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

by Jane Mayer

The idea of employing a deceptive front group to mask corporate self-interest was not original, even within the Koch family. The same ruse had been used not just by the du Pont family and others during the New Deal years but also by a group to which Fred Koch belonged in the 1950s. He was an early and active member of the Wichita-based DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom, an antilabor union group that was a forerunner of the National Right to Work Legal Defense Foundation. In a revealing private letter, one of its staff members explained the group’s “Astroturf” strategy. In reality, he said, big-business industrialists would run the group, serving as its “anonymous quarterbacks,” and “call the turns.” But he said they needed to sell the “yarn” that the group was “composed of housewives, farmers, small businessmen, professional people, wage earners—not big business industrialists.” Otherwise, he admitted, the movement was “almost certainly doomed to failure.”