Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right by Jane Mayer Page B
Authors: Jane Mayer
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golfer.”)
In a 1960 self-published broadside,
A Business Man Looks at Communism
, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [
sic
] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case
Brown v. Board of Education
, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed 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.”
Blazing a trail that would later be followed by his sons, Koch tapped his fortune to subsidize his political activism. He underwrote the distribution of what he claimed were over two and a half million copies of his book, as well as a speaking tour. According to the Associated Press, during one speech in 1961 he told the members of a Kansas Women’s Republican club that if they were afraid of becoming too “controversial” by joining his fight against Communism, they should remember that “you won’t be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain.” Such rants brought Koch to the attention of the FBI, which filed a report describing his rhetoric as “utterly absurd.”
The John Birch Society’s views were primitive, but its marketing was quite sophisticated. Welch, the candy manufacturer who founded the group, urged organizers to implement a modern sales plan, advertising heavily and pushing pamphlets door-to-door. The movement flourished in Wichita, where Fred Koch frequently attended local John Birch Society meetings and was a generous benefactor.
Ironically, the organization modeled itself on the Communist Party. Stealth and subterfuge were endemic. Membership was kept secret. Fighting “dirty” was justified internally, as necessary to combat the imputed treacherousness of the enemy. Welch “explicitly sought to use the same methods” he attributed to the Communists, “manipulation, deceit, and even dishonesty,” recalled diZerega, who attended Birch Society meetings in Wichita in his youth. One ploy the group used, he said, was to set up phony front groups “pretending to be other than what they were.”An alphabet soup of secretly connected organizations sprang up, with acronyms like TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now) and TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil). Another tactic was to wrap the group’s radical vision in mundane and unthreatening slogans that sound familiar today, such as “less government, more responsibility.” One of Welch’s favorite tropes, decrying “collectivism,” would cause some head-scratching more than fifty years later when it was echoed by Charles Koch in a 2014 diatribe in
The Wall Street Journal
denouncing his Democratic critics as “collectivists.”
Welch was “a very intelligent, sharp man, quite an intellectual,” Fred Koch’s wife, Mary, later told her hometown newspaper
The Wichita Eagle
. The family’s admiration for the John Birch Society, however, proved somewhat embarrassing on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As Lee Fang recounts in his book,
The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right
, when President Kennedy arrived in Dallas that morning, he was confronted by a hate-stoked, full-page newspaper ad paid for by
In a 1960 self-published broadside,
A Business Man Looks at Communism
, Koch claimed that “the Communists have infiltrated both the Democrat [
sic
] and Republican Parties.” Protestant churches, public schools, universities, labor unions, the armed services, the State Department, the World Bank, the United Nations, and modern art, in his view, were all Communist tools. He wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini’s suppression of Communists in Italy and disparagingly of the American civil rights movement. The Birchers agitated to impeach Chief Justice Earl Warren after the Supreme Court voted to desegregate the public schools in the case
Brown v. Board of Education
, which had originated in Topeka, in the Kochs’ home state of Kansas. “The colored man looms large in the Communist plan to take over America,” Fred Koch claimed in his pamphlet. Welfare in his view was a secret plot to attract rural blacks to cities, where he predicted that they would foment “a vicious race war.” In a 1963 speech, Koch claimed 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.”
Blazing a trail that would later be followed by his sons, Koch tapped his fortune to subsidize his political activism. He underwrote the distribution of what he claimed were over two and a half million copies of his book, as well as a speaking tour. According to the Associated Press, during one speech in 1961 he told the members of a Kansas Women’s Republican club that if they were afraid of becoming too “controversial” by joining his fight against Communism, they should remember that “you won’t be very controversial lying in a ditch with a bullet in your brain.” Such rants brought Koch to the attention of the FBI, which filed a report describing his rhetoric as “utterly absurd.”
The John Birch Society’s views were primitive, but its marketing was quite sophisticated. Welch, the candy manufacturer who founded the group, urged organizers to implement a modern sales plan, advertising heavily and pushing pamphlets door-to-door. The movement flourished in Wichita, where Fred Koch frequently attended local John Birch Society meetings and was a generous benefactor.
Ironically, the organization modeled itself on the Communist Party. Stealth and subterfuge were endemic. Membership was kept secret. Fighting “dirty” was justified internally, as necessary to combat the imputed treacherousness of the enemy. Welch “explicitly sought to use the same methods” he attributed to the Communists, “manipulation, deceit, and even dishonesty,” recalled diZerega, who attended Birch Society meetings in Wichita in his youth. One ploy the group used, he said, was to set up phony front groups “pretending to be other than what they were.”An alphabet soup of secretly connected organizations sprang up, with acronyms like TRAIN (To Restore American Independence Now) and TACT (Truth About Civil Turmoil). Another tactic was to wrap the group’s radical vision in mundane and unthreatening slogans that sound familiar today, such as “less government, more responsibility.” One of Welch’s favorite tropes, decrying “collectivism,” would cause some head-scratching more than fifty years later when it was echoed by Charles Koch in a 2014 diatribe in
The Wall Street Journal
denouncing his Democratic critics as “collectivists.”
Welch was “a very intelligent, sharp man, quite an intellectual,” Fred Koch’s wife, Mary, later told her hometown newspaper
The Wichita Eagle
. The family’s admiration for the John Birch Society, however, proved somewhat embarrassing on November 22, 1963, when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. As Lee Fang recounts in his book,
The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right
, when President Kennedy arrived in Dallas that morning, he was confronted by a hate-stoked, full-page newspaper ad paid for by
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