A spokesman for the Federal Bureau of Prisons said Mr. Kaczynski was found unresponsive in his cell early in the morning. The bureau did not specify a cause, but three people familiar with the situation said he died by suicide.
Mr. Kaczynski traced a singular path in American life: lonely boy genius to Harvard-trained star of pure mathematics, to rural recluse, to notorious murderer, to imprisoned extremist.
In the public eye, he fused two styles of violence: the periodic targeting of the demented serial killer, and the ideological fanaticism of the terrorist.
After he was captured by about 40 F.B.I. agents in April 1996, Mr. Kaczynski’s particular ideology was less the subject of debate than the question of whether his crimes should be dignified with a rational motive to begin with.
Victims railed against commentators who took seriously a 35,000-word manifesto that he had written to justify his actions and evangelize the ideas that he claimed inspired them.
Psychologists involved in the trial saw his writing as evidence of schizophrenia. His lawyers tried to mount an insanity defense — and when Mr. Kaczynski rebelled and sought to represent himself in court, risking execution to do so, his lawyers said that that was yet further evidence of insanity.
For years before the manifesto was published, Mr. Kaczynski (pronounced kah-ZIN-skee) had no reputation beyond that of a twisted reveler in violence, picking victims seemingly at random, known only by a mysterious-sounding nickname with roots in the F.B.I.’s investigation into him: “the Unabomber.” It became widely publicized that some of his victims lost their fingers while opening a package bomb. Simply going through the mail prompted flickers of nervousness in many Americans.
After his arrest, Mr. Kaczynski’s extraordinary biography emerged. He had scored 167 on an I.Q. test as a boy and entered Harvard at 16. In graduate school, at the University of Michigan, he worked in a field of mathematics so esoteric that a member of his dissertation committee estimated that only 10 or 12 people in the country understood it. By 25, he was an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley.
Then he dropped out — not just from Berkeley, but from civilization. Starting in 1971 and continuing until his arrest, he lived in a shack he built himself in rural Montana. He forsook running water, read by the light of homemade candles, stopped filing federal tax returns and subsisted on rabbits.
Mr. Kaczynski’s manifesto — published jointly by The New York Times and The Washington Post in 1995 under the threat of continued violence — argued that damage to the environment and the alienating effects of technology were so heinous that the social and industrial underpinnings of modern life should be destroyed.
A vast majority of Americans determined that the Unabomber must be a psychopath the moment they heard of him, and while he was front-page news, his text did not generally find receptive readers outside a tiny fringe of the environmental movement. The term “Unabomber” entered popular discourse as shorthand for the type of brainy misfit who might harbor terrifying impulses.
Yet political change and the passage of time caused some to see Mr. Kaczynski in a new light. His manifesto accorded centrality to a healthy environment without mentioning global warming; it warned about the dangers of people becoming “dependent” on technology while making scant reference to the internet. To young people afflicted by social media anomie and fearful of climate doom, Mr. Kaczynski seemed to wield a predictive power that outstripped the evidence available to him. (...)
In June, The Times and The Washington Post received a 35,000-word manuscript. Citing a recommendation from the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice, the papers took the Unabomber’s offer. They split the cost of printing the essay, titled “Industrial Society and Its Future.” The Post distributed it online and as an eight-page supplement with the Sept. 19 print paper.
The manifesto claimed that the current organization of society gives “politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats” control over “the life-and-death issues of one’s existence.” That makes modern people depressed, unlike “primitive man,” who gained satisfaction from determining his own “life-and-death issues” and found “a sense of security” in what the Unabomber called “WILD nature.”
The Unabomber justified his murderous campaign on the grounds that it got “our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression.”
The unique circumstances of the manifesto’s distribution — William Finnegan, writing in The New Yorker, called it “the most extraordinary manuscript submission in the history of publishing” — prompted a debate about the ethics of disseminating a terrorist’s views. The publicity seemed vindicated, however, after news of the Unabomber reached Linda Patrik, an associate philosophy professor vacationing in Paris. At first jokingly, then insistently, she told her husband that the manifesto reminded her of what he had said about his eccentric loner brother.
Ms. Patrik’s husband was David Kaczynski. When he read the manifesto online, his “jaw dropped,” he later told The Times. The language was reminiscent of letters Ted had written to David. He soon reached out to the authorities.
Since 1979, an F.B.I. team that grew to more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts and others had gone through tens of thousands of leads without getting close to a real suspect. After hearing from David Kaczynski, the authorities zeroed in on a 10-by-12-foot wooden shack in rural Montana. The area was so remote that during an 18-day stakeout, one agent saw a cougar kill a deer.
The home had two windows set on high; they caught light but kept the home hidden. Agents could not see inside. On April 3, 1996, one of them shouted that a forest ranger needed help. A thin, shaggy man emerged from the cabin. He was grabbed from both sides.
A ‘Walking Brain’
Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. His father, Theodore Richard Kaczynski, worked at his family’s business, Kaczynski’s Sausages, a factory on the city’s South Side. His mother, Wanda (Dombek) Kaczynski, was a homemaker. They both descended from Polish immigrants in the Chicago area, dropped out of high school to work and obtained diplomas at night school. By all accounts they were gregarious, kind, diligent and thoughtful. Each sent letters to newspapers in support of progressive causes.
From boyhood, Teddy, as he was known, felt his brilliance to be alienating. When an aunt of his visited, his father asked, “Why don’t you have some conversation with your aunt?” Teddy replied, “Why should I? She wouldn’t understand me anyway.”
In school, he skipped two grades. He later blamed his parents for seeming to prize and cultivate his intellect over his emotions.
“He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality,” a high school classmate, Loren De Young, told The Times. “He was always regarded as a walking brain.”
During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.
According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”
by Alex Traub. NY Times | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. A complicated and troubled man. See also: Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber for years of attacks that killed 3, dies in prison at 81 (Yahoo News).]
The manifesto claimed that the current organization of society gives “politicians, corporation executives and remote, anonymous technicians and bureaucrats” control over “the life-and-death issues of one’s existence.” That makes modern people depressed, unlike “primitive man,” who gained satisfaction from determining his own “life-and-death issues” and found “a sense of security” in what the Unabomber called “WILD nature.”
The Unabomber justified his murderous campaign on the grounds that it got “our message before the public with some chance of making a lasting impression.”
The unique circumstances of the manifesto’s distribution — William Finnegan, writing in The New Yorker, called it “the most extraordinary manuscript submission in the history of publishing” — prompted a debate about the ethics of disseminating a terrorist’s views. The publicity seemed vindicated, however, after news of the Unabomber reached Linda Patrik, an associate philosophy professor vacationing in Paris. At first jokingly, then insistently, she told her husband that the manifesto reminded her of what he had said about his eccentric loner brother.
Ms. Patrik’s husband was David Kaczynski. When he read the manifesto online, his “jaw dropped,” he later told The Times. The language was reminiscent of letters Ted had written to David. He soon reached out to the authorities.
Since 1979, an F.B.I. team that grew to more than 150 full-time investigators, analysts and others had gone through tens of thousands of leads without getting close to a real suspect. After hearing from David Kaczynski, the authorities zeroed in on a 10-by-12-foot wooden shack in rural Montana. The area was so remote that during an 18-day stakeout, one agent saw a cougar kill a deer.
The home had two windows set on high; they caught light but kept the home hidden. Agents could not see inside. On April 3, 1996, one of them shouted that a forest ranger needed help. A thin, shaggy man emerged from the cabin. He was grabbed from both sides.
A ‘Walking Brain’
Theodore John Kaczynski was born in Chicago on May 22, 1942. His father, Theodore Richard Kaczynski, worked at his family’s business, Kaczynski’s Sausages, a factory on the city’s South Side. His mother, Wanda (Dombek) Kaczynski, was a homemaker. They both descended from Polish immigrants in the Chicago area, dropped out of high school to work and obtained diplomas at night school. By all accounts they were gregarious, kind, diligent and thoughtful. Each sent letters to newspapers in support of progressive causes.
From boyhood, Teddy, as he was known, felt his brilliance to be alienating. When an aunt of his visited, his father asked, “Why don’t you have some conversation with your aunt?” Teddy replied, “Why should I? She wouldn’t understand me anyway.”
In school, he skipped two grades. He later blamed his parents for seeming to prize and cultivate his intellect over his emotions.
“He was never really seen as a person, as an individual personality,” a high school classmate, Loren De Young, told The Times. “He was always regarded as a walking brain.”
During his imprisonment, Mr. Kaczynski copied his correspondence by hand and forwarded it to the University of Michigan’s Joseph A. Labadie Collection, an archive devoted to radical protest, which has amassed dozens of boxes of Kaczynskiana.
According to New York magazine, Mr. Kaczynski’s papers became one of the collection’s most popular offerings. In an interview with the magazine, Julie Herrada, the collection’s curator, declined to describe the people so intrigued by Mr. Kaczynski that they visit the library to look through his archive. She said just one thing: “Nobody seems crazy.”
by Alex Traub. NY Times | Read more:
Image: AP
[ed. A complicated and troubled man. See also: Ted Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber for years of attacks that killed 3, dies in prison at 81 (Yahoo News).]
