Billionaire worked to move U.S. to far right
David Koch, who amassed a multibilliondollar fortune with his brother Charles from the corporate behemoth they ran and then joined him in pouring their riches into a powerful right-wing libertarian movement that helped reshape U.S. politics, has died at 79.
Charles Koch announced the death in a statement that provided no other details but noted that David Koch had been treated for prostate cancer in the past.
Hitching his star to the soaring ambitions of Charles, his older brother, David Koch became one of the world’s richest people, with assets of $42.2 billion last year and a 42 percent stake in the global family enterprise, Koch Industries. He also became a nationally known philanthropist, and he was the early public face of the Koch political ascendancy as the Libertarian Party’s candidate for vice president in 1980.
Three decades after David Koch’s public steps into politics, analysts say, the Koch brothers’ moneyfueled brand of libertarianism helped give rise to the tea party movement and strengthened the far-right wing of a resurgent Republican Party.
A gregarious, socially prominent New Yorker who loved the ballet, Koch saw his name emblazoned on cornices at Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the American Museum of Natural History and NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital — Manhattan institutions on which some of his $1.2 billion in charitable gifts were bestowed.
He was a familiar figure at society galas, a 6-foot-5inch former college basketball star who long held the single-game scoring record — 41 points — for the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Engineers.
He survived a 1991 plane crash that killed 34 people at Los Angeles International Airport. He broke down in tears on a witness stand in Kansas during a civil trial that nearly tore his family apart over money. And for years, he and Charles faced, and denied, accusations of having exploited libertarian principles for self-serving purposes.
They insisted that they adhered to a traditional belief in the liberty of the individual and in free trade, free markets and freedom from what they called government “intrusions.”
Since the 1970s, the Kochs have spent at least $100 million to transform a fringe movement into a formidable political force aimed at moving America to the far right by influencing the outcome of elections, undoing limits on campaign contributions and promoting conservative candidacies, think tanks and policies.
David Hamilton Koch was born in Wichita, Kan., on May 3, 1940, the third of four sons of Fred Chase Koch, an oil engineer and entrepreneur, and the former Mary Clementine Robinson, a Wellesley College graduate and the daughter of a physician in Kansas City, Mo.
Fred Koch made millions of dollars in the 1920s and ’30s by inventing a process to extract more gasoline from crude oil and by building refineries. Fiercely anti-Communist, he co-founded the rightwing John Birch Society and created the Wichita company that became Koch Industries.
After Fred Koch’s death in 1967, his sons inherited significant stakes in the company. Charles became chairman, CEO and the strategist behind its expansion into chemicals, pipelines and consumer goods, eventually making Koch Industries the nation’s second-largest private conglomerate.
A bachelor until he was 56, Koch married Julia Flesher, a former Adolfo fashion assistant, in 1996. They had three children: David Jr., Mary Julia and John Mark. All survive him.