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

by Jane Mayer

Goodyear, the firm’s managing partner and chief executive, had founded DCI Group in 1996 with two Republican campaign operatives while he was handling outside public relations for the huge tobacco company R. J. Reynolds. The work had shown the trio that ordinary campaign tools could succeed at marketing even the most toxic products. The key, according to an internal 1990 memo the tobacco industry was forced to disclose in a later legal settlement, was to disguise the company’s financial interest as a matter of great principle. Instead of pitching cigarette sales, it would create fake “smokers’ rights” groups who would agitate against smoking restrictions as a fundamental matter of liberty. Or, as the memo written by Tim Hyde—one of the three founding partners of DCI Group and at the time R. J. Reynolds’s director of national field operations—put it, the company needed to “create a movement” that would “build broad coalitions around the issue-cluster of freedom, choice, and privacy.” The company, Hyde wrote, “should proceed along two tracks.” One was the “intellectual track within the DC–New York corridor,” which could influence elite opinion with op-ed pieces, lawsuits, and expert think tank studies. The other was “a grassroots organizational and largely local track,” which would use front groups to simulate the appearance of popular political support.