What Harvard Did to Ted Kaczynski

Kaczynski was accepted by Harvard in the spring of 1958; he was not yet 16 years old. One friend remembers urging Kaczynski's father, Turk, not to let the boy go, arguing, "He's too young, too immature, and Harvard too impersonal." But Turk wouldn't listen. "Ted's going to Harvard was an ego trip for him," the friend recalls.

Murray, a wealthy and blue-blooded New Yorker, was both a scientist and a humanist. Before the war he had been the director of the Harvard Psychological Clinic; during it, he served in the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the CIA, helping develop psychological screening tests for applicants and monitoring military experiments on brainwashing.

After the war Murray returned to Harvard, where he continued to refine techniques of personality assessment. By 1950 he had resumed studies on Harvard undergraduates that he had begun, in rudimentary form, before the war, titled Multiform Assessments of Personality Development Among Gifted College Men. The experiment in which Kaczynski participated was the last and most elaborate of these. In their postwar form these experiments focused on stressful interpersonal relations, designing confrontations akin to those mock interrogations he had helped to orchestrate for the OSS.

Kaczynski has said that he was "pressured into participating". His hesitation turned out to be sensible. Researchers gave the volunteers almost no information about the experiment in which they would participate. Each was simply asked to answer yes to the following question: "Would you be willing to contribute to the solution of certain psychological problems (parts of an on-going program of research in the development of personality), by serving as a subject in a series of experiments or taking a number of tests (average about 2 hours a week) through the academic year (at the current College rate per hour)?"

In fact it would never be clear what the "certain psychological problems" were. And the test that served as the centrepiece for this undertaking appears remarkably similar to the old OSS stress test. Students would be given the third degree. But whereas the OSS applicants must have known that enduring unpleasant interrogations could be part of their job, these students did not. The intent was to catch them by surprise, to deceive them, and to brutalise them. The students were led to believe that they would debate their philosophy of life with another student like themselves. In fact they were confronted by a well-prepared "stooge" - a lawyer.

When the subject arrived, he was escorted to a "brilliantly lighted room" and seated in front of a one-way mirror. A motion-picture camera recorded his every move and facial expression through a hole in the wall. Electrodes leading to machines that recorded his heart and respiratory rates were attached to his body....

 Was the multiform-assessments project intended, at least in part, to help the CIA determine how to test, or break down, an individual's ability to withstand interrogation? The writer Alexander Cockburn has asked whether the students might have been given the hallucinogenic drug LSD without their knowledge, possibly at the request of the CIA. By the late 50s, according to some, Murray had become quite interested in hallucinogenics, including LSD and psilocybin. And soon after Murray's experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way, in 1960, Timothy Leary returned to Harvard and, with Murray's blessing, began his experiments with psilocybin.

In his autobiography, Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to promoting hallucinogenic drugs, described Murray as "the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support."

It is clear that Murray's experiment deeply affected at least some of its subjects. Even 25 years later some recalled the unpleasantness. In 1987 Cringle remembered the "anger and embarrassment ... the glass partition ... the electrodes and wires running up our sleeves."

Likewise, 25 years later Drill still had "very vivid general memories of the experience ... I remember someone putting electrodes and blood pressure counter on my arm just before the filming ... [I] was startled by [my interlocutor's] venom ... I remember responding with unabating rage."

And 25 years later, Locust wrote: "I remember appearing one afternoon for a 'debate' and being hooked up to electrodes and sat in a chair with bright lights and being told a movie was being made ... I remember him attacking me, even insulting me, for my values, or for opinions I had expressed in my written material ... I remember being shocked by the severity of the attack, and I remember feeling helpless to respond . . . What is the point of this? They have deceived me, telling me there was going to be a discussion, when in fact there was an attack."

We don't know what effect this experiment may have had on Kaczynski. I did not have access to his records, and therefore cannot attest to his degree of alienation then. Kaczynski must certainly have been among the most vulnerable of Murray's experimental subjects - a point that the researchers seem to have missed. He was among the youngest and the poorest of the group. He may have come from a dysfunctional home.

As Kaczynski's college life continued, outwardly he seemed to be adjusting to Harvard. But inwardly he increasingly seethed. According to Sally Johnson, the forensic psychiatrist who examined Kaczynski, he began worrying about his health. He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls. 

I suppose it was harder on Kaczynski because he was smarter and younger. 

The Chicago Tribune obit is sad, almost to the point of bullying a dead person.  No mention of Kaczynski's treatment at Harvard either.

Ted Kaczynski was born May 22, 1942, in Chicago, the son of second-generation Polish Catholics — a sausage-maker and a homemaker. He played the trombone in the school band, collected coins and skipped the sixth and 11th grades.

The Chicago Tribune previously reported the Kaczynskis moved to southwest suburban Evergreen Park from Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood, partly to escape the danger of urban life. The boys’ father, Ted “Turk” Kaczynski, passed on his love of the outdoors to his sons.

[ A brother lost, a brotherhood found ]

When Ted Kaczynski was in 5th grade, he scored a 167 on an IQ test, well into genius territory. A school counselor told Kaczynski’s mother, Wanda, that her son could be “another Einstein.” In junior high school, he was correcting his algebra teacher. As he progressed academically, though, Ted withdrew further into books, and into himself. His intelligence only exacerbated his lack of social skills, the Tribune reported.

His high school classmates thought him odd, particularly after he showed a school wrestler how to make a mini-bomb that detonated during chemistry class.

At Evergreen Park Community High School in the late 1950s, the Tribune reported later that classmates recalled Ted Kaczynski as a member of a group of kids referred to as “the briefcase boys,” because they carried their textbooks in briefcases, which even back then was considered socially awkward.

Likewise, Harvard classmates recalled him as a lonely, thin boy with poor personal hygiene and a room that smelled of spoiled milk, rotting food and foot powder.

After graduate studies at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, he got a job teaching math at the University of California at Berkeley but found the work difficult and quit abruptly. In 1971, he bought a 1½-acre parcel about 4 miles outside of Lincoln and built a cabin there without heating, plumbing or electricity.

He learned to garden, hunt, make tools and sew, living on a few hundred dollars a year.

His parents later moved to Lombard and the Tribune reported Kaczynski left his cabin in Montana in the late 1970s and started making bombs while living in his family’s home and working at an Addison foam-rubber factory in the late 1970s with his father and brother.

“In the anonymity of the big city, I figured it would be much safer to buy materials for a bomb and mail it,” he wrote in his journal.

But when a female supervisor dumped him after two dates, he began posting insulting limericks about her and wouldn’t stop.

His brother fired him and Ted Kaczynski soon returned to the wilderness to continue plotting his vengeful killing spree.