Product Description

From brilliant scholar to serial killer: was Ted Kaczynski mad? Or is he a mirror to our times?

On the basis of exhaustive research and much previously unpublished material, Alston Chase presents a radically new interpretation of the infamous Unabomber. He projects Kaczynski's life against the backdrop of the cold war, when the prospect of nuclear conflict generated on college campuses a fear of technology and a culture of despair. On those same campuses, federal agencies enlisted psychologists in a search for technologies of mind control and encouraged ethically questionable experiments on unwitting students.

Chase's gripping account follows Kaczynski from an unhappy adolescence in Illinois to Harvard University-where Kaczynski absorbed the ideas that would eventually surface in his famous Unabomber Manifesto-to graduate school, and finally to the edge of the wilderness in Montana, where he put his unthinkable plans into action.

This is a cautionary tale about modern evil, and the conditions that provoked Kaczynski's alienation remain in place. Paradoxically, they may be about to get worse, as the war on terrorism replaces the cold war in American policy and imagination. 16 pages of b/w photographs.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #560988 in Books
• Published on: 2003-03
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 352 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Chase adds an important element to our understanding of the infamous Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. Part of what made Kaczynski an iconic figure after his arrest in 1996 for 16 mail bombings (resulting in three deaths) between 1978 and 1995 was his unusual background as a highly gifted, Harvard-educated mathematician. While the media found comfort in writing him off as a mental case, more remarkable was how seemingly typical Kaczynski was. Bucking the conventional wisdom, Chase (In a Dark Wood) identifies Kaczynski as a victim more of the anxious and contradictory Cold War 1950s than of the incendiary 1960s. With a background strikingly similar to Kaczynski's-including both a Harvard degree and self-imposed exile in Montana-Chase is in a unique position to probe the underlying tensions that led Kaczynski to commit dispassionate murder in the name of ideals. Chase persuasively isolates the turning point in his subject's years at Harvard, "where lasting human relations are more rare than championship football teams." In Cambridge he faced the typical Harvard pressures but, more importantly, was a subject of three years' worth of what many will agree were wildly irresponsible psychological experiments led by maverick psychology pioneer Henry A. Murray. While the conclusions Chase draws are unimpeachable, his description of the fateful experiments feels truncated, no doubt because some records remain sealed. Chase's disenchanted indictment of academia (represented here by Harvard) as lackey to the military-industrial complex is all the more compelling for the author's unruffled sense of perspective. With its unusual emphasis and sometimes surprisingly personal tone, this may become the definitive Kaczynski volume. 16 pages of photos not seen by PW.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
Chase, who, like Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski, graduated from Harvard and fled academe for the Montana wilderness, here offers a new slant on the triple murderer and doctor of philosophy. According to the author, the philosophical roots of Kaczynski's anti-industrialism began with Harvard's curriculum in the late 1950s. Chase writes that it cultivated the view, later to be called cultural or moral relativism, that democratic society and its institutions were sheer power relations and bereft of intrinsic value. Chase then sets forth the etymology, so to speak, of the killer's more particular thoughts, concluding that Kaczynski was a cherry picker among quite old and common execrations of technology. Tying in the killer's personal rages, Chase suggests that social awkwardness and participation in a traumatizing psychological experiment (led by the unorthodox psychologist Henry A. Murray) underlay Kaczynski's exaltation in planning and "justifying" his crimes. It takes an intellectual to think like that, and Chase astutely and provocatively delineates Kaczynski's metamorphosis into a Raskolnikov. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Book Info
Chase presents a radically new interpretation of the infamous Unabomber. He projects Ted Kaczynski's life against the backdrop of the cold war, when the prospect of nuclear conflict generated on college campuses a fear of technology and a culture of despair.

Customer Reviews

Interesting - with lots of background info
the book "harvard and the unabomber" addresses several interesting issues that many rebellious intellectuals face. Among them - the desire of some to move to remote places like Montana, their issues with poor career prospects there, the double standards that many of them possess when they attack "the system", their issues with emotivism and moral relativism, and their skepticism of the moral legitimacy of authority. It also addresses the schism in academia over the question of whether a core curriculum should be put into place, and whether the said curriculum should inculcate moral standards in the students or not. It also addresses the fact that a Harvard degree is not necessarily a guarantee of success - that many Harvard graduates end up as nobodies.

Those are incidental, of course, to the main topic of the book, which is how these themes have influenced the Unabomber.

No smoking gun for the creation of a domestic terrorist, but important issues and questions are raised
Author Alston Chase is a contemporary of Unabomber Ted Kaczynski. Both attended Harvard in the late 1950's, both worked as university professors and, coincidentally, both retired to seclusion in Montana. Chase originally set out to write a book about the legacy of 1960's America. His research on Kaczynski revealed that contrary to the media's snap judgment, Kaczynski was not a product of his 1960's time at Berkley. The Unabomber manifesto is, in fact, rooted in 1950's Cold War ideology and the teachings of liberal arts colleges such as Harvard during that decade. Chase writes, "Once they had made up their minds about Kaczynski--whether deciding that he is insane, a profound philosopher, a misguided ideologist, or a representative of the sixties--many people lost interest in him. University scholars all too willing to devote seminars to such pop cultural doss as the Grateful Dead and Star Trek have virtually ignored the manifesto, producing just two articles on it since its appearance."

In the first half of the book, Chase provides a chronology of Kaczynski's crimes and his never-ending quest for a more powerful, more deadly bomb. Chase sheds lights on the futility of the FBI search and the numerous red herrings Kaczynski set our for law enforcement. The media, cut off from Kaczynski's cabin, were quick to label his messy and unkempt, when in reality he was meticulously organized. He kept a standard mountain tradition of not wasting water bathing while doing heavy winter work, and for that he was labeled a strange, unclean hermit. The media interviewed people Kaczynski didn't like, and they labeled him a misanthrope. When Chase interviewed Kaczynski's friends in the local Montana town, however, they remembered him as friendly and intelligent, if somewhat reserved. And the desolate cabin in the woods? It was within hearing distance of a highway, and Kaczynski had enough neighbors that he managed to keep up several boundary and land use disputes.

Chase's thesis is that Kaczynski was forever scarred by a series of intense psychological experiments he participated in as a Harvard undergraduate student. Researcher Henry A. Murray, a veteran of DoD psychology experimentation conducted highly unethical multi-year studies on a group of students. The subjects were deceived about the nature and length of the study, which aimed to discover their fundamental life philosophy and place them in highly stressful interrogations to observe their reactions to demeaning, belittling questioning. Chase provides a never-before-seen look at the experiments Harvard had tried to seal, but he never makes an ironclad case that this study was the linchpin for the creation of the Unabomber.

The book also exposes a dark side of the US military involvement in funding academic and psychological studies in the 1950's. During that time, the government wanted to fight the Cold War with propaganda and psychological manipulation. Murray's Harvard experiments descended from his military work on these subjects. By the mid-1940's a quarter of all US psychologists were serving the US military, and in the 1950's, the CIA was directly and indirectly (via dummy foundations) funding a significant portion of academic research in psychology.

Chase's book serves two important purposes--(1) revealing the true Ted Kaczynski, a brilliant and disturbed man who was judged quickly and incorrectly by the media and (2) revealing the military's significant influence on two decades of psychological research in the U.S. Chase doesn't have a smoking gun for the creation of a domestic terrorist, but he probes previously unexplored and unpublished areas in his search for answers about the genesis of Ted Kaczynski as the Unabomber.

The Formative Influences on a Killer.
_Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist_ by Alston Chase, published in 2003, is an attempt to explain the motivations behind the reign of terror unleashed on the American people by Ted Kaczynski (dubbed "the Unabomber" by the FBI). Kaczynski was a brilliant man with a 170 I.Q., a graduate of Harvard University, and at one time a professor of mathematics; however, he left his career in mathematics to go live out in the wilderness of Montana. Feeling increasingly alienated by industrial society (what he refers to in his _Manifesto_ as "the system") and increasingly troubled by the loss of "wild nature" to modernization, Kaczynski felt that he was left with no way out but to unleash a reign of terror upon those who he believed were furthering the technological system. Ironically, much of Kaczynski's justification for his murders, can be found in the writings of more mainstream sociologists. A constant theme that recurs in sociological literature (the very literature that Kaczynski himself read and studied) is the sense of alienation and anomie brought about by the disruption of traditional ways of life through technological advance. Further, the modern science of ecology tells us that man has caused untold amounts of harm to nature and has disrupted the wilderness, perhaps irrepairably. Kaczynski who for years had felt himself an outsider to modern society, first as a high I.Q. student and intellectual in a largely blue collar community, then as a student from a blue collar background among upper class Harvard students, and finally as a research mathematician (a field well-known for extremes in introversion), came to identify with the environmental movement in part because of his love for the wilderness. As a "green anarchist", Kaczynski saw little hope for modern industrial society and with each technological advance saw further dangers brought to humanity and the wild. This led him to take extreme measures against those who he believed were furthering "the system". This book delves into the influences on Kaczynski's thinking: the influence of Harvard University and its curriculum (which maintained that judgment was impossible and that values were meaningless), the influence of the Cold War, the CIA, and psychological experimentation on distorting Kaczynski's underlying perceptions of reality, and ultimately the influence of the 1960s and the environmental movement. As the author repeatedly states, "bad men do what good men dream of", and for those of us who have often felt disillusioned and disaffected with modernity and "the system", there is a certain sense of "There but for the grace of God go I", when we encounter the case of Kaczynski. There is also a sense of embarrassment felt by many who find that the very ideas they have been advocating are taken to their logical extreme by an individual like Kaczynski. Modern technological society has left many feeling profoundly alienated, and the loss of wilderness and traditional ways of life has only furthered this alienation. Those who champion "the system" and naively accept the idea of "progress" frequently scoff at such notions as "primitivism"; however, they then refuse to see the manifold harm that has been wrought upon nature and society by their own advances. It must be said though that while this book does appear to be somewhat sympathetic to Kaczynski and his ideas and way of life, it ultimately must not fall short in condemning his methods for attaining his goals as cowardly and futile. Further, I believe the author should not so readily dismiss the notion of "mental illness" in the case of Kaczynski. Kaczynski was obviously an extremely introverted and hyper-sensitive (he feared loud noises for example) individual whose inability to fit into modern society was readily apparent. As a society we have no other way of dealing with such people than to label them as "mentally ill". Further, it seems likely that there is some sort of underlying biological basis for such tendencies; though, the extent to which this biological basis operates is difficult to determine.

The author begins by discussing the crimes of the Unabomber. Noting his bomb-making skills and also noting some of the obscure influences on his ideas. For example, Kaczynski was obviously a fan of the novelist Joseph Conrad (a fellow Pole), and particularly enjoyed his _The Secret Agent_. Kaczynski signed his manifesto with the epithet "FC", which may have been taken from _The Secret Agent_. Kaczynski also advocated the "scientific method" and philosophically was a rationalist and strict positivist, though he ironically saw science and technology as destructive forces. Other instances of Kaczynski's intellectual games, include the recurrence of the word "wood" in his destructive acts. The author also explains various aspects of Kaczynski's "mountain man" existence which were distorted by the media. For example, Kaczynski was portrayed by the media as a "loner" (though he was known and liked by a few individuals who lived near him) and a "slob" (though his cabin was as neat as a pin).

Following this, the author turns to the influence of Harvard on Ted Kaczynski. The author notes the fact that Kaczynski was from a blue collar community, in which he was an outsider both as a consequence of his high intelligence and strong mathematical aptitude and because his family were intellectuals. Kaczynski subsequently attended Harvard, where he remained largely alienated. At Harvard, Kaczynski faced a General Curriculum which de-emphasized the underpinnings of Western Civilization and Christian values instead promoting materialistic nihilism. Further, at the time the Cold War was raging, so intelligent individuals like Kaczynski were forced into mathematics and scientific related fields (something which Kaczynski always held against his parents). It was while he was at Harvard that Kaczynski participated in a psychological experiment directed by Henry A. Murray (who was influential in the early CIA). This experiment sought to assess alienation and may have promoted a breakdown in the mind of Kaczynski. At the time, the CIA was engaging in many reckless policies, including unlawful and unethical experimentation with LSD and other drugs and mind control (something that Kaczynski would make note of in his _Manifesto_). Kaczynski left Harvard to become a graduate student at Michigan and then a professor at Berkeley before dropping out of mainstream society and returning to the wilderness.

In terms of philosophical influences, Kaczynski was a voracious reader. Principally though his writings seem to be distortions and perversions of the ideas of radical localists and anarchists such as Jacques Ellul (particularly _The Technological Society_) and E. F. Schumacher. Kaczynski also was influenced by primitivism, and the author distinguishes between different kinds of primitivism in the writings of sociologists and in Kaczynski himself. Kaczysnki's thinking also appeared to resonate with radical environmentalists such as the Earth Liberation Front, EarthFirst!, Edward Abbey (writer of _The Monkey Wrench Gang_), and anarcho-primitivist John Zerzan.

It is an unfortunate and sad fact that Kaczynski found himself so alienated by society that he chose to lash out as he did. His methods of attacking the system were indeed cowardly and deplorable, and ultimately only resulted in the deaths of many innocents. He achieved little by way of halting progress or restoring the wilderness which he loved so much. This book is a good book in attempting to understand the motivations of Kaczynski. Ultimately to prevent such atrocities in the future, it will be necessary for society to rethink itself, for people to be less greedy, and to achieve a viable alternative to modern materialistic decline. Whether or not such a reversal can be accomplished at all remains to be seen.