Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist [Hardcover]

Alston Chase (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 2003

Alston Chase presents an intepretation of the infamous Unabomber. He projects Ted Kaczynski's life against the sinister background of the Cold War, when the prospect of nuclear conflict generated a fear of technology and a culture of despair on American college campuses. On these same campuses, federal agencies enlisted psychologists in a covert search for technologies of mind control and encouraged ethically questionable experiments on unwitting students. Chase's account follows Kaczynski from an unhappy adolescence in Illinois to Harvard University, to postgraduate study and to the edge of the wilderness in Montana, where he put his unthinkable plans into action. His reign of terror is rendered in detail and interweaved with this narrative is the chilling counterpoint of Kaczynki's coded journal entries on the efficiacy of materials and techniques - the stark record of a killer's learning curve. A cautionary tale about modern evil, the conditions that provoked Kaczynski's alienation remain in place and may be getting worse as the War on Terrorism replaces the Cold War.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 352 pages
• Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition (March 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393020029
• ISBN-13: 978-0393020021
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (23 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #459,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Absorbing & Careful Analysis Of The Unabomber's Genesis!, July 16, 2003

By 

Barron Laycock "Labradorman" (Temple, New Hampshire United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (Hardcover)

As an academic whose students teasingly accused of being the Unabomber a couple of times in the late 1990s myself, after reading the manifesto in the fall of 1996 I realized both why they were teasing me and how many of the perspectives and ideas regarding the nature of modern society and its impact on our experience of reality we shared. And while his own particular interpretation of the effects and influences of modern technological society varied in substantial detail from my own regarding the specific mechanics by which it operated and its influence and effects, I was drawn by what I considered to be the mysterious forces that would force someone with such an obviously passionate love for the environment and the earth to commit random acts of murder in its name.

The media, of course, dismissed the manifesto as the irrational ramblings of a mad man, which to an untrained journalist's mind, anyone willing to murder complete strangers must surely be. Well, not necessarily. Terrorists, for example, may be immoral and horrific, but they are necessarily insane. They may just be committed to the particular cause to the degree they are willing to use any means to reach the desired end. And indeed, if the manifesto was the work of a mad man, there seemed to be some method to it. I found some answers from an interesting article written by Sales Kirkpatrick, a fellow self-confessed Neo-Luddite who feared the dehumanizing consequences of the emerging postindustrial society. He critiqued the manifesto, and in so doing helped many to better appreciate how this individual had slipped over the edge into homicide and madness. This book, "Harvard And the Unabomber" provides us with an excellent exploration that helps to make the connections between Theodore "Ted" Kaczynski's formative years, especially those spent at Harvard as an undergraduate student, on the one hand, and his intriguing albeit dogmatic treatise on what ails modern man.

The author, Alston Chase, shares many common experiences and perspectives with Kaczynski; both are Harvard graduates, academics who fled the academy for the wilderness early in their careers, and both of whom retreated to the mountains of Montana for reclusive relief. Chase spins a convincing and systematic portrait of how the intellectual philosophy in vogue at Harvard in those years led Kaczynski in the specific direction of his angry philippic against the evils of the modern world. He also, quite intriguingly, details how immersion in some highly confidential and also quite controversial psychological studies at Harvard may have contributed to his deteriorating mental health and contributed mightily to his generally dyspeptic and cynical view of scientists in general and psychologists in particular. In Chase's view, Kaczynski is very much a victim of the society of the general anxieties related to the suffocating atmosphere of the Cold War and of the unusual pressures the unorthodox Us Army sponsored psychological experiments he participated in during his Harvard years.

Finally, Chase is highly critical of the way in Which Harvard yielded to the unseemly and unethical treatment the students were subjected to in order to give the Army the information they had contracted for. Given Kaczynski's intellect, he likely then generalized from his experience while enduring the experiments, drawing some frighteningly dangerous conclusions about the nature of modern society as a result. This is a worthwhile and very carefully written book, one not disposed to easy answers and one that takes great pains to be both thorough and fair. It is well worth the reading. Enjoy!

18 of 21 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Thought Provoking but Not Convincing, June 23, 2003

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Scott Snyder (Northern California) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (Hardcover)

This is a difficult book to review without getting into a deep conversation on all matters philosophical, cultural and personal.

This is the story of Theodore Kaczynski, and it is fraught with irony. Here's A Ph.D. in mathematics with a highly scientific mind who attacks science with science (in this way he could be labeled a "metaphysician"); a man who would destroy people to save them from "the system"; a student of the humanities (literature, languages, philosophy, history) who acts inhumanely; a loner who would rather be in the wilds of Montana but now finds himself in the belly of the beast he so hated. His dissertation was on "Boundary Functions" but it seems that for all his breakthrough thinking, he malfunctioned at the moral boundary.

Finally, here is a man who dismisses morals as "mere" emotions that are irrational and without an objective, scientific foundation, who at the same time was driven by the emotions of rage, anger and revenge. If emotions and morals are invalid in the service of humanity, certainly they are invalid in the pursuit of destruction.

Alston wants to place a lot of the responsibility for the Kaczynski's anger on the General Education curriculum then taught at Harvard. I thought it strange that the books and authors Chase mentions are books by my idols! But I draw very different lessons from the works of Dostoyevsky, Melville and Mumford than does Chase. There is a lot that can be said about the Gen Ed curriculum, but based on an intense personal experience with most of the writers mentioned here, I know them to embrace humanitarian ideals and to move beyond despair. To lay the causative influence of the Unabomber here is mistaken.

The author asks: "Is intelligence evil?" Answer: No, of course not. Intelligence is a tool. Chase gives us only half of the picture when he lists all the tyrants and genocidal killers who are intelligent without also listing all the brilliant people who benefited humanity - whether that be in science, the humanities, medicine or religion. The very question is dangerous, for the anti-intellectual class would pick up on that immediately and march forth under this banner that ignorance is bliss, that the intelligent are wicked, that books should be burned, etc. etc.

Then there is Henry Murray. So what if his favorite book is Moby Dick and he has interesting nocturnal trysts with his assistant. Odd, but not evil. As far as the "dyad" is concerned, I wasn't there; but it doesn't sound any worse than the standard fraternity or military initiatory hazing. True, the CIA was up to some really strange and evil things that violated the Nuremberg Code it its investigation of mind control techniques, but the dyad does not seem to be one of those. It did use deceit - which is unethical - but otherwise I was surprised by how non-horrific the interrogations were - as presented here.

Chase like Kaczynski seems not to trust psychologists. Perhaps with good reason, since the court appointed psychologist seem to discover whatever the court wants them to discover about Ted's mental state. For the final analysis of Ted's personality, Chase turns to the Enneagram. And the Enneagram is presented as the final word on the type of person Kaczynski is. This is pseudo-science, and the author knows it. While the Enneagram seems to describe Ted rather well, it is hardly scientific. But perhaps that is just as well.

All in all, "Harvard and the Unabomber" was an absorbing read. It touched me in a deeply personal way. As a history of the Unabomber case, it's pretty good. As an analysis of the root causes to explain, "what exactly happened to Ted?" - I think the author injects far too much of his own story into this analysis and doesn't support many of his theories as to why Gen Ed, Harvard or Henry Murray caused Kaczynski to terrorize the system.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars No smoking gun for the creation of a domestic terrorist, but important issues and questions are raised, June 15, 2007

By 

Jessica Lux (Rosamond, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Harvard and the Unabomber: The Education of an American Terrorist (Hardcover)

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.