"Not long after the death of his father, Charles Koch ... discovered a letter the family patriarch had written to his sons. 'You will receive what now seems to be a large sum of money, ' Fred Koch cautioned. 'It may either be a blessing or a curse.' Fred's legacy would become a blessing and a curse to his four sons--Frederick, Charles, and fraternal twins David and Bill--who in the ensuing decades fought bitterly over their birthright, the oil and cattle-ranching empire their father left behind in 1967. Against a backdrop of scorched-earth legal skirmishes, Charles and David built Koch Industries into one of the largest private corporations in the world ... and they rose to become two of the wealthiest men on the planet. Influenced by the sentiments of their father, who was present at the birth of the John Birch Society, Charles and David have spent decades trying to remake the American political landscape and mainline their libertarian views into the national bloodstream"