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As a result, Jane Mayer’s Dark Money —a detailed accounting of their rise and rise—is absolutely necessary reading for anyone who wants to make sense of our politics. Lay aside the endless punditry about Donald’s belligerence or Hillary’s ambition; Mayer is telling the epic story of America in our time. It is a triumph of investigative reporting, perhaps not surprising for a journalist who has won most of the awards her profession has to offer. But she had to cut through the secrecy that these men have carefully cultivated, unraveling an endless list of front groups. And she had to do it despite real intimidation; apparently an arm of what some have called “the Kochtopus” hired private investigators to try to dig up dirt on her personal and professional life, a tactic that failed because there wasn’t any. She’s a pro, and she’s given the world a full accounting of what had been a shadowy and largely unseen force.¹

Mayer begins at the beginning, detailing the origins of the great fortunes—the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, the Bradleys, and others—that became the source of this right-wing network. Many are the Gatsbyesque stories of unhappy plutocrats: Richard Mellon Scaife, raised in an enormous Pennsylvania mansion dubbed Penguin Court because his mother liked the birds and had rookeries built in the shape of igloos where the slabs of ice were changed daily. By the time he was sent to Deerfield Academy at age fourteen he had a drinking problem severe enough that his parents had to build a new dormitory to ensure his graduation. Even their money couldn’t keep him from getting expelled from Yale, so he graduated instead from the University of Pittsburgh, where his dad was chairman of the board, and entered the family business, Gulf Oil.

The origin story of the Koch brothers, however, is like something out of a Robert Ludlum novel, connected to most of the darkest forces of the twentieth century. Their father, Fred Koch, had invented an improved process for refining crude oil into gasoline. The Russians sought his expertise as they set up their own refineries after the Bolshevik Revolution—at first he said he didn’t want to work for Communists, but since they were willing to pay in advance he overcame his scruples and helped Stalin meet his first five-year plan by building fifteen refineries and then advising on a hundred more, across the Soviet Union.

Next, he turned to another autocrat with busy expansion plans, Adolf Hitler, traveling frequently to Germany where he “provided the engineering plans and began overseeing the construction of a massive oil refinery owned by a company on the Elbe River in Hamburg.” It turned into a crucial part of the Reich’s military might, “one of the few refineries in Germany” that could produce “the high-octane gasoline needed to fuel fighter planes.” And it turned the elder Koch into an admirer of the regime, who as late as 1938 was writing in a letter to a friend that “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.” Comparing the scenes he saw in Hamburg to FDR’s New Deal, he said it gave him hope 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.”

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1. The New York Times ran a detailed account of this harassment campaign, including a refusal from a Koch spokesman to comment explicitly on their involvement in the espionage; he contents himself with merely describing Mayer’s overall reporting as “grossly inaccurate.” See Jim Dwyer, What Happened to Jane Mayer When She Wrote About the Koch Brothers January 26, 2016.