Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty Read Online Free PDF

from such a rebellious kid,” Harry Litwin, a friend and business partner of Charles’s father, once remarked.
    When Charles became Fred Koch’s work-in-progress, he also became a lightning rod for his brother Bill’s jealousy. Being four-and-a-half years older than the twins, Charles was the alpha dog in the house, and he affected each of the twins in different ways. Bill was in some respects the most cerebral of the four Koch brothers, but he was also the most socially awkward and emotionally combustible. “[Bill] was kind of born with a temper,” Bill’s childhood friend, Jay Chapple, said. In his baby book, Mary had scrawled notations including “easily irritable,” “angry,” and “jealous.”
    As a young boy, Bill resorted to desperate gambits for attention. “He was perverse,” Charles has said. “I remember when we were little, and the twins were drying off after a shower, and there was a little wall heater there, the kind with the grate and the little holes, and Mother said, ‘Billy, don’t touch that.’ And so Billy put his little bottom up against it and it burned him so bad he looked like a waffle.” On another occasion, when Mary warned her son to take a hog’s nose ring out of his mouth, Bill proceeded to gulp it down, necessitating a trip to the hospital.
    Charles viewed Bill as a walking time bomb. “He’d lash out. Hewas violent. He’d throw tantrums.” Bill’s volatile emotions made it difficult for him to concentrate in school, and his worried parents eventually sent him to a psychologist, who advised that the only way to help Bill was to remove the source of his smoldering resentment—Charles. “We had to get Charles away because of the terrible jealousy that was consuming Billy,” Mary told
The New York Times
’s Leslie Wayne in a 1986 interview. So off he went to Arizona.
    Bill recalled a
Lord of the Flies
–like childhood, in which his parents frequently left him and his brothers in the care of the household help “to grow up amongst ourselves,” while Fred traveled the world tending to his business empire and Mary either accompanied him or was out of the house at cocktail parties or society events. When Fred was home, his emotional distance caused his sons to clamor for attention and approval. As Bill put it, “When you’re one of four kids, the only currency you have is the love of your father, and we all fought for that.”
    Bill remembered Charles as a mischievous bully, who perched astride the family storm cellar during backyard games of King of the Hill and gleefully flung him down to the ground whenever he tried to scramble to the top. And Bill has said that his older brother took sadistic pleasure in provoking fights between him and David. Bill nevertheless idolized his older brother, though Charles made it painfully clear that he preferred David’s company.
    Bill and David were twins, but David and Charles were natural compatriots. David was self-confident and athletic, with a mild temperament and a contagious laugh. “Charles and David were so much alike, they were always really good friends. And Bill probably felt a little left out,” said their cousin Carol Margaret Allen. “Charles always had quite a following of girls, and so did David. And Bill—I think he would have liked to have had more girls following him. He was not as gregarious and outgoing.”
    Bill sprouted up quickly before his body could grow accustomedto the spurt. Awkward and uncoordinated, he spent his childhood trying to keep up with his brothers and feeling constantly left out by Charles. Bill felt like the family geek. His self-esteem plummeted. “For a long time,” he later reflected, “I didn’t think I was worth shit.”
    Though the Kochs exiled Charles to boarding school, the seeds of a bitter sibling rivalry were already sown. Fred did not help the brotherly dynamic. He even encouraged the twins to fight. Home movies, in which the brothers can’t be older than five or six,