RICHARD MELLON SCAIFE

“[Jane] 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 Koch Brothers’ New Brand,” a review in the New York Review [March 10, 2016; pp. 16-18] by Bill McKibben of Jane Mayer’s Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right (2016).