Inside the Koch Family
In a new interview, David Koch speaks openly about his family and their role as financial backers for the American conservative movement.
Andrew Goldman has an almost unimprovable profile of David Koch in the August 2nd edition of New York Magazine. I’m stunned by the access that Goldman was able to achieve with New York City’s 2nd richest man.
The piece has illuminated David Koch, a man whom some have branded as an ‘environmental criminal’, and has made him human with a real voice, with real jokes (on his artificial knees: “If you spent as many years as I did begging girls for favors, you’d have bad knees, too.”)
Goldman weaves Koch’s tale in a fashion befitting the gentleman. In this story, we delve into Koch’s estrangement from his brother William, the aircraft tragedy that nearly killed him, the reasons behind his philanthropy, even his private sexual… difficulties.
Thanks to this article, we can also trace the origins of much of the conservative grassroots movement to today. Goldman explores Koch’s relationship with his father, a man whom Koch dryly notes was “paranoid about communism, let’s put it that way.”
Dissatisfied with their father’s John Birch Society, the Koch brothers set to building something William F. Buckley would have seen as at least more agreeable: groups like the Cato Institute, the Mercatus Center, and Americans for Prosperity.
The Koch family is perhaps the largest financial cog in the engine that drives conservative intellectual thought in this country. This piece is indispensible in understanding one of the key men behind the machine:
Koch concedes that he sympathizes with the tea party. “It demonstrates a powerful visceral hostility in the body politic against the massive increase in government power, the massive efforts to socialize this country, which goes against the conservative grain of the average American,” he says. He insists he vigorously opposes the elements of the party “that go too far” and that he stands firmly against “violence” and other “bad things” perpetrated by tea-party members. “I’m not a racist. I’m very broad-minded,” he says.
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