In June of 1995, the Washington Post and the New York Times received a 35,000-word manifesto that began: "The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race." The highly articulate document was written by a man the FBI called the Unabomber, and he was threatening to send a bomb to an unspecified location unless one of the newspapers published it.
This was no idle threat. Over 17 years, the Unabomber had been responsible for 16 package bombs that killed three people and injured dozens more. One had been placed on an American Airlines passenger plane; had the bomb detonated properly, it could have killed everyone aboard. The FBI and the US attorney general recommended publication – partly in the hopes that someone might be able to identify its author. Unbeknownst to them, someone already had: that summer, Linda Patrik had sat her husband David Kaczynski down and, to his shock, asked if he thought it possible that his brother Ted was the Unabomber.
Remarkably, Linda had never met Ted Kaczynski. For years he’d been living in a cabin in Montana, having little to no contact with the family. Linda’s suspicions were based largely on the media’s description of the manifesto as a critique of modern technology and what little she knew of Ted – namely, that he was obsessed with technology’s negative effects and that he was mentally unstable.
Following publication of the manifesto that September, David and Linda pored over letters Ted had written to the family, comparing the writing. Eventually, David had to admit that his wife might be right. Ted was David’s only sibling. Their relationship had been fraught – Ted could be distant and cruel – but not without love.
Two possibilities
Imagine the dilemma. For David, it wasn’t only the possibility that his brother was a murderer and that it was up to him to turn him in. There was also a chance that David was wrong and that, given Ted’instability, any attempted arrest might result in a Waco-style siege and his (innocent) brother dead. But if Ted was guilty, David might, in effect, be sending his brother to the electric chair.
When David went to the FBI with his suspicions, they promised to keep his identity a secret. Ted was arrested in April 1996. Within days, a leak had turned David into media fodder. A latenight comedian called him the "Una-snitch", while the New York Times deemed him a moral hero.
It was reported that during all the weeks of pre-trial hearings David attended – a process that would end in his brother’s guilty plea and a sentence of life without parole – Ted never acknowledged him. They haven’t spoken since. Nor would Ted speak to his mother on her deathbed. His diagnosis (one he did not accept) was paranoid schizophrenia.
Ted Kaczynski was a prodigy. Raised in Illinois by left-leaning blue-collar parents, he attended Harvard at the age of 16, a move that might have been “the beginning of the end for Ted”. Not only was he unprepared developmentally and psychologically, but while at Harvard he was enrolled in a psychological experiment that would these days be deemed ethically indefensible.
The experiment was overseen by Henry Murray, who during the second World War had worked for the precursor of the CIA developing interrogation techniques for use on POWs. It involved the calculated humiliation of subjects in order to study how gifted young men would react to aggressive assaults on their belief systems. Ted was a subject for three years.
After earning his doctorate at the University of Michigan, Ted was appointed assistant professor of mathematics at UC Berkeley when he was 25. Two years later, in 1969, he abruptly resigned. Ted had become concerned about the erosion of human autonomy brought on by technology. Because much of technology is based on mathematics, he had decided to give up his career.
What followed was the gradual, and then total, withdrawal from family and society, and the long campaign of violence targeting academics, scientists and businessmen.
David Kaczynski writes that the story that emerged from the drama of two brothers – "one bad, one good' " – was not only reductionist and trite, but also eliminated Linda's critical role. Every Last Tie reads partly as a tribute to the insight and fortitude his wife showed in identifying Ted as the Unabomber and supporting David through the hellish process of turning David in ("far from being the leader of a righteous quest for truth, I was a reluctant follower") and the ongoing experience of feeling "forever defined by the fate of being Ted Kaczynski's brother".
The Kaczynskis’ kinship is a cross to bear, but also a uniquely privileged position from which to report, which makes it all the more disappointing that the book David has produced is almost unerringly bland, as though it were written by a kindly and distant observer rather than someone who wrestled with tragic, unique, and compelling circumstances.
Reflective author
The author himself is not uninteresting; nor is he incapable of reflection or anger. He lived as a hermit in the desert for eight years as a young man, had been head of New Yorkers Against the Death Penalty, and served as director of a Tibetan monastery in Woodstock, New York.
But none of these experiences, which arose directly or indirectly from Ted’s life story, are fleshed out. Nor are the negotiations that led to Ted’s arrest. Instead, we get the two boys growing up, anecdotes about Ted’s early oddities, and a description of the family dynamics around the time of the manifesto’s publication.
Perhaps Every Last Tie should have been written sooner, before its author had made peace with the past. Perhaps a better editor would have pressed him to probe more deeply, to revisit the anguish of those years. A work of nonfiction such as this should be an investigation, one that feels active, rather than an exercise in unerring kindness.
Molly McCloskey is the author of Circles Around the Sun: In Search of a Lost Brother, published in paperback by Penguin
