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

show Bill and David battering each other wearing puffy boxing gloves the size of each other’s heads. “He wanted his boys to grow up to be men,” said David’s friend John Damgard. “And I think the old man would pit the twins together because they were the same age and he was teaching them techniques in boxing. And that probably started the rivalry.”
    Day to day, sometimes hour to hour, David and Bill were either the best of friends or the worst of enemies. The twins did everything together and shared the same tight-knit circle of friends, most of whom played together on the basketball team of Wichita’s Minneha Middle School. One of the brothers’ favorite pastimes was “bushwhacking.” This involved first cajoling Morris, the tough but good-natured property foreman who squired them around Wichita, to drive them up and down the rural roads near the Koch compound after dark. The idea was to search for couples pulled over at secluded make-out spots. When they spotted a parked car, Morris flicked off the lights and crept up on it, as one of the brothers or their friends lit the fuse on a cherry bomb. When they were almost on top of the vehicle, Morris switched on the high beams and out the window the firecracker flew, scaring the bejesus out of their target. Cackling maniacally, the boys peeled off into the night looking for more couples to terrify.
    Bill possessed a firecracker-like fuse of his own, and he andDavid frequently brawled. A certain antagonism between brothers isn’t uncommon, but the combativeness between the Koch twins was anything but standard. During one bout, Bill bashed his twin over the head with a polo mallet. During another altercation, witnessed by members of the twins’ middle school clique, Bill brandished a butcher knife against his brother and had to be calmly talked down. David still bears a scar from the time Bill pierced him in the back with a ceremonial sword that their father brought back from one of his African adventures.
    When it came time for the twins to attend prep school, they had their pick of prestigious institutions. David chose Deerfield Academy, an all-boys boarding school in northwestern Massachusetts that groomed East Coast Brahmins for the Ivy League. He credited the school, where he would go on to distinguish himself on the basketball and track teams, with transforming him “from an unsophisticated country boy into a fairly polished, well informed graduate.”
    Bill opted for another path. Of all the schools he could have selected, he chose the alma mater of the older brother he alternately revered and resented. Bill’s choice of the Culver Military Academy alarmed Mary, who later confided to an interviewer that her son had become unhinged in his fixation on Charles.
    “You’ve got to talk to a psychiatrist to analyze it,” David would later sigh, reflecting on the Bill-Charles dynamic.
    “This was not a lovey-dovey family,” mused a member of the extended family. “This was a family where the father was consumed by his own ambitions. The mother was trapped by her generation and wealth and surrounded by alpha males. And the boys only had each other, but they were so busy in pursuit of their father’s approval that they never noticed what they could do for each other.”
    “Everything,” the relative added, “goes back to their childhood. Everything goes back to the love they didn’t get.”

CHAPTER TWO
Stalin’s Oil Man
    Fred’s business success—both at home and abroad—came at a steep price for the Koch family patriarch and cast long shadows over his sons’ formative years. The innovation that made him rich also invited an onslaught of patent infringement litigation from a company called Universal Oil Products, which was owned by a consortium of major U.S. oil companies, including the remnants of John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil. The lawsuits drove him to look abroad for business opportunities, including to Josef Stalin’s U.S.S.R.
    When