“[We] tried to sit next to Ted to see what he’s like, but he would only sit there for five, 15 seconds, then just get up and go,” McIntosh said. “He would not have anything to do with us.”
But other students recalled Kaczynski being far less socially withdrawn.
John V. Federico ’62, a resident of Eliot House, recalled sitting at the same table with Kaczynski from time to time.
“He was very quiet, but personable,” Federico said. “He would enter into the discussions maybe a little less so than most...but he was certainly friendly. He was younger, and he seemed to be on the shy side, so you needed to make some effort to draw him in. But he could do that.”
Already somewhat distant from other students, Kaczynski seemed to have hinted to his suitemates of his future self-sufficient seclusion in Lincoln, Mont.
“I remember Ted explaining something once on Montana,” Persons said. “He said his father used to take him and his brother camping and taught him advanced outdoor survival skills, which may explain why he was able to live in Montana for so long successfully.”
BECOMING THE BOMBER
After graduating in 1962, Kaczynski chose graduate school and a university job, but only ten years after leaving Harvard he had physically isolated himself from the rest of the world, marking a transition that would set him on the path to the creation of the Unabomber.
Kaczynski earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan, becoming an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley in 1967 before suddenly resigning two years later.
In 1971, he moved into a secluded cabin in Lincoln, Mont., intending to use survival skills to become self-sufficient. But the industrialization and development around his rural retreat would lead him to begin a string of mail bombings.
Over the course of more than a decade of investigation, the FBI dubbed the anonymous terrorist the “Unabomber,” a reference to his targeting of universities and airlines.
By 1995, Kaczynski outlined his call for revolution against industrial society in a 50-page essay, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” threatening further bombings if this “Unabomber Manifesto” remained unpublished.
“The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race,” Kaczynski wrote in the first line of the Manifesto, published anonymously in The Washington Post and The New York Times in September 1995.
After Kaczynski’s brother, David Kaczynski, read the Manifesto, he began to suspect that his brother was the Unabomber. David Kaczynski turned samples of his brother’s other writings in to the FBI, leading to an arrest on April 3, 1996.
Kaczynski currently serves a life sentence without possibility of parole in a federal supermax prison in Florence, Colo.
—Staff writer David Song can be reached at davidsong@college.harvard.edu.