# There was a 1940's or 1950' version of Koch Brothers??? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [March 4, 2015, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209 "2015-03-04T17:12:23Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 1:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/21 "2015-03-05T13:29:16Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > J.R. Ewing in _Dallas_ supposedly was based on [H.L. Hunt](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H._L._Hunt). I don’t see it myself. H.L. Hunt would seem more likely to have been the inspiration for Jock Ewing, the patriarch who built up the family’s oil business and left a complicated family situation for his children to sort out. Which would make Bunker and Herbert Hunt J.R. and Bobby. Lamar Hunt would be Gary, the brother who went into another business (the NFL/Knot’s Landing). And Ray, Jock’s illegitimate son, would by Ray, H.L.'s illegitimate son. ---
**Author:** ![mlees](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ba8739/32.png) [@mlees](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mlees)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 3:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/22 "2015-03-05T15:10:39Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > No, Japan was not acting rationally. Japan was acting out of (perceived) desperation. I recall reading how Yamato told Tojo that in the event of war, “We can run wild for the first year, but I can guarantee nothing about the second or third year.” In fact, they spent the whole war making it up on the fly. Yamamoto, not Yamato. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 4:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/23 "2015-03-05T16:10:21Z")
> [@Robert163](#): > > no, this was not that situation. it was more about the people who improved propaganda models than anything else. Like [“The American Family Robinson”?](http://www.otrcat.com/american-family-robinson-p-49252.html) (A 1930s anti-New-Deal radio show sponsored by the National Association of Manufacturers.) ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 4:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/24 "2015-03-05T16:11:26Z")
> [@mlees](#): > > Yamamoto, not Yamato. :o Oh, yes, “Yamato” is another name for Japan itself. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 5, 2015, 9:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/25 "2015-03-05T21:45:32Z")
> [@elucidator](#): > > Mark Twain. And the idea was everybody got one vote, but if you wanted more, you had to get more education. Or more money, that also counted for extra votes. But money-votes were “mortal” (one can always lose one’s money) and education-votes were “immortal” and more prestigious. Nowadays it seems like a solution to a non-problem. People with money and education run things **now.** ---
**Author:** ![JoseB](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/joseb/32/1530_2.png) [@JoseB](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JoseB)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2015, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/26 "2015-03-08T10:22:39Z")
Slight hijack of the thread – Weren’t the Hunt Brothers (William Herbert and Nelson Bunker, the two sons of H.L. Hunt mentioned upthread) the ones who crashed and burned rather spectacularly when they tried (and failed) to corner the world market of silver in 1979 or 1980? ---
**Author:** ![RTFirefly](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/c77e96/32.png) [@RTFirefly](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/RTFirefly)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2015, 12:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/27 "2015-03-08T12:45:35Z")
> [@XT](#): > > Well, except we weren’t really prepared for war before WWII. But don’t let the facts get in the way of a good old fashioned military industrial complex rant! And by and large, it didn’t hurt us. See below. > [@](#): > > As opposed to the good old fashioned way where we sent off our kids to fight and die with no training and crap equipment, right? That’s the way to do it! Worked so well for us during…well, during every freaking war we fought until we finally got this stupid idea out of our collective heads and decided that perhaps we should prepare for a change, since we invariably seem to get sucked into one war or another regardless of whether we were prepared or not. > [@XT](#): > > For the vast majority of US history we haven’t been prepared militarily, yet again and again we found ourselves in wars where our only option was to throw away our children’s lives in exchange for learning again and again the lessons we should have trained them in and have them use crappy, ill prepared and thought through weapons and equipment. This happened every single time the US went to war until fairly recently. It sickens me to look at the actual history and see this happening over and over again. After the War of 1812 ended in 1814, we went for over a century without any wars that weren’t either wars of choice against lesser adversaries (Mexican War, Spanish-American War) or with ourselves (Civil War). Our casualties were pretty low-level in the wars of choice, and what good would better preparation have done us in the Civil War? We would have just killed each other in greater numbers. We were at a point where better rifles were increasing the advantage of the defensive side in any battle. In 1864, the Civil War was starting to look like WWI would look. Thank goodness that was 1864 rather than 1861. In WWI, we were unprepared when the war finally sucked us in (when the war itself was nearly 3 years old), but our European allies and enemies had been prepared and frankly, it’s hard to see how it would have made that much of a difference, unless we’d had the foresight to develop and build tanks in advance of entering the war. And it’s hard to imagine the political will to keep a substantial military establishment after a century of the absence of any reason to do so. I’m going to skip past WWII for a moment to look at the Age of Preparation. What did it get us? It got us Korea and Vietnam, where our combined casualties for these two conflicts, taken together, are [on the order of our WWI casualties](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_military_casualties_of_war). It got us Iraq and Afghanistan, where our casualties were way lower, but our costs for each were in the trillions, and rather than reinstituting a draft, we threw the same relative handful of soldiers back into these wars, again and again and again. And that’s just the costs to **us**. The costs to the people whose lands we fought wars in have been far worse. How many died, how many exiled, in the wars themselves? How many killed and exiled as a result of the destabilizations we created? The estimates for deaths in the Indochina war (Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia) through 1975 range from 1.5M to 3.5M, and then of course another \>1M estimated dead in Cambodia’s killing fields. In Iraq, millions are still exiled, and while the estimates vary widely of Iraqis who lost their lives in the internecine combat that we enabled, a guess of somewhere in the hundreds of thousands seems safe. And Lord knows how many people died when we overthrew regimes from Mossadegh in Iran to Allende in Chile, or when we armed proxies in places like Angola. During the Cold War, there at least was a reason for a prepared military establishment to prevent the Soviet tanks from rumbling into western Europe, and no question but that that was a large-scale Good Thing. But Lord, did our preparation have dire consequences elsewhere. And in the post-Cold War era, when conventional military threats are few and far between, and the sorts of conflicts we seem to get involved in are those where we’re in over our heads, no matter how much preparation we can do, we’re wildly overprepared, in a very counterproductive way. The fact that we’ve got a big hammer tends to make too many of us believe that we can intervene successfully in situations where there are no usable tools for an outsider who can’t tell friend from foe and doesn’t even speak the language. I’d agree that our lack of preparation for WWII surely increased the toll of our dead substantially. But I think your case only applies to this one particular, rather than being a valid argument across our history. ETA: > [@](#): > > I know you think you are making a point about the dread military industrial complex (a warning given by a Republican President, ironically enough) A 1950s Republican, who in no way resembles any Republican politician now. To say that Ike is more like Obama than he is like Scott Walker should be pretty obvious. So I don’t think there’s any irony there. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [March 8, 2015, 2:57pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/28 "2015-03-08T14:57:11Z")
> [@JoseB](#): > > Slight hijack of the thread – Weren’t the Hunt Brothers (William Herbert and Nelson Bunker, the two sons of H.L. Hunt mentioned upthread) the ones who crashed and burned rather spectacularly when they tried (and failed) to corner the world market of silver in 1979 or 1980? Yes. ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2015, 1:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/29 "2015-03-09T13:45:02Z")
[QUOTE=RTFirefly] After the War of 1812 ended in 1814, we went for over a century without any wars that weren’t either wars of choice against lesser adversaries (Mexican War, Spanish-American War) or with ourselves (Civil War). Our casualties were pretty low-level in the wars of choice, and what good would better preparation have done us in the Civil War? We would have just killed each other in greater numbers. We were at a point where better rifles were increasing the advantage of the defensive side in any battle. In 1864, the Civil War was starting to look like WWI would look. Thank goodness that was 1864 rather than 1861. [/QUOTE] I disagree. Better preparation in logistics and battlefield medicine would have saved countless lives. The Union COULD have adopted and fielded a great number of Henry’s rifles, giving them a huge tactical advantage. Union soldiers were, unfortunately, forced to attempt to save back their pay to buy the rifles themselves…rifles that weren’t logistically supported by the Army who insisted we stuck to muzzle loaders. There were other similar examples of weapons the Union could have had but didn’t because of the attitude I mentioned up thread, examples that could have shortened the war and saved a lot of lives that were otherwise lost. > [@](#): > > In WWI, we were unprepared when the war finally sucked us in (when the war itself was nearly 3 years old), but our European allies and enemies had been prepared and frankly, it’s hard to see how it would have made that much of a difference, unless we’d had the foresight to develop and build tanks in advance of entering the war. And it’s hard to imagine the political will to keep a substantial military establishment after a century of the absence of any reason to do so. Again, I disagree. The first powered air plane flew in the US, and we COULD have been as advanced as any country by the time WWI happened. We weren’t. The US watched the war from the sidelines and did absolutely nothing to improve our own military, even when we started to lean towards joining the war. We didn’t even have a portable automatic rifle going into the war and had to rely on the French to provide one…one that was a total piece of shit. I should say we DID have one, invented in 1918…the BAR. We chose not to put it into full production, however. So, to me WWI is one of the consummate examples of the US not preparing and sending in our boys with little or no training (despite the fact we had years TOO up our training, even if we didn’t think we’d get dragged into WWI ourselves), crappy weapons (same) and no preparation. > [@](#): > > I’m going to skip past WWII for a moment to look at the Age of Preparation. What did it get us? It got us Korea and Vietnam, where our combined casualties for these two conflicts, taken together, are on the order of our WWI casualties. It got us Iraq and Afghanistan, where our casualties were way lower, but our costs for each were in the trillions, and rather than reinstituting a draft, we threw the same relative handful of soldiers back into these wars, again and again and again. We were totally unprepared for Korea. Post WWII we had pretty much disbanded the majority of the Army except for garrison duty. We had shelved most of the Army weapons development (we DID spend some money on the Air Force and our nuke program, which did us a hell of a lot of good when we had to send troops to Korea). The troops sent to Korea were mostly green, using weapons dragged from storage from WWII (so, little to no development since the war and all surplus) and, again, no real training. Vietnam was only slightly better. It certainly wasn’t The Age Of Development, since again we sent in our troops poorly trained and poorly equipped with weapons either old or untested and ones the troops weren’t trained on very well (look up the early history of the M-16 and what it’s issues were). To me, the Age of Development started when we finally went to an all volunteer force without conscription and really started to take this stuff seriously wrt training, logistics and weapons development. Seems to me that, though the ‘wars’ we have fought haven’t always been wise (Gulf War II, perhaps Afghanistan), what they DO show is that when we are better prepared and have spent the time and money to develop the weapons, at a minimum US casualties are much less. Training for war and development weapons is neither good nor bad. It’s how you use your military that determines that. But you can get a bunch of your own people killed in a just cause as easily as getting them killed in a non-just one. Myself, I’d rather spend the money up front than US blood on the back end, which, to me is exactly what we did, over and over again throughout our history. From the War of 1812 until after Vietnam is was the defining characteristic of the US and it’s military…to send in ill prepared and trained boys with crappy equipment to fight and die while we once again relearned the skills to fight and developed the weapons to do so. As soon as the war was over, we, of course, cut back massively, stopped development and got things ready so we could reset the cycle in a decade or two. We did this until recently, and I’m all for keeping our current trend of being prepared. It’s up to us to make sure the folks who decide to pull the trigger aren’t idiotic assholes with political agendas. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2015, 3:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/30 "2015-03-09T15:04:48Z")
> [@RTFirefly](#): > > And that’s just the costs to **us**. The costs to the people whose lands we fought wars in . . . Oh, you know that doesn’t count! Nobody ever talks about it! How many Vietnamese names are carved on the black wall?! ---
**Author:** ![XT](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/xt/32/456_2.png) [@XT](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/XT)\ **Post date:** [March 9, 2015, 5:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/31 "2015-03-09T17:09:15Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > Oh, you know that doesn’t count! Nobody ever talks about it! How many Vietnamese names are carved on the black wall?! How many American names are carved on Vietnamese war memorials? About the same, I’d guess, since the memorials are to honor the dead of the country in question, not all war dead from everyone who participated. I believe that other countries involved have war memorials to Vietnam…how many Americans do you expect are on their memorials? ---
**Author:** ![mack](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/b19c9b/32.png) [@mack](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mack)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2015, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/32 "2015-03-11T21:53:21Z")
> [@Robert163](#): > > I was once told during a conversation on world events that there was a pair of brothers or business partners very similar to the Koch bothers. I don’t remember if it was in WWII, before, or after but basically they worked behind the scenes with funding and particularly propaganda, basically forming the model that is being used today. Has anyone heard of this? My first thought was the Dulles brothers, John Foster (sec. of state) and Allen (director of CIA). They weren’t mega-rich bankrollers but they were deep in the events of the day. ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [March 11, 2015, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/33 "2015-03-11T21:54:33Z")
> [@mack](#): > > My first thought was the Dulles brothers, John Foster (sec. of state) and Allen (director of CIA). They weren’t mega-rich bankrollers but they were deep in the events of the day. that may be it… ---
**Author:** ![Dr.Conrad\_Shadowdale](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/7ea924/32.png) [@Dr.Conrad\_Shadowdale](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Dr.Conrad_Shadowdale)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2015, 1:48am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/34 "2015-03-12T01:48:16Z")
You might be thinking about the Brown brothers, who financed LBJ’s political career and, as repayment, were awarded oodles of government contracts through the years. Their company, Brown & Root, is called KBR today. ---
**Author:** ![Robert163](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/4af34b/32.png) [@Robert163](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Robert163)\ **Post date:** [March 12, 2015, 1:52am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/35 "2015-03-12T01:52:19Z")
> [@Dr.Conrad\_Shadowdale](#): > > You might be thinking about the Brown brothers, who financed LBJ’s political career and, as repayment, were awarded oodles of government contracts through the years. Their company, Brown & Root, is called KBR today. I think it was the Dulles brothers but I will check brown also ---
**Author:** ![foolsguinea](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/foolsguinea/32/14751_2.png) [@foolsguinea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/foolsguinea)\ **Post date:** [March 16, 2015, 5:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/36 "2015-03-16T05:07:43Z")
The Dulles brothers were who I thought of. Served in the Eisenhower administration, helped steer USA foreign policy into a full successor/continuation of what had been UK foreign policy before Mother England lost the Empire. But I don’t think that’s what the OP describes. ---
**Author:** ![gwenaelle1](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/90db22/32.png) [@gwenaelle1](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/gwenaelle1)\ **Post date:** [April 25, 2015, 1:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/37 "2015-04-25T13:24:40Z")
The Koch brothers are choir boys compared to the Dulles brothers. The Dulles were way more powerful and crooked than the Koch brothers. ---
**Author:** ![Jackmannii](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/jackmannii/32/311_2.png) [@Jackmannii](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Jackmannii)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2015, 8:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/38 "2015-04-29T20:22:46Z")
> [@BrainGlutton](#): > > No, Japan was not acting rationally. Japan was acting out of (perceived) desperation Well, the Japanese made the rational (to their way of thinking) deduction that after one crushing blow, the weak and unwarlike Americans would sue for peace, giving Japan a free hand in Asia. So arguably Japan was acting out of miscalculation, bad intelligence and stupidity, but they weren’t irrational. :dubious: ---
**Author:** ![Simplicio](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/c37758/32.png) [@Simplicio](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Simplicio)\ **Post date:** [April 29, 2015, 9:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/39 "2015-04-29T21:23:04Z")
> [@gwenaelle1](#): > > The Koch brothers are choir boys compared to the Dulles brothers. The Dulles were way more powerful and crooked than the Koch brothers. Yea, I’m not sure there’s much similarity. The Dulles were lawyers and career diplomats from a middle class background who between them held several important positions in the US gov’t they used to directly influence foreign policy. The Kochs inherited their fathers business, and used that wealth to fund a bunch of outside rightwing think tanks and PACs to influence politicians to their desired (generally, domestic) policy goals. They were both influential conservatives (and, I guess, both pairs of brothers), but they came from different backgrounds, used different methods and pursued different ends. So it seems a stretch to say the Dulles were “very similar to the Koch bothers”. ---
**Author:** ![ralph124c](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/8797f3/32.png) [@ralph124c](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ralph124c)\ **Post date:** [April 30, 2015, 3:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209/40 "2015-04-30T15:36:27Z")
Kennedy was a master manipulator. He paid reporters (like Arthur Krock, Steward Allsop) to write nice articles about him. He was determined that one of his sons become president, and bought influence from politicians to pave the way for this. he also opposed American intervention in WWII. Hi biggest propaganda coup was selling his family as wholesome ans 'all american". As a propagandist, he was a big success. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-was-a-1940s-or-1950-version-of-koch-brothers/714209.md?page=1)