On the morning of December 8, 1958, as a light snow fell in Indianapolis, Fred Koch strode up the walkway to the sprawling brick Tudor home at 3650 Washington Boulevard. Stepping out of the chill and shedding his coat, Fred was greeted by Marguerite Dice, the widow who had volunteered to host the meeting that would mark the birth of the John Birch Society.
Fred found a seat in Dice’s spacious living room, where plush chairs and davenports had been arrayed in a semicircle. There with him were ten others, including T. Coleman Andrews, former commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service, who had resigned his post in 1955, coming out as a vocal foe of the income tax; Col. Laurence Bunker, a former aide to General Douglas MacArthur; Wisconsin industrialist William Grede; W. B. McMillan, president of the Hussman Refrigerator Company; and University of Illinois classics professor Revilo Oliver, later a hero of white supremacists for his racist and anti-Semitic jeremiads.
Robert Welch had convened the meeting. He was a former candy company executive who in the mid-1950s had quit his job to devote himself full-time to fighting communism. How could he continue peddling Sugar Babies and Junior Mints when America—the world—was in crisis?
Welch was a child prodigy who had entered college at the age of twelve. He had dabbled in politics, launching a 1950 bid for lieutenant governor in Massachusetts on a platform of repelling the creep of socialism into state and federal government. He lost the race, but his dystopic vision of a subverted, subjugated America gained traction. To disseminate his ideas, Welch founded a magazine, One Man’s Opinion (later renamed American Opinion). And that was the problem: Welch was just one man. If he hoped to defeat the existential threat of communism, he would need an army.
Fred Koch, whose fervent anticommunism had brought him to Welch’s notice, seemed like an ideal general. Since returning from the Soviet Union in 1930, he had watched his four sons grow up in a world where the words of his old Bolshevik minder seemed to be coming true. Fred now saw evidence of communist infiltration everywhere. Jerome Livschitz’s taunt—we will make you rotten to the core—echoed in his ears. His time among the Soviets, and his firsthand experiences witnessing a society fully under the boot heel of government, was regular table talk for the Koch boys.
“He was constantly speaking to us children about what was wrong with government and government policy,” David has said. “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.”
Fred’s experiences in the Soviet Union, which in turn drove his interest in politics and economics, especially influenced Charles. “That sparked the evolution of Charles’s political views,” said Tony Woodlief, a former Koch Industries management consultant who knows Charles well. “You can blame it on Standard Oil.”
The more Fred traveled the world, the more horrified he became at the growing influence of socialism and communism—to the point where, on the cusp of World War II, he even saw something laudable in the rise of fascism. “Although nobody agrees with me, I am of the opinion that the only sound countries in the world are Germany, Italy, and Japan, simply because they are all working and working hard,” he reported in an October 1938 letter to his mentor Charles de Ganahl, after an extensive trip that included stops in imperial Japan and (“violently socialistic”) New Zealand.
The laboring people in those countries are proportionately much better off than they are any place else in the world. When you contrast the state of mind of Germany today with what it was in 1925 you begin to think that perhaps this course of idleness, feeding at the public trough, dependence on government, etc., with which we are afflicted is not permanent and can be overcome.
At the end of World War II, Fred believed that the next great clash would be fought between the forces of capitalism and collectivism, but to his frustration, few people seemed to recognize the peril. He saw it as his duty to raise the alarm. “I think these times are far more serious even than Civil War days,” he confided to a friend and retired military officer. “That war was merely to decide whether we were going to be one nation or two, whereas the fight that is going on now in this country is going to decide whether we are going to be free men or slaves.” (This was a bizarre comment to make, since the Civil War was fought, in large part, to eradicate slavery.)
As he became increasingly outspoken about the menace of communism, Fred returned to Moscow in 1956 (his first visit in twenty-six years), joining a delegation of ten prominent Wichita businessmen on a “friendship tour” to refute Soviet propaganda about the evils of capitalism. “We have been painted as oppressive masters of the laboring people,” one of Fred’s companions said at the time. “We are nothing of the sort. Although we are wealthy in terms of worldly goods, we are humanitarians in every respect.” The quixotic trip only reinforced the immutability of the ideological battle under way.
When Welch summoned Fred to Indianapolis, he did not tell the industrialist the reason for the meeting. He merely said that the topic was of the gravest importance.
“The meeting will be completely ‘off the record’—you will simply be in Indianapolis, or just in the Midwest, on business,” Welch wrote to the small circle of prominent men he had picked to attend the conclave. “And since there is no way I can tell you of the ideas which I hope to see thoroughly discussed there, without writing volumes, you will have to take for granted that I would not ask such busy men to give up two whole days in this way unless I thought it would be worthwhile.”
When all his guests took their seats, Welch made his entrance toting a thick stack of note cards. Tall, with thinning gray hair and pursed lips, Welch looked a bit like Mr. Magoo. He shook hands with the men and, knowing there was much ground to cover, took his place rigidly behind a podium that he had borrowed from a nearby church.
“Before tomorrow is over,” Welch said, “I hope to have all of you feeling that you are taking part, here and now, in the beginning of a movement of historical importance.” Speaking for hours on end in his customary monotone, interrupted only by small breaks for food, Welch outlined the dizzying breadth of the communist conspiracy, reaching back to the Roman and Greek empires—civilizations that “did perish of the cancer of collectivism”—to illustrate the tragic fate that could be awaiting the West.
“This octopus is so large,” Welch said, “that its tentacles now reach into all of the legislative halls, all of the union labor meetings, a majority of the religious gatherings, and most of the schools of the whole world. It has a central nervous system which can make its tentacles in the labor unions of Bolivia, in the farmers’ co-operatives of Saskatchewan, in the caucuses of the Social Democrats of West Germany, and in the class rooms of Yale Law School, all retract or reach forward simultaneously. It can make all of these creeping tentacles turn either right or left, or a given percentage turn right while the others turn left, at the same time, in accordance with the intentions of a central brain in Moscow or Ust-Kamenogorsk. The human race has never before faced any such monster of power which was determined to enslave it.”
To others, this might have sounded like pure lunacy. But Fred knew better. Of the men who had assembled in Indianapolis, he perhaps had the most direct experience with communism. He had seen the beast up close.
The communists had either executed or banished to Siberia many of the Soviet engineers Fred worked with in the early 1930s. Even the loyal Bolshevik Jerome Livschitz had faced a firing squad in 1936 for allegedly plotting with Stalin’s nemesis, Leon Trotsky.
Fred suspected Stalin’s assassins had struck even closer to home. In 1930, Winkler-Koch trained a Russian engineer by the name of Hachatouroff, who while en route back to the Soviet Union, received word that his life was in danger. He returned to Wichita, where Fred gave him a job. But a few months later, Hachatouroff was found dead after falling from a hotel window. The authorities ruled his death a suicide. When Charles was old enough to hear the gruesome tale, Fred told him about Hachatouroff and about the brutality of the Soviet regime, where a man’s life was not his own and where almost any transgression was punishable with death. Fred said that he didn’t buy the official explanation of the Russian engineer’s demise. He believed the KGB had murdered him. “He was always convinced that they pushed him out,” Charles remembered.
Only as dusk fell on that first day in Indianapolis did Welch unveil his vision. Defeating this many-tentacled monster, Welch explained, required its own multipronged approach: the establishment of Christian Science–like reading rooms and bookstores, to educate people on “the true history of events and developments of the past two decades”; the organizing of front groups (“little fronts, big fronts, temporary fronts, permanent fronts, all kinds of fronts”); and support for conservative news outlets—Welch’s American Opinion, but also William F. Buckley’s National Review (then a mere three years old), the Dan Smoot Report, and Human Events.
Additionally, Welch’s movement would make prodigious use of the “letter-writing weapon,” causing a “continuous overwhelming flood” of correspondence to descend on everyone from Washington lawmakers and executive agency heads to newspaper editors, TV sponsors, and educators. Welch intended to place their weight onto “the political scales in this country as fast and as far” as possible.
It wasn’t until the following day that Welch gave a name to his movement: the John Birch Society. For those unfamiliar with Birch, Welch handed out packets containing copies of the 1954 biography he had written of the young Baptist preacher and Army captain, who was shot dead by Chinese communists in August 1945, a week-and-a-half after V-J Day. Welch considered Birch the first martyr of the Cold War. “It is my fervent hope that the John Birch Society will last for hundreds of years and exert an increasing influence for the temporal good and spiritual ennoblement of mankind throughout those centuries,” Welch told the men seated in front of him.
Over the course of the two-day retreat, Welch succeeded in stirring the patriotic instincts of his guests, who had needed little convincing that the nation was on a destructive path. Before Welch even concluded his presentation, Hussman Refrigerator Company’s W. B. McMillan scratched out a check for $1,000: “Here, Bob, we’re in business.” Fred Koch enthusiastically signed on, too, later joining the John Birch Society’s National Council, along with most of the other attendees.
After Indianapolis, Fred threw himself more vigorously than ever into the fight against communism. He besieged lawmakers with letters demanding they address the peril facing the nation, writing to one congressman that “inaction means in a very few years Red Chinese and Red Russian soldiers will be marching in our streets. In that event the dead will be the lucky ones.” And in 1960, Fred self-published a short tract called A Business Man Looks at Communism, which warned of an impending communist takeover. The pamphlet was an outgrowth of a talk on communism he’d given to Wichita Rotarians, and which he was subsequently asked to reprise on local radio station KFH. So many listeners called in asking for copies that Fred decided to expand on his remarks in a 39-page booklet.
He produced a forceful, though deeply paranoid polemic intended to jar Americans from their apathy: “It is not the Communists who are destroying America,” he wrote. “America is being destroyed by citizens who will not listen, are not informed, and will not think.”
One likely path to a communist coup, he wrote, was the “infiltration of high offices of government and political parties until the President of the U.S. is a Communist.… Even the Vice Presidency would do, as it could be easily arranged for the President to commit suicide.”
Fred saw the specter of communism lurking behind everything from American foreign aid (“the U.S.A. is following Stalin’s spending prescription”) to tax-free nonprofits (“using the astronomical sums of money in their control to bring on socialism”), and from college campuses (“one of the breeding grounds of recruits for the Communist Party”) to churches (“ministers don’t become Communists but Communists become ministers”).
Even modernist painters were part of the conspiracy: “The idea is to make our civilization seem degraded, ugly, and hopeless.” According to Bill Koch, Fred found Pablo Picasso particularly loathsome. “My father hated Picasso because he was a communist.”
The American civil rights movement also figured into the plot. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred wrote, noting that he’d been told that the Communist Party had influenced the welfare laws in major American cities “to make it attractive for rural Southern Negroes and Puerto Ricans to come to those cities.” Later, when the communists wanted to seize control of urban centers, they “will use the colored people by getting a vicious race war started.”
Fred reserved special scorn for labor unions, which endeavored to “have the worker do as little as possible for the money he receives,” he wrote. “This practice alone can destroy our country.” And he alleged that the “Communist-infiltrated union” whose members controlled the wire traffic in and out of the Pentagon had “probably” handed over America’s secrets to the communists.
Fred initially printed 12,500 copies of his pamphlet, which he distributed to every weekly newspaper in the country, along with other interested parties. Demand was so great that by late 1961, it had entered its ninth printing. At least 2.6 million copies of A Business Man Looks at Communism would ultimately go into circulation.
Readers of Fred’s anticommunist call to arms included FBI agents, who received numerous inquiries about the Wichita businessman. Worried Americans deluged FBI director J. Edgar Hoover with letters asking if Fred’s claims about the depth of the communist infiltration were valid—and in some cases wondering if his pamphlet was part of a subversive plot of its own.
“Would you consider Fred Koch… a security risk?” asked one letter writer. “… I am astonished and appalled at the contents of this Publication.”
Along with his pamphlet, Fred gave frequent speeches across the Midwest on the subject of communism. In 1960, he was the commencement speaker at Wichita State University, where he warned that the “tentacles” of socialism had crept “further and further” into the body politic, creating a national craving for government handouts that he likened to morphine addiction.
The sad fact is that once people begin to get something for nothing then they want more and more at the same price. It destroys their independence, their self-reliance, and transforms them into dependent animal creatures without their knowing it. The end result is the human race as portrayed by Orwell—a human face ground into the earth by the large boot of benevolent Big Brother.
Fred knew that many people viewed him as a red-baiting crackpot. Speaking out was uncharacteristic of him. He was a private man, who revealed little about himself, his family, and his company. But given the stakes, he did not consider silence an option. The time had come to fight. “Maybe you don’t want to be controversial by getting mixed up in this anti-communist battle,” he told members of Kansas’s Northeast Johnson County Women’s Republican Club. “But you won’t be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain.”
Driving into Wichita from the west on Highway 54 during the 1960s, you could easily tell that you were entering Bircher country. IMPEACH EARL WARREN, the billboard on the edge of town implored. The Chief Justice of the Supreme Court was an early target of the Birch Society, which in addition to ads and billboards, launched petition drives seeking the judge’s ouster. Birchers reviled Warren for presiding over 1954’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling, which paved the way for school desegregation, inflaming the South and enraging conservatives who believed the high court had violated the Constitution. (“If many of the opinions of the Warren Supreme Court had been written in the Kremlin they could not have served the Communist better,” Fred wrote in A Business Man Looks at Communism.)
Fred had taken on a high-profile role within the society, as one of its national leaders. Family friend and fellow Wichita businessman Bob Love, the youthful president of the Love Box Company, also got involved with the movement. The pair had teamed up in the past to promote political causes. Love, who was closer in age to Fred’s sons, was a founder of Kansans for the Right to Work. Together he and Fred had led the successful effort to curb the power of unions in Kansas via a 1958 constitutional amendment. Now, the pair commanded Wichita’s growing Birch Society contingent, whose ranks included many of the same business leaders involved in the right-to-work battle.
Fred’s chapter met frequently in the basement trophy room of the Koch family’s stone mansion. “The room looks practically medieval,” recalled one visitor, a doctoral student doing his dissertation on the John Birch Society. “… Its walls are crowded with stuffed heads from the disappearing wildlife of Africa and North America.” During one meeting, the Ph.D. student wrote, a “speaker said that if the Communists take over, they will point to this as the place where the Americanist conspirators met.”
Charles joined the Birch Society in the early 1960s, and he held occasional political discussions of his own in the basement of his family’s mansion, inviting over members of the local chapter of Young Americans for Freedom to wax philosophical about the nature of government and its role in pilfering liberties from the people. Charles seemed to steer clear of the more hysterical claims being made by his father and other society luminaries, preferring to talk about big picture ideas. “He didn’t take the conspiracy stuff very seriously,” one participant in these discussions remembered.
But the “conspiracy stuff” gathered steam in Wichita, a Birch Society stronghold thanks to the efforts of Fred Koch and Bob Love.
The city’s schools and colleges became an early target of Wichita’s Birchers, who critics accused of running stealth candidates for school board positions and employing McCarthyesque tactics in the classroom. A former Wichita high school debate teacher recalled that “the Birch Society was giving the superintendent of schools and Board of Education a lot of headaches with their complaints.” One source of their ire was the UNICEF collection boxes children toted around during Halloween: “The Birch Society just went nuts over it.” She drew their wrath when the topic of the United Nations came up in her classroom: “I got phone calls from parents just furious because of something some debater said about the United Nations—didn’t I know that the United Nations was evil and trying to take over the world and destroy our independence?”
Meanwhile, Fred had even begun to harbor doubts about the patriotic commitment of his beloved alma mater, MIT. He had donated regularly to the school, and in 1955, he served a five-year term on its board of trustees, a period when Bill, Charles, and David attended college there. But he came to believe the communist infestation had taken root at MIT, as it had elsewhere in the country.
Fred considered the university’s tolerance of a Dutch mathematician named Dirk Jan Struik particularly egregious. A member of MIT’s faculty since 1926, Struik was an unapologetic Marxist, who had joined the Communist Party in his native Netherlands. In 1951, Struik was hauled before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, where he pleaded the Fifth. A couple months later, Massachusetts indicted Struik for conspiring to teach and advocate the violent overthrow of the government. MIT immediately suspended him pending the outcome of the case. “They used my textbook on differential geometry, but I myself was not allowed to teach it,” he reflected years later. “… I’ve always said that that time was half Nazi Germany, half Alice in Wonderland.”
There was scant evidence to support the traitorous acts Struik was accused of, and in 1956, the charges were dropped. MIT reinstated the professor, who resumed teaching at the school during Charles’s senior year. The decision infuriated Fred. The man was an admitted communist, after all, and here he was once again in a position to mold young minds, maybe even his son’s. The professor’s retention, Fred griped to a fellow anticommunist, “meant… that there would be an MIT Alger Hiss some day for sure.”
Fred complained bitterly about Struik and wrote to MIT administrators warning of the communist influence on the campus where his sons were spending their college years. When an MIT fund-raiser visited Fred in Wichita, the industrialist told him he was “down on Tech” because the administration had done little to take a stand against Struik or other communists in its ranks.
“Fred Koch used all of his influence and all of his wallet and everything else to try to get this guy off the faculty—and he failed,” said John McManus, the current president of the John Birch Society. As a young Bircher in the mid-1960s, McManus recalled meeting Fred at a society function, where the businessman was still fuming about his inability to purge Struik from MIT.
By the early 1960s, the John Birch Society had some 60,000 members, 58 full-time employees, and annual revenues of $1.6 million. It was growing rapidly—and stirring up controversy across the nation. The Saturday Evening Post reported that its rabble-rousing members “are said to have infiltrated Republican organizations, disrupted school boards, harassed city councils and librarians and subverted PTA’s near and far.”
The society’s fierce letter-writing and lobbying campaigns targeted issues ranging from U.S. participation in the United Nations (“Get U.S. Out!”) to water fluoridation, which members claimed was a tool of communist dominion. (In Wichita, a Birch Society–led effort repealed by referendum a city fluoridation plan.)
Birchers also bitterly opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 on states’ rights grounds, and believed that the civil rights movement itself was a communist creation to divide and conquer America. (“It always seemed to me that when the Communists… begin to light these racial fires all over the country as they are now doing, that it would be the beginning of a decisive move on their part,” Fred wrote to a fellow Birch Society council member in 1963.)
The Birchers formed the vanguard of a far-right awakening in America, and the group’s extreme rhetoric, charges of treason directed at the nation’s politicians, and aggressive recruiting practices, frightened not just the political Left, but the Right as well.
Such torchbearers of conservatism as the National Review’s William F. Buckley eyed the movement warily, seeing in the Birch Society’s rise the possible implosion of the conservative movement. Through the head-spinning conspiracies of Robert Welch—who had called President Dwight D. Eisenhower a “dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy” and claimed Soviet censorship of Boris Pasternak’s Nobel Prize–winning Doctor Zhivago was actually an elaborate ruse so that the subversive book would be embraced by the West—the Birch Society risked branding all conservatives as cranks and kooks.
At first, Buckley and his allies took care to distance themselves from Welch without offending their fellow conservatives, who were joining the Birch Society in droves. Barry Goldwater, the charismatic Republican senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential nominee, was particularly mindful of his base of support within the society, which was populated with many deep-pocketed businessmen. He feared alienating men like Fred Koch, who had generously supported his political career: Upon the 1960 publication of The Conscience of a Conservative, Fred promptly ordered 2,500 copies of the polemic that propelled Goldwater to political stardom and put them in the hands of every opinion maker in Kansas. In 1961, Goldwater managed to praise the society’s members without endorsing the views of the group’s controversial Svengali, telling reporters he was “impressed by the type of people” in the society. “They are the kind we need in politics.”
But by early 1962, as the society gained strength and numbers, it grew clear to Buckley and his allies that more drastic action was needed. By embracing Goldwater, Birchers threatened his chances of broader Republican appeal. Buckley, Goldwater, and other conservative leading lights convened that January at Palm Beach’s upscale Breakers Hotel, where they spent considerable time discussing the Birch Society problem. There, Buckley volunteered for the assignment of making Robert Welch into a pariah. That February he unleashed a 5,000-word haymaker in National Review, titled “The Question of Robert Welch,” which slammed the Birch Society leader for harming the cause of anticommunism. “How can the John Birch Society be an effective political instrument while it is led by a man whose views on current affairs are, at so many critical points… so far removed from common sense?” Buckley wrote.
Senior members of the society had already begun to chafe under Welch’s autocratic leadership. (Democracy, he famously said, was “a weapon of demagoguery and a perennial fraud.”) Buckley’s essay caused further unrest. But Fred remained one of Welch’s defenders.
“I wrote Buckley and told him that possibly if the Communists ever took over he would be a prime candidate for the firing squad and that by attacking Welch he was hastening the day considerably,” he reported to the conservative journalist Elizabeth Churchill Brown.
Fred’s hard-line conservative politics were controversial not only to the broader public, but also within his extended family, causing what one relative called a “schism” between the Kochs and the family of Mary’s younger brother, William Robinson, a prominent lawyer in Wichita. While Fred organized the Birch Society in the early- and mid-1960s, Robinson chaired the Democratic Central Committee of Sedgwick County (which includes Wichita). In 1964, the year Fred enthusiastically backed Goldwater’s presidential bid, Robinson attended the Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City as a delegate.
Robinson ran twice, unsuccessfully, for Congress, making a bid for the 4th district congressional seat in 1960 and challenging Bob Dole in the 1968 Senate race. “That was the death of the relationship between the Robinsons and the Kochs,” the relative said. Bill Koch, however, remained close to his uncle and aunt, especially in adulthood. “They were like surrogate parents. They were the loving parents that he always wanted.” Bill’s uncle was fiercely loyal to his nephew. “Billy is a very compassionate guy, unlike the rest of his family,” Robinson sniped in 1992.
Fred’s conservatism influenced his children in different ways. Bill, for his part, never fully embraced the extreme politics of his father. He even considered following in the footsteps of his uncle, contemplating a Senate bid in Kansas as a Democrat in the late 1990s—an indignity that Fred, who had passed on by this point, was mercifully spared. Nor was the old man alive to see Bill augment his art collection with paintings by modern artists (including Picasso) who he considered communists.
David inherited his conservative views on government from Fred, but he has implied that some of his father’s more conspiratorial beliefs about communism were out there. “Father was paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way,” David told New York magazine. Frederick—save for a 1980s run-in with the British bureaucracy over his plans to renovate a historic mansion in London—steered clear of politics entirely.
Of the four brothers, Charles most heartily imbibed their father’s hard-line political views; part of this likely owed to his arrival back in Wichita in the early 1960s, after attending college and grad school in Boston, during the height of Fred’s John Birch Society organizing. One Wichitan recalled going on a blind date with Charles in the early 1960s, where he spent much of the evening discoursing on the evils of communism and discussing Communism on the Map—one of a series of propagandistic films screened at Birch Society chapter meetings, in which the nations of the world are shown slowly being covered by an ooze of pink or red. His date was not impressed. “I ended up leaving early and walking home,” she remembered.
Like his father, Charles occasionally speechified about the dangers of collectivism and the encroaching welfare state. “The U.S. government is trying to win votes—not to satisfy consumers,” he told an audience of college students in 1965. “In this form of collectivism, the society controls everything that should be controlled by individuals.”
With Koch family friend Bob Love, Charles opened a John Birch Society bookstore on Wichita’s East 13th Street, down the road from his family’s compound. He curated a section there on Austrian economics (a school of thought that heavily influenced libertarianism) and enjoyed introducing customers to the works of economists including Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek.
A family acquaintance recalled visiting the Koch family’s home one day in the 1960s, carrying a dog-eared copy of Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, the assigned reading in a college literature class. When Charles answered the door, his eyes lingered on the book’s cover. After an uncomfortable pause, he finally asked the visitor to leave the Hemingway book outside, since it could not enter the house.
“Is there a problem?” the puzzled visitor asked. It wasn’t like he was carrying a copy of Tropic of Cancer.
“Well,” Charles explained, “he was a communist.”
The guest entered. Hemingway remained on the stoop.
Communism may have been sweeping the world, but there was at least one threshold where, by God, it would not cross.