Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer

family and wrote up an evaluation. The psychologist recommended that the boys be separated and that Mary Koch, who was already busy with social life and travel, further distance herself from them in order to make them more “manly.” Psychological theories during that period attributed homosexuality to “over mothering.”
    As a result, Freddie was sent to Hackley, a prep school in Tarrytown, New York, where he could follow his cultural interests, attending the opera in Manhattan and acting in school productions. Later, he came to feel that Hackley rescued him.
    In order to keep him from picking on his brothers, the Kochs sent Charles away to school as well, in his case, at the age of eleven. The school they chose for him was the Southern Arizona School for Boys, renowned for its strictness.His mother made clear that it was done for his younger brother Billy’s sake, which only heightened resentments between the boys.
    “I pleaded with them not to send me away,” Charles told
Fortune
in 1997. Charles did poorly at the boarding school, but instead of yielding to his pleas to come home, the Kochs sent him to an even more rigid boarding school, the Fountain Valley School in Colorado. “I hated all that,” Charles recalled. At one point, his parents finally “took pity” on him, he said, and let him attend public high school in Wichita, which he loved, but “I got into trouble,” he recalled, so they packed him off to the Culver Military Academy in Indiana, which also emphasized discipline. There, Charles did better academically but repeatedly got into trouble.Eventually, Culver expelled him for drinking on a train (although he was eventually readmitted, enabling him to earn his diploma). “I have a little bit of a rebel, and free spirit in me,” Charles later acknowledged.As punishment, Charles’s father banished him to live with his relatives in Texas. “Father put the fear of God in him,” David later recalled. “He said, ‘If you don’t make it, you’ll be worthless. You’ve disappointed me.’ Father was a severe taskmaster.”
    In his confidential report for Bill Koch, Coppin wrote, “Charles spent little of the next fifteen years at home, only coming there for an occasional holiday.” After he was exiled by the family, “the first thing Charles did when he came home on vacation was to beat up” his younger brother Bill.
    Young Bill grew alarmingly depressed. He was socially withdrawn and preoccupied with his sense of inferiority to his twin, David, and his older brother Charles. Soon the twins too were sent to boarding school. Bill, interestingly, chose to follow Charles’s footsteps to Culver Military Academy, while David chose the eastern prep school Deerfield Academy. “There was a lot of strife between the boys. Charles was in constant rebellion against authority. It was a miserable childhood,” Coppin said in an interview.
    Yet later, as a parent, Charles partially repeated the pattern. When his own son, Chase, then thirteen, played a halfhearted tennis match, Charles had an employee pick him up and deliver him to a baking, reeking feedlot on one of the family ranches where he was forced to work seven days a week, twelve hours a day. Charles proudly recounted the story with a grin, telling
The Wichita Eagle
, “I think he thought he’d have a job here in Wichita and could go out with his friends at night.” Chase became an exceptionally good tennis player but later had another, more serious problem. While driving as a high school student in Wichita, he ran a red light and fatally injured a twelve-year-old boy. He pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor charge of vehicular manslaughter and was sentenced to eighteen months of probation and a hundred hours of community service and was required to pay for the boy’s funeral. After college, Chase, like his father, joined the family company.
    Meanwhile, in an online blog, Charles’s other child, Elizabeth, a Princeton graduate, described her own