadside, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat and Republican Parties.” He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” he warned. Welfare was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech that prefigures the Tea Party’s talk of a secret socialist plot, Koch predicted that Communists would “infiltrate the highest offices of government in the U.S. until the President is a Communist, unknown to the rest of us.”

Koch married Mary Robinson, the daughter of a Missouri physician, and they had four sons: Freddie, Charles, and twins, David and William. John Damgard, the president of the Futures Industry Association, was David’s schoolmate and friend. He recalled that Fred Koch was “a real John Wayne type.” Koch emphasized rugged pursuits, taking his sons big-game hunting in Africa, and requiring them to do farm labor at the family ranch. The Kochs lived in a stone mansion on a large compound across from Wichita’s country club; in the summer, the boys could hear their friends splashing in the pool, but they were not allowed to join them. “By instilling a work ethic in me at an early age, my father did me a big favor, although it didn’t seem like a favor back then,” Charles has written. “By the time I was eight, he made sure work occupied most of my spare time.” David Koch recalled that his father also indoctrinated the boys politically. “He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government,” he told Brian Doherty, an editor of the libertarian magazine Reason , and the author of “Radicals for Capitalism,” a 2007 history of the libertarian movement. “It’s something I grew up with—a fundamental point of view that big government was bad, and imposition of government controls on our lives and economic fortunes was not good.”

David attended Deerfield Academy, in Massachusetts, and Charles was sent to military school. Charles, David, and William all earned engineering degrees at their father’s alma mater, M.I.T., and later joined the family company. Charles eventually assumed control, with David as his deputy; William’s career at the company was less successful. Freddie went to Harvard and studied playwriting at the Yale School of Drama. His father reportedly disapproved of him, and punished him financially. (Freddie, through a spokesperson, denied this.)

In 1967, after Fred Koch died, of a heart attack, Charles renamed the business Koch Industries, in honor of his father. Fred Koch’s will made his sons extraordinarily wealthy. David Koch joked about his good fortune in a 2003 speech to alumni at Deerfield, where, after pledging twenty-five million dollars, he was made the school’s sole “lifetime trustee.” He said, “You might ask: How does David Koch happen to have the wealth to be so generous? Well, let me tell you a story. It all started when I was a little boy. One day, my father gave me an apple. I soon sold it for five dollars and bought two apples and sold them for ten. Then I bought four apples and sold them for twenty. Well, this went on day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, until my father died and left me three hundred million dollars!”

David and Charles had absorbed their father’s conservative politics, but they did not share all his views, according to diZerega, who befriended Charles in the mid-sixties, after meeting him while browsing in a John Birch Society bookstore in Wichita. Charles eventually invited him to the Kochs’ mansion, to participate in an informal political-discussion group. “It was pretty clear that Charles thought some of the Birch Society was bullshit,” diZerega recalled.

DiZerega, who has lost touch with Charles, eventually abandoned right-wing views, and became a political-science professor. He credits Charles with opening his mind to political philosophy, which set him on the path to academia; Charles is one of three people to whom he dedicated his first book. But diZerega believes that the Koch brothers have followed a wayward intellectual trajectory, transferring their father’s paranoia about Soviet Communism to a distrust of the U.S. government, and seeing its expansion, beginning with the New Deal, as a tyrannical threat to freedom. In an essay, posted on Beliefnet, diZerega writes, “As state socialism failed . . . the target for many within these organizations shifted to any kind of regulation at all. ‘Socialism’ kept being defined downwards.”

Members of the John Birch Society developed an interest in a school of Austrian economists who promoted free-market ideals. Charles and David Koch were particularly influenced by the work of Friedrich von Hayek, the author of “The Road to Serfdom” (1944), which argued that centralized government planning led, inexorably, to totalitarianism. Hayek’s belief in unfettered capitalism has proved inspirational to many conservatives, and to anti-Soviet dissidents; lately, Tea Party supporters have championed his work. In June, the talk-radio host Glenn Beck, who has supported the Tea Party rebellion, promoted “The Road to Serfdom” on his show; the paperback soon became a No. 1 best-seller on Amazon. (Beck appears to be a fan of the Kochs; in the midst of a recent on-air parody of Al Gore, Beck said, without explanation, “I want to thank Charles Koch for this information.” Beck declined to elaborate on the relationship.)

Charles and David also became devotees of a more radical thinker, Robert LeFevre, who favored the abolition of the state but didn’t like the label “anarchist”; he called himself an “autarchist.” LeFevre liked to say that “government is a disease masquerading as its own cure.” In 1956, he opened an institution called the Freedom School, in Colorado Springs. Brian Doherty, of Reason , told me that “LeFevre was an anarchist figure who won Charles’s heart,” and that the school was “a tiny world of people who thought the New Deal was a horrible mistake.” According to diZerega, Charles supported the school financially, and even gave him money to take classes there.

Throughout the seventies, Charles and David continued to build Koch Industries. In 1980, William, with assistance from Freddie, attempted to take over the company from Charles, who, they felt, had assumed autocratic control. In retaliation, the company’s board, which answered to Charles, fired William. (“Charles runs it all with an iron hand,” Bruce Bartlett, the economist, told me.) Lawsuits were filed, with William and Freddie on one side and Charles and David on the other. In 1983, Charles and David bought out their brothers’ share in the company for nearly a billion dollars. But the antagonism remained, and litigation continued for seventeen more years, with the brothers hiring rival private investigators; in 1990, they walked past one another with stony expressions at their mother’s funeral. Eventually, Freddie moved to Monaco, which has no income tax. He bought historic estates in France, Austria, and elsewhere, filling them with art, antiques, opera scores, and literary manuscripts. William founded his own energy company, Oxbow, and turned to yachting; he spent an estimated sixty-five million dollars to win the America’s Cup, in 1992.

With Charles as the undisputed chairman and C.E.O., Koch Industries expanded rapidly. Roger Altman, who heads the investment-banking firm Evercore, told me that the company’s performance has been “beyond phenomenal.” Charles remained in Wichita, with his wife and two children, guarding his privacy while supporting community charities. David moved to New York City, where he is an executive vice-president of the company and the C.E.O. of its Chemical Technology Group. A financial expert who knows Koch Industries well told me, “Charles is the company. Charles runs it.” David, described by associates as “affable” and “a bit of a lunk,” enjoyed for years the life of a wealthy bachelor. He rented a yacht in the South of France and bought a waterfront home in Southampton, where he threw parties that the Web site New York Social Diary likened to an “East Coast version of Hugh Hefner’s soirées.” In 1996, he married Julia Flesher, a fashion assistant. They live in a nine-thousand-square-foot duplex at 740 Park Avenue, with their three children. Though David’s manner is more cosmopolitan, and more genial, than that of Charles, Brian Doherty, who has interviewed both brothers, couldn’t think of a single issue on which the brothers disagreed.

As their fortunes grew, Charles and David Koch became the primary underwriters of hard-line libertarian politics in America. Charles’s goal, as Doherty described it, was to tear the government “out at the root.” The brothers’ first major public step came in 1979, when Charles persuaded David, then thirty-nine, to run for public office. They had become supporters of the Libertarian Party, and were backing its Presidential candidate, Ed Clark, who was running against Ronald Reagan from the right. Frustrated by the legal limits on campaign donations, they contrived to place David on the ticket, in the Vice-Presidential slot; upon becoming a candidate, he could lavish as much of his personal fortune as he wished on the campaign. The ticket’s slogan was “The Libertarian Party has only one source of funds: You.” In fact, its primary source of funds was David Koch, who spent more than two million dollars on the effort.

Many of the ideas propounded in the 1980 campaign presaged the Tea Party movement. Ed Clark told The Nation that libertarians were getting ready to stage “a very big tea party,” because people were “sick to death” of taxes. The Libertarian Party platform called for the abolition of the F.B.I. and the C.I.A., as well as of federal regulatory agencies, such as the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Department of Energy. The Party wanted to end Social Security, minimum-wage laws, gun control, and all personal and corporate income taxes; it proposed the legalization of prostitution, recreational drugs, and suicide. Government should be reduced to only one function: the protection of individual rights. William F. Buckley, Jr., a more traditional conservative, called the movement “Anarcho-Totalitarianism.”

That November, the Libertarian ticket received only one per cent of the vote. The brothers realized that their brand of politics didn’t sell at the ballot box. Charles Koch became openly scornful of conventional politics. “It tends to be a nasty, corrupting business,” he told a reporter at the time. “I’m interested in advancing libertarian ideas.” According to Doherty’s book, the Kochs came to regard elected politicians as merely “actors playing out a script.” A longtime confidant of the Kochs told Doherty that the brothers wanted to “supply the themes and words for the scripts.” In order to alter the direction of America, they had to “influence the areas where policy ideas percolate from: academia and think tanks.”

After the 1980 election, Charles and David Koch receded from the public arena. But they poured more than a hundred million dollars into dozens of seemingly independent organizations. Tax records indicate that in 2008 the three main Koch family foundations gave money to thirty-four political and policy organizations, three of which they founded, and several of which they direct. The Kochs and their company have given additional millions to political campaigns, advocacy groups, and lobbyists. The family’s subterranean financial role has fuelled suspicion on the left; Lee Fang, of the liberal blog ThinkProgress, has called the Kochs “the billionaires behind the hate.”

Only the Kochs know precisely how much they have spent on politics. Public tax records show that between 1998 and 2008 the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than forty-eight million dollars. The Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, which is controlled by Charles Koch and his wife, along with two company employees and an accountant, spent more than twenty-eight million. The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation spent more than a hundred and twenty million. Meanwhile, since 1998 Koch Industries has spent more than fifty million dollars on lobbying. Separately, the company’s political-action committee, Koch PAC , has donated some eight million dollars to political campaigns, more than eighty per cent of it to Republicans. So far in 2010, Koch Industries leads all other energy companies in political contributions, as it has since 2006. In addition, during the past dozen years the Kochs and other family members have personally spent more than two million dollars on political contributions. In the second quarter of 2010, David Koch was the biggest individual contributor to the Republican Governors Association, with a million-dollar donation. Other gifts by the Kochs may be untraceable; federal tax law permits anonymous personal donations to politically active nonprofit groups.

In recent decades, members of several industrial dynasties have spent parts of their fortunes on a conservative agenda. In the nineteen-eighties, the Olin family, which owns a chemicals-and-manufacturing conglomerate, became known for funding right-leaning thinking in academia, particularly in law schools. And during the nineties Richard Mellon Scaife, a descendant of Andrew Mellon, spent millions attempting to discredit President Bill Clinton. Ari Rabin-Havt, a vice-president at the Democratic-leaning Web site Media Matters, said that the Kochs’ effort is unusual, in its marshalling of corporate and personal funds: “Their role, in terms of financial commitments, is staggering.”

Of course, Democrats give money, too. Their most prominent donor, the financier George Soros, runs a foundation, the Open Society Institute, that has spent as much as a hundred million dollars a year in America. Soros has also made generous private contributions to various Democratic campaigns, including Obama’s. But Michael Vachon, his spokesman, argued that Soros’s giving is transparent, and that “none of his contributions are in the service of his own economic interests.” The Kochs have given millions of dollars to nonprofit groups that criticize environmental regulation and support lower taxes for industry. Gus diZerega, the former friend, suggested that the Kochs’ youthful idealism about libertarianism had largely devolved into a rationale for corporate self-interest. He said of Charles, “Perhaps he has confused making money with freedom.”

Some critics have suggested that the Kochs’ approach has subverted the purpose of tax-exempt giving. By law, charitable foundations must conduct exclusively nonpartisan activities that promote the public welfare. A 2004 report by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog group, described the Kochs’ foundations as being self-serving, concluding, “These foundations give money to nonprofit organizations that do research and advocacy on issues that impact the profit margin of Koch Industries.”

The Kochs have gone well beyond their immediate self-interest, however, funding organizations that aim to push the country in a libertarian direction. Among the institutions that they have subsidized are the Institute for Justice, which files lawsuits opposing state and federal regulations; the Institute for Humane Studies, which underwrites libertarian academics; and the Bill of Rights Institute, which promotes a conservative slant on the Constitution. Many of the organizations funded by the Kochs employ specialists who write position papers that are subsequently quoted by politicians and pundits. David Koch has acknowledged that the family exerts tight ideological control. “If we’re going to give a lot of money, we’ll make darn sure they spend it in a way that goes along with our intent,” he told Doherty. “And if they make a wrong turn and start doing things we don’t agree with, we withdraw funding.”

The Kochs’ subsidization of a pro-corporate movement fulfills, in many ways, the vision laid out in a secret 1971 memo that Lewis Powell, then a Virginia attorney, wrote two months before he was nominated to the Supreme Court. The antiwar movement had turned its anger on defense contractors, such as Dow Chemical, and Ralph Nader was leading a public-interest crusade against corporations. Powell, writing a report for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, urged American companies to fight back. The greatest threat to free enterprise, he warned, was not Communism or the New Left but, rather, “respectable elements of society”—intellectuals, journalists, and scientists. To defeat them, he wrote, business leaders needed to wage a long-term, unified campaign to change public opinion.

Charles Koch seems to have approached both business and politics with the deliberation of an engineer. “To bring about social change,” he told Doherty, requires “a strategy” that is “vertically and horizontally integrated,” spanning “from idea creation to policy development to education to grassroots organizations to lobbying to litigation to political action.” The project, he admitted, was extremely ambitious. “We have a radical philosophy,” he said.

In 1977, the Kochs provided the funds to launch the nation’s first libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute. According to the Center for Public Integrity, between 1986 and 1993 the Koch family gave eleven million dollars to the institute. Today, Cato has more than a hundred full-time employees, and its experts and policy papers are widely quoted and respected by the mainstream media. It describes itself as nonpartisan, and its scholars have at times been critical of both parties. But it has consistently pushed for corporate tax cuts, reductions in social services, and laissez-faire environmental policies.

When President Obama, in a 2008 speech, described the science on global warming as “beyond dispute,” the Cato Institute took out a full-page ad in the Times to contradict him. Cato’s resident scholars have relentlessly criticized political attempts to stop global warming as expensive, ineffective, and unnecessary. Ed Crane, the Cato Institute’s founder and president, told me that “global-warming theories give the government more control of the economy.”

Cato scholars have been particularly energetic in promoting the Climategate scandal. Last year, private e-mails of climate scientists at the University of East Anglia, in England, were mysteriously leaked, and their exchanges appeared to suggest a willingness to falsify data in order to buttress the idea that global warming is real. In the two weeks after the e-mails went public, one Cato scholar gave more than twenty media interviews trumpeting the alleged scandal. But five independent inquiries have since exonerated the researchers, and nothing was found in their e-mails or data to discredit the scientific consensus on global warming.

Nevertheless, the controversy succeeded in spreading skepticism about climate change. Even though the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration recently issued a report concluding that the evidence for global warming is unequivocal, more Americans are convinced than at any time since 1997 that scientists have exaggerated the seriousness of global warming. The Kochs promote this statistic on their company’s Web site but do not mention the role that their funding has played in fostering such doubt.

In a 2002 memo, the Republican political consultant Frank Luntz wrote that so long as “voters believe there is no consensus about global warming within the scientific community” the status quo would prevail. The key for opponents of environmental reform, he said, was to question the science—a public-relations strategy that the tobacco industry used effectively for years to forestall regulation. The Kochs have funded many sources of environmental skepticism, such as the Heritage Foundation, which has argued that “scientific facts gathered in the past 10 years do not support the notion of catastrophic human-made warming.” The brothers have given money to more obscure groups, too, such as the Independent Women’s Forum, which opposes the presentation of global warming as a scientific fact in American public schools. Until 2008, the group was run by Nancy Pfotenhauer, a former lobbyist for Koch Industries. Mary Beth Jarvis, a vice-president of a Koch subsidiary, is on the group’s board.

Naomi Oreskes, a professor of history and science studies at the University of California, San Diego, is the co-author of “Merchants of Doubt,” a new book that chronicles various attempts by American industry to manipulate public opinion on science. She noted that the Kochs, as the heads of “a company with refineries and pipelines,” have “a lot at stake.” She added, “If the answer is to phase out fossil fuels, a different group of people are going to be making money, so we shouldn’t be surprised that they’re fighting tooth and nail.”

David Koch told New York that he was unconvinced that global warming has been caused by human activity. Even if it has been, he said, the heating of the planet will be beneficial, resulting in longer growing seasons in the Northern Hemisphere. “The Earth will be able to support enormously more people because far greater land area will be available to produce food,” he said.

In the mid-eighties, the Kochs provided millions of dollars to George Mason University, in Arlington, Virginia, to set up another think tank. Now known as the Mercatus Center, it promotes itself as “the world’s premier university source for market-oriented ideas—bridging the gap between academic ideas and real-world problems.” Financial records show that the Koch family foundations have contributed more than thirty million dollars to George Mason, much of which has gone to the Mercatus Center, a nonprofit organization. “It’s ground zero for deregulation policy in Washington,” Rob Stein, the Democratic strategist, said. It is an unusual arrangement. “George Mason is a public university, and receives public funds,” Stein noted. “Virginia is hosting an institution that the Kochs practically control.”

The founder of the Mercatus Center is Richard Fink, formerly an economist. Fink heads Koch Industries’ lobbying operation in Washington. In addition, he is the president of the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, the president of the Claude R. Lambe Charitable Foundation, a director of the Fred C. and Mary R. Koch Foundation, and a director and co-founder, with David Koch, of the Americans for Prosperity Foundation.

Fink, with his many titles, has become the central nervous system of the Kochtopus. He appears to have supplanted Ed Crane, the head of the Cato Institute, as the brothers’ main political lieutenant. Though David remains on the board at Cato, Charles Koch has fallen out with Crane. Associates suggested to me that Crane had been insufficiently respectful of Charles’s management philosophy, which he distilled into a book called “The Science of Success,” and trademarked under the name Market-Based Management, or M.B.M. In the book, Charles recommends instilling a company’s corporate culture with the competitiveness of the marketplace. Koch describes M.B.M. as a “holistic system” containing “five dimensions: vision, virtue and talents, knowledge processes, decision rights and incentives.” A top Cato Institute official told me that Charles “thinks he’s a genius. He’s the emperor, and he’s convinced he’s wearing clothes.” Fink, by contrast, has been far more embracing of Charles’s ideas. (Fink, like the Kochs, declined to be interviewed.)

At a 1995 conference for philanthropists, Fink adopted the language of economics when speaking about the Mercatus Center’s purpose. He said that grant-makers should use think tanks and political-action groups to convert intellectual raw materials into policy “products.”

The Wall Street Journal has called the Mercatus Center “the most important think tank you’ve never heard of,” and noted that fourteen of the twenty-three regulations that President George W. Bush placed on a “hit list” had been suggested first by Mercatus scholars. Fink told the paper that the Kochs have “other means of fighting [their] battles,” and that the Mercatus Center does not actively promote the company’s private interests. But Thomas McGarity, a law professor at the University of Texas, who specializes in environmental issues, told me that “Koch has been constantly in trouble with the E.P.A., and Mercatus has constantly hammered on the agency.” An environmental lawyer who has clashed with the Mercatus Center called it “a means of laundering economic aims.” The lawyer explained the strategy: “You take corporate money and give it to a neutral-sounding think tank,” which “hires people with pedigrees and academic degrees who put out credible-seeming studies. But they all coincide perfectly with the economic interests of their funders.”

In 1997, for instance, the E.P.A. moved to reduce surface ozone, a form of pollution caused, in part, by emissions from oil refineries. Susan Dudley, an economist who became a top official at the Mercatus Center, criticized the proposed rule. The E.P.A., she argued, had not taken into account that smog-free skies would result in more cases of skin cancer. She projected that if pollution were controlled it would cause up to eleven thousand additional cases of skin cancer each year.

In 1999, the District of Columbia Circuit Court took up Dudley’s smog argument. Evaluating the E.P.A. rule, the court found that the E.P.A. had “explicitly disregarded” the “possible health benefits of ozone.” In another part of the opinion, the court ruled, 2-1, that the E.P.A. had overstepped its authority in calibrating standards for ozone emissions. As the Constitutional Accountability Center, a think tank, revealed, the judges in the majority had previously attended legal junkets, on a Montana ranch, that were arranged by the Foundation for Research on Economics and the Environment—a group funded by Koch family foundations. The judges have claimed that the ruling was unaffected by their attendance.

“Ideas don’t happen on their own,” Matt Kibbe, the president of FreedomWorks, a Tea Party advocacy group, told me. “Throughout history, ideas need patrons.” The Koch brothers, after helping to create Cato and Mercatus, concluded that think tanks alone were not enough to effect change. They needed a mechanism to deliver those ideas to the street, and to attract the public’s support. In 1984, David Koch and Richard Fink created yet another organization, and Kibbe joined them. The group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, seemed like a grassroots movement, but according to the Center for Public Integrity it was sponsored principally by the Kochs, who provided $7.9 million between 1986 and 1993. Its mission, Kibbe said, “was to take these heavy ideas and translate them for mass America. . . . We read the same literature Obama did about nonviolent revolutions—Saul Alinsky, Gandhi, Martin Luther King. We studied the idea of the Boston Tea Party as an example of nonviolent social change. We learned we needed boots on the ground to sell ideas, not candidates.” Within a few years, the group had mobilized fifty paid field workers, in twenty-six states, to rally voters behind the Kochs’ agenda. David and Charles, according to one participant, were “very controlling, very top down. You can’t build an organization with them. They run it.”

Around this time, the brothers faced a political crisis. In 1989, the Senate Select Committee on Indian Affairs investigated their business and released a scathing report accusing Koch Oil of “a widespread and sophisticated scheme to steal crude oil from Indians and others through fraudulent mismeasuring.” The Kochs admitted that they had improperly taken thirty-one million dollars’ worth of crude oil, but said that it had been accidental. Charles Koch told committee investigators that oil measurement is “a very uncertain art.”

To defend its reputation, Koch Industries hired Robert Strauss, then a premier Washington lobbyist; the company soon opened an office in the city. A grand jury was convened to investigate the allegations, but it eventually disbanded, without issuing criminal charges. According to the Senate report, after the committee hearings Koch operatives delved into the personal lives of committee staffers, even questioning an ex-wife. Senate investigators were upset by the Kochs’ tactics. Kenneth Ballen, the counsel to the Senate committee, said, “These people have amassed such unaccountable power!”

By 1993, when Bill Clinton became President, Citizens for a Sound Economy had become a prototype for the kind of corporate-backed opposition campaigns that have proliferated during the Obama era. The group waged a successful assault on Clinton’s proposed B.T.U. tax on energy, for instance, running advertisements, staging media events, and targeting opponents. And it mobilized anti-tax rallies outside the Capitol—rallies that NPR described as “designed to strike fear into the hearts of wavering Democrats.” Dan Glickman, a former Democratic congressman from Wichita, who supported the B.T.U. tax, recalled, “I’d been in Congress eighteen years. The Kochs actually engaged against me and funded my opponent. They used a lot of resources and effort—their employees, too.” Glickman suffered a surprise defeat. “I can’t prove it, but I think I was probably their victim,” he said.

The Kochs continued to disperse their money, creating slippery organizations with generic-sounding names, and this made it difficult to ascertain the extent of their influence in Washington. In 1990, Citizens for a Sound Economy created a spinoff group, Citizens for the Environment, which called acid rain and other environmental problems “myths.” When the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette investigated the matter, it discovered that the spinoff group had “no citizen membership of its own.”

In 1997, another Senate investigation began looking into what a minority report called “an audacious plan to pour millions of dollars in contributions into Republican campaigns nationwide without disclosing the amount or source,” in order to evade campaign-finance laws. A shell corporation, Triad Management, had paid more than three million dollars for attack ads in twenty-six House races and three Senate races. More than half of the advertising money came from an obscure nonprofit group, the Economic Education Trust. The Senate committee’s minority report suggested that “the trust was financed in whole or in part by Charles and David Koch of Wichita, Kansas.” The brothers were suspected of having secretly paid for the attack ads, most of which aired in states where Koch Industries did business. In Kansas, where Triad Management was especially active, the funds may have played a decisive role in four of six federal races. The Kochs, when asked by reporters if they had given the money, refused to comment. In 1998, however, the Wall Street Journal confirmed that a consultant on the Kochs’ payroll had been involved in the scheme. Charles Lewis, of the Center for Public Integrity, described the scandal as “historic. Triad was the first time a major corporation used a cutout”—a front operation—“in a threatening way. Koch Industries was the poster child of a company run amok.”

During the Clinton Administration, the energy industry faced increased scrutiny and regulation. In the mid-nineties, the Justice Department filed two lawsuits against Koch Industries, claiming that it was responsible for more than three hundred oil spills, which had released an estimated three million gallons of oil into lakes and rivers. The penalty was potentially as high as two hundred and fourteen million dollars_._ In a settlement, Koch Industries paid a record thirty-million-dollar civil fine, and agreed to spend five million dollars on environmental projects.

In 1999, a jury found Koch Industries guilty of negligence and malice in the deaths of two Texas teen-agers in an explosion that resulted from a leaky underground butane pipeline. (In 2001, the company paid an undisclosed settlement.) And in the final months of the Clinton Presidency the Justice Department levelled a ninety-seven-count indictment against the company, for covering up the discharge of ninety-one tons of benzene, a carcinogen, from its refinery in Corpus Christi, Texas. The company was liable for three hundred and fifty million dollars in fines, and four Koch employees faced up to thirty-five years in prison. The Koch Petroleum Group eventually pleaded guilty to one criminal charge of covering up environmental violations, including the falsification of documents, and paid a twenty-million-dollar fine. David Uhlmann, a career prosecutor who, at the time, headed the environmental-crimes section at the Justice Department, described the suit as “one of the most significant cases ever brought under the Clean Air Act.” He added, “Environmental crimes are almost always motivated by economics and arrogance, and in the Koch case there was a healthy dose of both.”

During the 2000 election campaign, Koch Industries spent some nine hundred thousand dollars to support the candidacies of George W. Bush and other Republicans. During the Bush years, Koch Industries and other fossil-fuel companies enjoyed remarkable prosperity. The 2005 energy bill, which Hillary Clinton dubbed the Dick Cheney Lobbyist Energy Bill, offered enormous subsidies and tax breaks for energy companies. The Kochs have cast themselves as deficit hawks, but, according to a study by Media Matters, their companies have benefitted from nearly a hundred million dollars in government contracts since 2000.

In 2004, Citizens for a Sound Economy was accused of illegitimately throwing its weight behind Bush’s reëlection. The group’s Oregon branch had attempted to get Ralph Nader on the Presidential ballot, in order to dilute Democratic support for John Kerry. Critics argued that it was illegal for a tax-exempt nonprofit organization to donate its services for partisan political purposes. (A complaint was filed with the Federal Election Commission; it was dismissed.)

That year, internal rivalries at Citizens for a Sound Economy caused the organization to split apart. David Koch and Fink started a new group, Americans for Prosperity, and they hired Tim Phillips to run it. Phillips was a political veteran who had worked with Ralph Reed, the evangelical leader and Republican activist, co-founding Century Strategies, a campaign-consulting company that became notorious for its ties to the disgraced lobbyist Jack Abramoff. Phillips’s online biography describes him as an expert in “grasstops” and “grassroots” political organizing. The Kochs’ choice of Phillips signalled an even greater toughness. The conservative operative Grover Norquist, who is known for praising “throat slitters” in politics, called Phillips “a grownup who can make things happen.”

Last year, Phillips told the Financial Times that Americans for Prosperity had only eight thousand registered members. Currently, its Web site claims that the group has “1.2 million activists.” Whatever its size, the Kochs’ political involvement has been intense; a former employee of the Cato Institute told me that Americans for Prosperity “was micromanaged by the Kochs.” And the brothers’ investment may well have paid off: Americans for Prosperity, in concert with the family’s other organizations, has been instrumental in disrupting the Obama Presidency.

In January, 2008, Charles Koch wrote in his company newsletter that America could be on the verge of “the greatest loss of liberty and prosperity since the 1930s.” That October, Americans for Prosperity held a conference of conservative operatives at a Marriott hotel outside Washington. Erick Erickson, the editor-in-chief of the conservative blog RedState.com, took the lectern, thanked David Koch, and vowed to “unite and fight . . . the armies of the left!” Soon after Obama assumed office, Americans for Prosperity launched “Porkulus” rallies against Obama’s stimulus-spending measures. Then the Mercatus Center released a report claiming that stimulus funds had been directed disproportionately toward Democratic districts; eventually, the author was forced to correct the report, but not before Rush Limbaugh, citing the paper, had labelled Obama’s program “a slush fund,” and Fox News and other conservative outlets had echoed the sentiment. (Phil Kerpen, the vice-president for policy at Americans for Prosperity, is a contributor to the Fox News Web site. Another officer at Americans for Prosperity, Walter Williams, often guest-hosts for Limbaugh.)

Americans for Prosperity also created an offshoot, Patients United Now, which organized what Phillips has estimated to be more than three hundred rallies against health-care reform. At one rally, an effigy of a Democratic congressman was hung; at another, protesters unfurled a banner depicting corpses from Dachau. The group also helped organize the “Kill the Bill” protests outside the Capitol, in March, where Democratic supporters of health-care reform alleged that they were spat on and cursed at. Phillips was a featured speaker.

Americans for Prosperity has held at least eighty events targeting cap-and-trade legislation, which is aimed at making industries pay for the air pollution that they create. Speakers for the group claimed, with exaggeration, that even back-yard barbecues and kitchen stoves would be taxed. The group was also involved in the attacks on Obama’s “green jobs” czar, Van Jones, and waged a crusade against international climate talks. Casting his group as a champion of ordinary workers who would be hurt by environmentalists, Phillips went to Copenhagen last year and staged a protest outside the United Nations conference on climate change, declaring, “We’re a grassroots organization. . . . I think it’s unfortunate when wealthy children of wealthy families . . . want to send unemployment rates in the United States up to twenty per cent.”

Grover Norquist, who holds a weekly meeting for conservative leaders in Washington, including representatives from Americans for Prosperity, told me that last summer’s raucous rallies were pivotal in undermining Obama’s agenda. The Republican leadership in Congress, he said, “couldn’t have done it without August, when people went out on the streets. It discouraged deal-makers”—Republicans who might otherwise have worked constructively with Obama. Moreover, the appearance of growing public opposition to Obama affected corporate donors on K Street. “K Street is a three-billion-dollar weathervane,” Norquist said. “When Obama was strong, the Chamber of Commerce said, ‘We can work with the Obama Administration.’ But that changed when thousands of people went into the street and ‘terrorized’ congressmen. August is what changed it. Now that Obama is weak, people are getting tough.”

As the first anniversary of Obama’s election approached, David Koch came to the Washington area to attend a triumphant Americans for Prosperity gathering. Obama’s poll numbers were falling fast. Not a single Republican senator was working with the Administration on health care, or much else. Pundits were writing about Obama’s political ineptitude, and Tea Party groups were accusing the President of initiating “a government takeover.” In a speech, Koch said, “Days like today bring to reality the vision of our board of directors when we started this organization, five years ago.” He went on, “We envisioned a mass movement, a state-based one, but national in scope, of hundreds of thousands of American citizens from all walks of life standing up and fighting for the economic freedoms that made our nation the most prosperous society in history. . . . Thankfully, the stirrings from California to Virginia, and from Texas to Michigan, show that more and more of our fellow-citizens are beginning to see the same truths as we do.”

While Koch didn’t explicitly embrace the Tea Party movement that day, more recently he has come close to doing so, praising it for demonstrating the “powerful visceral hostility in the body politic against the massive increase in government power, the massive efforts to socialize this country.” Charles Koch, in a newsletter sent to his seventy thousand employees, compared the Obama Administration to the regime of the Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez. The Kochs’ sense of imperilment is somewhat puzzling. Income inequality in America is greater than it has been since the nineteen-twenties, and since the seventies the tax rates of the wealthiest have fallen more than those of the middle class. Yet the brothers’ message has evidently resonated with voters: a recent poll found that fifty-five per cent of Americans agreed that Obama is a socialist.

Americans for Prosperity, meanwhile, has announced that it will spend an additional forty-five million dollars before the midterm elections, in November. Although the group is legally prohibited from directly endorsing candidates, it nonetheless plans to target some fifty House races and half a dozen Senate races, staging rallies, organizing door-to-door canvassing, and running ads aimed at “educating voters about where candidates stand.”

Though the Kochs have slowed Obama’s momentum, their larger political battle is far from won. Richard Fink, interviewed by FrumForum.com this spring, said, “If you look at where we’ve gone from the year 2000 to now, with the expansion of government spending and a debt burden that threatens to bankrupt the country, it doesn’t look very good at all.” He went on, “It looks like the infrastructure that was built and nurtured has not carried the day.” He suggested that the Kochs needed “to get more into the practical, day-to-day issues of governing.”

In 1991, David Koch was badly injured in a plane crash in Los Angeles. He was the sole passenger in first class to survive. As he was recovering, a routine physical exam led to the discovery of prostate cancer. Koch received treatment, settled down, started a family, and reconsidered his life. As he told Portfolio, “When you’re the only one who survived in the front of the plane and everyone else died—yeah, you think, ‘My God, the good Lord spared me for some greater purpose.’ My joke is that I’ve been busy ever since, doing all the good work I can think of, so He can have confidence in me.”

Koch began giving spectacularly large donations to the arts and sciences. And he became a patron of cancer research, focussing on prostate cancer. In addition to his gifts to Sloan-Kettering, he gave fifteen million dollars to New York-Presbyterian Hospital, a hundred and twenty-five million to M.I.T. for cancer research, twenty million to Johns Hopkins University, and twenty-five million to the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston. In response to his generosity, Sloan-Kettering gave Koch its Excellence in Corporate Leadership Award. In 2004, President Bush named him to the National Cancer Advisory Board, which guides the National Cancer Institute.

Koch’s corporate and political roles, however, may pose conflicts of interest. For example, at the same time that David Koch has been casting himself as a champion in the fight against cancer, Koch Industries has been lobbying to prevent the E.P.A. from classifying formaldehyde, which the company produces in great quantities, as a “known carcinogen” in humans.

Scientists have long known that formaldehyde causes cancer in rats, and several major scientific studies have concluded that formaldehyde causes cancer in human beings—including one published last year by the National Cancer Institute, on whose advisory board Koch sits. The study tracked twenty-five thousand patients for an average of forty years; subjects exposed to higher amounts of formaldehyde had significantly higher rates of leukemia. These results helped lead an expert panel within the National Institutes of Health to conclude that formaldehyde should be categorized as a known carcinogen, and be strictly controlled by the government. Corporations have resisted regulations on formaldehyde for decades, however, and Koch Industries has been a large funder of members of Congress who have stymied the E.P.A., requiring it to defer new regulations until more studies are completed.

Koch Industries became a major producer of the chemical in 2005, after it bought Georgia-Pacific, the paper and wood-products company, for twenty-one billion dollars. Georgia-Pacific manufactures formaldehyde in its chemical division, and uses it to produce various wood products, such as plywood and laminates. Its annual production capacity for formaldehyde is 2.2 billion pounds. Last December, Traylor Champion, Georgia-Pacific’s vice-president of environmental affairs, sent a formal letter of protest to federal health authorities. He wrote that the company “strongly disagrees” with the N.I.H. panel’s conclusion that formaldehyde should be treated as a known human carcinogen. David Koch did not recuse himself from the National Cancer Advisory Board, or divest himself of company stock, while his company was directly lobbying the government to keep formaldehyde on the market. (A board spokesperson said that the issue of formaldehyde had not come up.)

James Huff, an associate director at the National Institute for Environmental Health Sciences, a division of the N.I.H., told me that it was “disgusting” for Koch to be serving on the National Cancer Advisory Board: “It’s just not good for public health. Vested interests should not be on the board.” He went on, “Those boards are very important. They’re very influential as to whether N.C.I. goes into formaldehyde or not. Billions of dollars are involved in formaldehyde.”

Harold Varmus, the director of the National Cancer Institute, knows David Koch from Memorial Sloan-Kettering, which he used to run. He said that, at Sloan-Kettering, “a lot of people who gave to us had large business interests. The one thing we wouldn’t tolerate in our board members is tobacco.” When told of Koch Industries’ stance on formaldehyde, Varmus said that he was “surprised.”

The David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History, is a multimedia exploration of the theory that mankind evolved in response to climate change. At the main entrance, viewers are confronted with a giant graph charting the Earth’s temperature over the past ten million years, which notes that it is far cooler now than it was ten thousand years ago. Overhead, the text reads, “ HUMANS EVOLVED IN RESPONSE TO A CHANGING WORLD .” The message, as amplified by the exhibit’s Web site, is that “key human adaptations evolved in response to environmental instability.” Only at the end of the exhibit, under the headline “ OUR SURVIVAL CHALLENGE ,” is it noted that levels of carbon dioxide are higher now than they have ever been, and that they are projected to increase dramatically in the next century. No cause is given for this development; no mention is made of any possible role played by fossil fuels. The exhibit makes it seem part of a natural continuum. The accompanying text says, “During the period in which humans evolved, Earth’s temperature and the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere fluctuated together.” An interactive game in the exhibit suggests that humans will continue to adapt to climate change in the future. People may build “underground cities,” developing “short, compact bodies” or “curved spines,” so that “moving around in tight spaces will be no problem.”

Such ideas uncannily echo the Koch message. The company’s January newsletter to employees, for instance, argues that “fluctuations in the earth’s climate predate humanity,” and concludes, “Since we can’t control Mother Nature, let’s figure out how to get along with her changes.” Joseph Romm, a physicist who runs the Web site ClimateProgress.org, is infuriated by the Smithsonian’s presentation. “The whole exhibit whitewashes the modern climate issue,” he said. “I think the Kochs wanted to be seen as some sort of high-minded company, associated with the greatest natural-history and science museum in the country. But the truth is, the exhibit is underwritten by big-time polluters, who are underground funders of action to stop efforts to deal with this threat to humanity. I think the Smithsonian should have drawn the line.”

Cristián Samper, the museum’s director, said that the exhibit is not about climate change, and described Koch as “one of the best donors we’ve had, in my tenure here, because he’s very interested in the content, but completely hands off.” He noted, “I don’t know all the details of his involvement in other issues.”

The Kochs have long depended on the public’s not knowing all the details about them. They have been content to operate what David Koch has called “the largest company that you’ve never heard of.” But with the growing prominence of the Tea Party, and with increased awareness of the Kochs’ ties to the movement, the brothers may find it harder to deflect scrutiny. Recently, President Obama took aim at the Kochs’ political network. Speaking at a Democratic National Committee fund-raiser, in Austin, he warned supporters that the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in the Citizens United case—which struck down laws prohibiting direct corporate spending on campaigns—had made it even easier for big companies to hide behind “groups with harmless-sounding names like Americans for Prosperity.” Obama said, “They don’t have to say who, exactly, Americans for Prosperity are. You don’t know if it’s a foreign-controlled corporation”—or even, he added, “a big oil company.” ♦

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By John Cassidy

By Susan B. Glasser

Part-time Palm Beacher David Koch, business, political icon, dies at 79

David H. Koch, the billionaire libertarian and part-time Palm Beach resident who devoted his riches to philanthropy and building a political movement, has died. He was 79.

During his lifetime, Koch built a business empire that made him one of the wealthiest men on the planet. He built an equally influential political network — nationally and in Florida — that reinvigorated conservative politics, but also made him a reviled figure among liberals.

His family released a statement Friday.

“While we mourn the loss of our hero, we remember his iconic laughter, insatiable curiosity, and gentle heart. His stories of childhood adventures enlivened our family dinners; his endless knowledge rendered him our ‘walking Google.’ His sensitive heart had him shed a tear at the beauty of his daughter’s ballet, and beam with pride when his son beat him at chess. We will miss the fifth link in our family,” according to the statement.

Born May 3, 1940, in Wichita, Kansas, to Mary Clementine (Robinson) Koch and Fred Chase Koch, he was the third of four sons, beating his younger twin William into the world by a matter of minutes.

Koch was a 1959 graduate of the elite Deerfield Academy and earned both bachelor's and master's degrees in chemical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he was a member of the Beta Theta Pi fraternity.

Tall and athletic, Koch played basketball for three years at M.I.T., where he held the single-game scoring record (41 points) for more than 45 years .

In 1970, Koch joined the family business, Koch Industries, second only to Cargill among the largest privately held companies in the U.S, according to Forbes. He assumed the presidency of Koch Engineering in 1979 and, in 1982, with his older brother Charles, became co-owner of Koch Industries.

He was worth $42.4 billion at the time of his death and ranked 18th richest person in the world, tied with his brother Charles, according to Forbes magazine rankings.

While Koch donated more than $1.3 billion of his fortune to charity, he was better known for using his wealth to reshape the conservative political landscape in America.

>>RELATED: David Koch among top billionaires from Palm Beach on Forbes list

Koch embraced and generously funded largely Republican candidates and organizations that support libertarian ideals — a traditional belief in freedom from what they believe are government intrusions, such as taxes, trade restrictions, business regulation, welfare programs and bans on same-sex marriages.

“For a lot of successful businessmen, politics has been a spectator sport,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist who worked with Koch over the years. “They buy a ticket with a contribution and they sit on the sidelines. Not David Koch. He played the game.”

In 1980, Libertarian Party candidate Ed Clark chose Koch as his vice presidential running mate in a presidential election won by Republican Ronald Reagan in a landslide.

The same year, a failed boardroom coup led by Koch’s twin brother, William, failed, igniting an epic family battle that dragged on for years and pitted the four Koch brothers — Charles, David, Frederick and William — against each other.

In a series of high-profile lawsuits peppered with nasty accusations, William and Frederick claimed that Charles and David had cheated them out of $2 billion. On the witness stand, David sobbed as he testified about the bitter family feud and how private investigators had been hired to filch trash and janitors were bribed to dig up dirt.

In a statement released late Friday afternoon, William recalled the clash. Amid the conflict, William said he called his brother to serve as an observer at the final race of the prestigious America’s Cup yacht race in 1992.

“He politely declined,” wrote William, who ended up winning the race that year.

“David and I happily reconciled our past business differences 20 years ago,” William wrote. “He was best man at my wedding. Our spouses and children have become good friends ... He was an outstanding human and he was my best friend.”

David Koch was also passionate about politics.

With his older brother Charles, the Koch’s became a formidable force in conservative politics over the last four decades, building a network of like-minded wealthy donors and helping found Americans for Prosperity , a powerful libertarian advocacy group with influence that rivals that of the Republican Party.

In Florida politics, the state chapter of the AFP backed a campaign against three Supreme Court Justice seeking merit retention on the 2012 ballot. The justices, they claimed, represented a left-leaning agenda that turned Florida’s highest court into one of the most activist judiciaries.

The Kochs’ political machine became the target of harsh criticism by liberals and progressives who claimed they used their fortune to buy influence, manipulate elections and government policies — primarily to benefit their own companies. The brothers soon became Public Enemy Number One of the left.

That portrayal bothered David, Castellanos said.

“”It came as a shock to them that after all the good they had done with the fruits of their own labor, people would tar them with an ugly political brush they did not deserve,“ Castellanos said. ”I think it hurt when he was thrown in a box with people who had darker intentions.“

In 2016, the Koch brothers did not back President Trump , and David Koch was not expected to back the president's re-election bid next year. In July of last year, Trump ripped the Koch brothers in a tweet saying, “The globalist Koch Brothers, who have become a total joke in real Republican circles, are against Strong Borders and Powerful Trade. I never sought their support because I don't need their money or bad ideas.”

>>READ ALSO: Trump targets anti-Trump, Palm Beach billionaire Koch brothers

Outside of politics, Koch has been a major donor to cultural institutions and hospitals for many years. According to the New York Times, Koch donated $100 million in 2008 to New York City Ballet’s Lincoln Center theater and $65 million in 2014 to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for the refurbishment of its fountains plaza. He has donated more than $680 million to research and medical facilities in the United States since he was found to have prostate cancer.

Until recently, Koch funded the annual Coconuts New Year’s Eve fireworks display that brought thousands of spectators to the West Palm Beach waterfront.

He attributed his philanthropy to a plane crash he survived in 1991, when an airplane he was in collided with another at Los Angeles International Airport. Koch escaped the smoke-filled plan, while more than 30 others were killed in the collision.

>>RELATED: Who is Bill Koch, Oxbridge Academy's founder?

“I was amazed that I survived this accident,” Koch told Barbara Walters in a 2014 interview. “Thinking back on it later, I felt that the good Lord was sitting on my shoulder and that he helped save my life because he wanted me to do good works and become a good citizen.”

In Palm Beach, David Koch lived with his wife, Julia, at a 1920s-era oceanfront estate known as El Sarmiento at 150 S. Ocean Blvd. In 2008, the estate was awarded the Preservation Foundation of Palm Beach's Ballinger Award, which recognized a historically sensitive renovation and restoration project that incorporated a second historic house on the 2-acre estate.

Reporting by Palm Beach Daily News staff writer Shannon Donnelly was used in this story.

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Billionaire conservative donor David Koch dies at 79

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NEW YORK (AP) — Billionaire industrialist David H. Koch, who with his older brother Charles poured a fortune into right-wing causes, transforming the American political landscape and shaping U.S. policies on such issues as climate change and government regulation, died Friday at 79.

The cause of death was not disclosed, but Koch Industries said Koch, who lived in New York City, had contended for years with various illnesses, including prostate cancer.

A chemical engineer by training, Koch was an executive in the family-run conglomerate, the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential candidate in 1980 and a major benefactor of educational, medical and cultural organizations.

But he and his brother became best known for building a political network dubbed the “Kochtopus” for its many-tentacled support of conservative and libertarian causes, candidates and think tanks, including the Cato Institute.

The brothers in 2004 founded the anti-tax, small-government group Americans for Prosperity, which remains one of the most powerful conservative organizations in U.S. politics, and they were an important influence on the tea party movement.

While celebrated on the right, the Koch brothers have been vilified by Democrats and others who see them as a dark and conspiratorial force, the embodiment of fat-cat capitalism and the corrupting influence of corporate money in American politics.

“I was taught from a young age that involvement in the public discourse is a civic duty,” David Koch wrote in a 2012 op-ed in the New York Post. “Each of us has a right — indeed, a responsibility, at times — to make his or her views known to the larger community in order to better form it as a whole. While we may not always get what we want, the exchange of ideas betters the nation in the process.”

Some prominent Republicans praised his legacy upon his death, with libertarian-leaning Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky saying “his many contributions will have lasting impact on our country.”

On the other side of the political divide over Koch, Beth Rotman of the government watchdog group Common Cause said the Kochs and their network of like-minded wealthy donors “undermined so many important American values over the past several decades as part of the Kochs’ attempted corporate takeover of American politics.”

Among other things, the Kochs and their company bankrolled a decades-long movement to cast doubt on man-made climate change and to thwart efforts to fight global warming through reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“David Koch will likely be remembered as one of a small handful of individuals who singlehandedly thwarted efforts to act on climate change and other pressing environmental threats aimed at preserving our planet for future generations,” said Pennsylvania State University climate scientist Michael Mann.

The brothers also invested heavily in fighting President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul. They pressed to bring conservative voices to college campuses. And they developed a nationwide grassroots network backing conservative causes and candidates at the state and national levels.

They drew the line at Donald Trump. The Kochs refused to endorse him in 2016, warning that his protectionist trade policies, among other priorities, weren’t sufficiently conservative.

Trump, for his part, tweeted last year that the brothers were a “total joke in real Republican circles,” calling them “two nice guys with bad ideas.”

David Koch had stepped away from a leadership role in recent years because of declining health, including a decades-long battle with prostate cancer, and his brother became the network’s public face.

In an interview after the 2012 Republican convention, his mind was on his legacy.

“When I pass on,” he told The Weekly Standard, “I want people to say he did a lot of good things, he made a real difference, he saved a lot of lives in cancer research.”

Koch donated $100 million in 2007 to create a cancer research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also gave millions to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, the M.D. Anderson Cancer in Houston and other institutions.

The Lincoln Center theater that houses the New York City Ballet became the David H. Koch Theater in 2008 after he gave $100 million. Parts of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History are named for him after he contributed a total of $50 million for exhibits devoted to dinosaur fossils and human evolution.

He said his philanthropy was fueled by a brush with death during a 1991 collision of two airliners at the Los Angeles airport. Thirty-four people were killed. Koch spent two days in intensive care with smoke inhalation.

“I felt that the good Lord was sitting on my shoulder and that he helped save my life because he wanted me to do good works and become a good citizen,” he told Barbara Walters in 2014.

Charles and David Koch, each with an estimated net worth of $50.5 billion, were tied for 11th place in 2019 on the Forbes 500 list of the nation’s richest men.

Their father, Fred, in 1940 co-founded the company that later became Koch Industries. The Wichita, Kansas-based conglomerate has vast holdings in oil refineries, paper mills, fertilizer plants, cattle ranches and other ventures. It is the company behind Stainmaster carpeting, Brawny paper towels and Dixie cups.

It has drawn fire for years from environmental advocates and researchers. Koch Industries in 2000 paid $35 million — then the largest civil fine ever levied under the federal Clean Water Act — to settle lawsuits over oil pipeline leaks into lakes and streams in six states.

The University of Massachusetts Amherst’s Political Economy Research Institute ranks Koch Industries one of the top 25 polluters in the U.S.

David Koch, who held degrees from MIT, served on Koch Industries’ board and was also CEO of a Koch chemical subsidiary. He retired from the company as executive vice president in 2018.

Two other Koch brothers, Frederick and Bill Koch, came out on the losing end of a power struggle for control of the company’s board. They sold their stake in Koch Industries in 1983, later unsuccessfully claiming in a lawsuit that they were cheated out of more than $1 billion. David and Bill Koch were twins.

David Koch is survived by his wife, Julia Flesher, and their three children.

On Friday, Charles Koch said of his younger brother: “The significance of David’s generosity is best captured in the words of Adam Smith, who wrote, ‘to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.’”

Associated Press writers Seth Borenstein in Washington and Patrick Whittle in Portland, Maine, contributed.

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David Koch has died at 79. Here’s how he changed American politics.

He and his brother Charles funded a decades-long effort to roll back environmental and business regulations.

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David Koch — one half of the infamous “billionaire Koch brothers,” a political duo that spent hundreds of millions of dollars pushing American politics to the right in recent decades — has died at age 79, his company Koch Industries announced Friday.

By all accounts, David played second fiddle to his brother Charles in both the family company and the brothers’ political strategizing. But the two worked together closely in their decades-long effort aimed at rolling back environmental and business regulations, and at voting Democrats out of office.

The Kochs liked to couch their political aims in high-minded terms — that they supported “liberty” or “economic freedom.” And they spent a good deal of money funding and promoting such ideas in academia. But these aims often coincided with their business and financial interests, since Koch Industries is a major oil refining and chemical conglomerate. Policies aimed at reining in carbon emissions and combating climate change would generally be bad for the Kochs, so they fought any such proposal tooth and nail.

Dating back to the 1970s, Charles and David helped found and fund libertarian organizations, but in the ensuing decades they shifted their efforts toward more straightforward support of Republicans. It was during President Barack Obama’s administration that the Kochs dramatically escalated their political activity and became two of the most important political funders on the right.

In the 2018 midterm elections, for instance, the Kochs announced that their donor network — partly funded by them, but also by other wealthy conservatives — planned to spend up to $400 million on helping Republican candidates.

Due to large donations, David Koch’s name is all over major cultural institutions in New York City: the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Lincoln Center, the American Museum of Natural History. But it’s his and his brother’s political spending that will be his most memorable legacy.

Who are the Koch brothers?

Technically, there are four Koch brothers — Frederick, Charles, and twins David and Bill. But when people talk about the political influence of the “Kochs” or the “Koch brothers,” they’re mainly referring to Charles and David, who worked most closely together.

The Koch brothers were born in Wichita, Kansas. Their father, Fred C. Koch, had founded an oil refinery company, and when his health began to fail in the 1960s, he gave Charles an increasingly larger role in running things. After Fred’s 1967 death, it was then mainly Charles who transformed his father’s company into the behemoth Koch Industries that made him and David not just extremely rich, but two of the richest people in the world. (They tied for 11th richest in the latest Forbes estimates .)

Along the way, Charles and David were pitted against their other brothers, Frederick and Bill, in a bitter power struggle for control of Koch Industries, which split the pairs of brothers apart and resulted in years of litigation. But Charles and David won, and in the decades since, they’ve worked together to found and fund a massive operation to influence American politics.

The Koch brothers’ political influence starts with a little-remembered libertarian presidential bid

The 1980 presidential election is remembered today as the year of the Reagan Revolution, as GOP nominee Ronald Reagan won a nationwide landslide victory against incumbent Democrat Jimmy Carter.

But one odd footnote from that year is that David Koch was on the ballot as well — as the nominee for vice president of the United States for the Libertarian Party.

In the years before this, Charles and David had become increasingly interested in libertarian ideas on economics, and had started to devote money to those causes (including what remains the main libertarian think tank, the Cato Institute) . And David’s participation with the Libertarian ticket — clearly more of a lark than a serious effort to win — placed him and his brother apart from both major political parties. (They got 1 percent of the vote.)

So over the ensuing decades, the Kochs shifted their strategy. They founded and funded academic institutions (George Mason University’s Mercatus Center) and academic programs to spread ideas, as well as nonprofit groups (Citizens for a Sound Economy) to try to build “grassroots” support for those ideas and pressure Congress and state legislatures. Many of those ideas were about opposition to government and environmental regulations — during a period when Koch Industries was facing serious regulatory and legal problems related to its environmental and safety practices. And, seeing third-party politics as pointless, they became major Republican donors.

The Kochs mobilized against Obama but had a complicated relationship with Trump

But it was the Obama administration that spurred the Kochs to dramatically escalate their strategic and financial involvement in politics. The new Democratic president was trying to pass both a major expansion of government health care spending and a cap-and-trade bill designed to rein in carbon emissions and combat climate change. Charles Koch called Obama’s agenda “the greatest assault on American freedom and prosperity in our lifetimes,” saying Democrats’ policies “threaten to erode our economic freedom.”

Amidst a recession, there was already a backlash against Obama in the form of the Tea Party — a backlash the Kochs helped stoke and tried to shape around their preferred issue positions (anti-Obamacare, anti-cap-and-trade, anti-regulation, anti-taxing the rich). “The Kochs didn’t like the social issues, so they tried to make it a small-government thing and put ‘values’ on the back burner,” social conservative activist Tony Perkins says in Tim Alberta’s new book American Carnage .

Democrats’ cap-and-trade bill passed the House, but widespread backlash, including from Koch-funded groups , helped ensure it was never brought for a vote in the Senate. This turned out to be the final major legislative effort to address climate change in the next decade. Obamacare, though, did end up passing — but the Kochs helped ensure many Democrats who voted for it would pay a price, through a broad effort to help Republicans win in the 2010 midterms.

They did this through a complex web of dark money groups that became informally known as the “ Kochtopus ,” which spent on organizing and ads. Much of the money for these groups came from the Kochs themselves, but they also got many other wealthy Republicans to pitch in as part of their “donor network.” And the effort was remarkably successful — the GOP won enormous gains in the House and in state legislatures in 2010, which would help shape the next decade of American politics.

However, the Kochs were never truly kingmakers in presidential politics. David, for instance, said in 2015 that he wanted Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker to win the Republican Party’s presidential nomination. That did not pan out, and the Kochs entered an awkward period, with Charles criticizing Donald Trump’s lack of commitment to limited government and free market economics — though David did reportedly attend Trump’s election night party.

Since Trump won, Charles has continued to feud with the president, criticizing Trump’s “protectionism” and saying he won’t spend to help Trump win in 2020 (though he will keep spending to help Republicans win). David, meanwhile, had a difficult last few years, experiencing health problems and reportedly being pushed aside from Koch Industries by Charles in 2018 (the company said he retired).

Meanwhile, though, Trump has relied on many appointees with close ties to the Kochs — and the brothers have clearly benefited from the Trump administration’s tax cuts, deregulation, and environmental policies. So though it may seem that Trump’s rise disproved nostrums about the Kochs’ influence on politics, in practice, many of his administration’s policies are exactly what they — and their bottom lines — wanted all along.

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David Koch, Industrialist Who Funded Conservatives, Dies at 79

David Koch, the industrialist and libertarian who used his fortune to transform American politics while also donating more than $1 billion to philanthropic causes, has died. He was 79.

The death was confirmed by Koch spokeswoman Cristyne Nicholas.

Koch, whose net worth of about $59 billion in the Bloomberg Billionaires Index tied him with his brother as the world’s seventh-richest person, derived most of his wealth from a 42% stake in Wichita, Kansas-based Koch Industries, which has annual revenue of about $110 billion. It is one of the nation’s largest closely held companies, and its spectacular growth included the 2005 acquisition of Georgia Pacific for $21 billion.

A resident of New York’s Upper East Side and the city’s richest person, Koch once joked that Koch Industries was “the biggest company you’ve never heard of.” The conglomerate has interests ranging from oil and ranching to farming and the manufacturing of electrical components.

Donor Network

But he and Charles Koch, 83, became better known for pushing their views than their business acumen, pumping millions into conservative causes and candidates. The operation they built includes more than 700 donors who give $100,000 or more a year and a group called Americans for Prosperity that has chapters in 35 states. It’s rivaled only by the Republican Party in its influence on the conservative agenda in the U.S.

The Koch brothers and other wealthy donors were able to expand their influence on elections following the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United decision that paved the way for unbridled spending, both directly and indirectly, by outside groups.

“David Koch’s imprint on the American political scene will endure long into the future,” said Daniel Schulman, who wrote “Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America’s Most Powerful and Private Dynasty,” published in 2014. “The Kochs helped to give rise to the age of the mega-donor, an era of unprecedented political spending in which wealthy individuals, as well as corporations, can influence politics as never before. His political legacy is huge.”

Pence, Pompeo, Perry

Koch money incubated a generation of political figures, including Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, former Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, Energy Secretary Rick Perry and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker.

Yet all those men but Walker worked for President Donald Trump, who has upended the free-market views the Kochs have tried to foster within the Republican Party. That has prompted clashes with Trump, especially on trade and immigration policy.

The brothers didn’t support Trump in his 2016 campaign, although they praised his efforts to cut taxes and regulations.

Koch was the vice presidential candidate for the Libertarian Party in 1980. But as his health failed, he became less prominent in the Koch political operation. Charles Koch has served as the philosophical and hands-on leader, while David was chairman of the foundation that oversees AFP, their flagship political organ.

Stepping Down

In June 2018, Charles Koch told company employees that his brother would step down from the business and political empires because of health problems. Charles Koch’s  letter  didn’t provide details, although he noted that David Koch had announced in October 2016 that he’d been hospitalized the previous summer.

“Unfortunately, these issues have not been resolved and his health has continued to deteriorate,” the letter said.

Koch was diagnosed with prostate cancer more than two decades ago. Through personal donations and contributions from the David H. Koch Foundation, he pledged or contributed more than $1 billion to cancer research, medical centers, educational institutions, arts and cultural institutions, and to assist public-policy organizations, according to his official biography.

‘Hands-on’ Philanthropist

“A lot of billionaires make their contribution and their name is on the board of directors, but they have no intention of showing up to the meetings,” said New York philanthropist Adrienne Arsht. “He came to meetings. He was always hands on.”

Arsht said David Koch never acted like Manhattan’s wealthiest person.

“He was most understated,” she said. “There was nothing about anything that he did that made you think he was anything but a man from Kansas.”

But the Koch brothers played a massive role in politics, helping shape state and federal policy.

“By lavishly underwriting candidates, policy organizations, and advocacy groups — often through untraceable donations — they have pulled American politics toward their own arch-conservative, pro-business, anti-tax, and anti-regulatory agenda,” Jane Mayer, who has covered the Koch brothers for the New Yorker, wrote in June 2018.

The brothers were credited with helping underwrite the limited-government Tea Party movement that helped Republicans take control of Congress in 2010. “They helped to unleash a political insurgency that in turn set the stage for our present state of extreme polarization, an outcome I don’t think they expected or desired,” Schulman said.

The brothers favored ending the minimum wage, eliminating so-called “corporate welfare” for new factories and stadiums and backed union-weakening laws. While their efforts got the most attention in Washington, AFP’s nearly nationwide on-the-ground presence meant their influence was felt in state and local matters that included fights against gas-tax increases and referendums on local projects.

Organizations that the brothers help found or fund, such as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato institute, and the Manhattan Institute, have supported some of their ideas through studies and media interviews given by resident scholars.

Confounding Critics

Characterizing himself as a social liberal, David Koch was pro-choice when it came to abortion and supportive of same-sex marriage and stem-cell research. Further confounding liberal critics, the brothers supported efforts to free nonviolent prisoners and overhaul sentencing, changes they argued would reduce recidivism, save taxpayers money and remove barriers to opportunity.

“He believed he had a responsibility to a world that had given him so many opportunities to succeed,” his family said in a statement Friday. “David’s philanthropic dedication to education, the arts and cancer research will have a lasting impact on innumerable lives.”

He opposed the Affordable Care Act and was skeptical about the need for government to deal with global warming, giving money to groups that raised questions about the scientific consensus that climate change is occurring. In 2011, David Koch  called  then-President Barack Obama “the most radical president we’ve ever had as a nation,” pointing to damage he thought Obama had done to the free-enterprise system.

“David was smart, really smart,” said Frayda Levin, a Koch network donor and former New Jersey book distributor who served with him on the board of Americans for Prosperity. “He could hone in on any issue and ask insightful questions.”

John Birch Society

David Hamilton Koch, whose grandfather was a Dutch immigrant, was born on May 3, 1940, in Wichita to Fred and Mary Robinson Koch. Their father, after helping Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin develop oil-refining plants, became an early supporter of the anti-communist John Birch Society. That group was often in conflict with the movement conservatism that fueled the rise of figures like former President Richard Nixon, so the family’s politics have long been an uneasy fit in the Republican Party’s mainstream.

David and his twin brother, William, were the youngest of four siblings. David and Charles successfully fought Fred and William in court for control of the company.

David Koch attended Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts. He went on to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1962 and a master’s a year later. Koch, who was 6-foot-5, averaged 21 points per game on MIT’s basketball team and held the single-game scoring record of 41 points that stood for 46 years, according to his official biography. He also played for the Boston Rugby Football Club.

Family Business

Koch worked initially as a consultant and engineer for firms such as Arthur D. Little before joining the family business in 1970. Charles had taken over following the death of their father three years before.

The company then was an oil-refining business worth about $70 million. The brothers turned it into an industrial behemoth with interests in oil refining, pipelines, commodities trading, ranching and paper and pulp products that include brands such as Dixie Cups and Brawny paper towels.

While Charles ran Koch Industries from Wichita, David opened the company’s New York office in 1970, rising to executive vice president as his brother reigned as chairman and chief executive officer.

Using his New York base, David lavished money on museums and arts institutions such as the $100 million he gave to the New York State Theater at Lincoln Center, which was renamed the David H. Koch Theater.

Cancer Research

He also supported medical research, especially after he survived a USAir  accident  in 1991 at Los Angeles International Airport. Shortly afterward, he discovered he had prostate cancer, a disease that afflicted his brothers.

“When you’re the only one who survived in the front of the plane and everyone else died — yeah, you think, ‘My God, the good Lord spared me for some greater purpose,” he told portfolio.com.

The David H. Koch Charitable Foundation gave $150 million to the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center to build a state-of-the-art outpatient medical facility, the largest single gift the institution had then received. He gave $100 million to MIT to create the David H. Koch Institute for Integrative Cancer Research.

In 1996, at age 56, he married the former Julia Flesher, a former assistant to designer Adolfo. They had three children: David Jr., Mary and John.

The death was confirmed by Koch’s spokeswoman Cristyne Nicholas.

He and his brother Charles, 83, became better known for pushing their views than for their business acumen, pumping millions into conservative causes and candidates. The operation they built includes more than 700 donors who give $100,000 or more a year and a group called Americans for Prosperity that has chapters in 36 states. It’s rivaled only by the Republican Party in its influence on the conservative agenda in the U.S.

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Billionaire David Koch dead at 79: A look back on his life and tale of survival during the 1991 LAX plane crash

LOS ANGELES (FOX 11) - Billionaire conservative, activist, and philanthropist David Koch has died at the age of 79.

David and his brother Charles were worth more than $100 billion combined. They'd become some of the most influential political donors in America and led a network of similar minded, wealthy donors. 

The Koch’s supported a number of think tanks that have made the American judiciary more conservative, dramatically lessened environmental regulations, and funded opposition to universal healthcare. 

Related:   Billionaire David Koch, a major donor to conservative causes and educational groups, dies at 79

David ran for vice president on the libertarian ticket back in 1980, but most of his donations were made to republicans.

Here’s a story some might not know about him. David Koch was involved in a plane crash at LAX back in 1991. Thirty-four people died when two lanes crashed into each other on the runway. 

1991 LAX plane crash 

Koch says the crash changed his perspective on life. 

CNBC’s Jane Wells was a reporter for FOX 11 at the time and spoke to Koch just moments after the devastating crash. 

“The left said of the plane struck the corner of the building and a tremendous collision a huge ball of fire rolled up on the left side of the plane. I was thrown forward about 5 to 6 feet. All the lights went out and the plane filled up with smoke,” Koch told Wells. 

David Koch being interviewed moments after a deadly crash at LAX in 1991

Kock said God saved his life for a reason that day, and that made him want to give back to the community. 

“I was gagging very badly, I didn’t think I was going to make it. There was an instance I thought I was dead,” he added. 

He then decides to dedicate himself to philanthropy.  Koch donated an estimated $1.2 billion to charity, including cancer research and the arts.