David H. Koch's career as a politician was hardly illustrious, beginning and ending with a quixotic 1980 bid for the vice presidency, when Koch and Ed Clark, his running mate on the Libertarian Party ticket, tried to persuade voters that Ronald Reagan would leave the nation careening toward socialism.
But few Americans have had an impact on the political system to rival that of David Koch and his brother Charles.
David Koch, who died Friday at 79 after a long battle with prostate cancer, was the aide de camp to Charles, his older brother, as the two leveraged the family fortune, one of the nation's largest, to push American politics to the right. Charles Koch, 83, announced his brother's death in a statement.
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