124. Running to Do Evil

An interview with Unabomber Ted Kaczynski, whose younger brother turned him in -- and what it says about the Boston bombers.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 0:46Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:28Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 1:55Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 2:36Stephen J. Dubner?

  If you are a man, or a boy, and you have a brother, especially an older brother, and you know that the bond between brothers is unlike any other, sometimes that bond is almost impossibly wonderful.

• 2:51Speaker 01

  We used to, very often, we used to go out and play catch, or one of us would hit the ball with a bat and the other one would catch it. And I remember one time when we were throwing that ball, we were as far apart as we could get and still reach each other with the ball. We were throwing that ball as hard as we could, as far as we could. Of course, the ball was thrown very inaccurately because we were trying so hard to throw it. And so we would, we were making these running, leaping catches. We made more fantastic catches that day than I think we did in all the rest of our years together. That was more fun.

• 3:24Stephen J. Dubner?

  And sometimes, the brotherly bond is toxic.

• 3:29Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't know that it's exactly true that he wanted me to suffer exactly. It's more like, more as if he wanted to score a victory over me, defeat me, put himself in the, in the victorious position, and me in the position of one who's defeated and humiliated.

• 3:52Stephen J. Dubner?

  You probably don't recognize this voice because he hasn't spoken much in public, but you do know the person the voice belongs to. It's Ted Kaczynski.

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Okay. Do you deny, in the context of this interview, do you deny that you committed the crimes attributed to the Unabomber?

• 4:12Speaker 01

  I can't comment on that.

• 4:16Stephen J. Dubner?

  Ted Kaczynski is the Unabomber, a homegrown terrorist who, over the course of 17 years, planted or mailed at least 16 bombs. He killed three people and wounded 24. He wasn't a religious fundamentalist, but he was a fundamentalist. His enemy was essentially modern society. He grew up in Chicago, attended Harvard, but he wound up living alone in a remote cabin in the Montana woods. He was arrested in 1996 after one of the most notorious and longest man hunts in history, and he was sentenced to life in prison. How did he finally get caught? His younger brother, David, turned him in.

• 4:57Speaker 02

  Were you surprised when you learned that it was David who had turned you in? Were you surprised?

• 5:03Speaker 01

  Not terribly surprised.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio, the podcast that explores the hidden side of everything. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 5:47Stephen J. Dubner?

  I interviewed Ted Kaczynski in 1999, three years after he was arrested for the crimes that earned him the name "The Unabomber." He was in the same prison then as he is today, a federal supermax in Florence, Colorado.

• 6:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Just in terms of your life in prison again, I'm just wondering a little bit about your daily routine. Do you get eight hours of sleep a day?

• 6:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, usually not all at once. I'll give you, let's say--

• 6:13Stephen J. Dubner?

  I had been writing a magazine article about his brother, David, the hero of the Unabomber story, if there was such a thing. Then I learned that Ted was writing a book, a book that wound up never being published. And the book spent most of its time attacking David as intellectually dishonest and resentful of his brilliant big brother. I requested an interview with Ted, even though he didn't do that kind of thing, and, to my surprise, he agreed.

• 6:40Speaker 01

  Food, beer, believe it or not, is pretty good.

• 6:42Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Sometimes it's--

• 6:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  We talked for several hours. He sat on a concrete bench in a concrete room, a wall of reinforced glass between us.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  Let's take a third. I take a shower every other day, rather than every day, because I have sensitive skin.

• 7:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  Most of our conversation that day was about David and Ted, Ted and David, the brothers Kaczynski. Ted, the older brother by seven years, intellectually domineering and socially awkward. David, a more tender touch, more adept at living in the real world, but also enthralled to his big brother's love of nature and his hatred of an overindustrialized society. He followed Ted, among other places, into the wilderness.

• 7:38Stephen J. Dubner?

  As modern as their story was, it also felt ancient, like Isaac and Ishmael, or Greek tragedy. More than anything, it was about the enormous leverage that a big brother can exert on a younger one. Now, I don't mean to say that brotherly love isn't real. It is. And as the youngest of four brothers myself, I've experienced a lot of it. But with brothers, there can be a lot of other stuff, too. Rivalry, resentment, insecurity. There are things that, if other people told you to do them, you'd just laugh. "Hey, let's set this thing on fire." Or, "Hey, as soon as it gets dark, let's jump off that cliff."

• 8:23Stephen J. Dubner?

  But when your big brother tells you to do this stuff, you do it. Last week's bombings at the Boston Marathon and the violence afterward were apparently, allegedly, committed by a pair of brothers, Tamerlin and Johar Tsarnaev. The older brother has since been killed, the younger brother is under arrest. As we began to learn more about them, I couldn't help but think of the brothers Kozinski, how the dynamic between brothers is unlike any other. There are some parallels between the two sets of brothers. Johar Tsarnaev, like David Kozinski, is seven years younger than his brother.

• 9:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  In each case, the older brother was a loner and angry, the younger brother mellower, better adjusted, and yet, they idolized their big brothers. And of course, in each case, there were bombs. But Johar Tsarnaev followed his big brother into violence. David Kozinski did not. While for many years, he and Ted were as close as only brothers can be, there came a time when they were as bitterly estranged as perhaps only brothers can be.

• 9:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  The estrangement was a result of David getting a girlfriend. Linda Patrick, whom David had longed for since high school, finally returned his longing. When David and Linda got serious, Ted cut David off. Linda brought David back into the modern world. It was she who persuaded David to consider that his big brother might be the Unabomber, and then to go to the FBI.

• 10:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  When I interviewed Ted in prison, one stipulation was that he wouldn't talk about his actual crimes, since he was still hoping for a retrial. In prison, his neighbors were a who's who of 1990s terrorism. Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, Ramzi Youssef from the First World Trade Center bombing.

• 10:33Speaker 01

  See, I'm in a range of cells where there are eight cells. And they call this celebrity row. And these people are not what you would think of as criminal types.

• 10:43Stephen J. Dubner?

  Yeah.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  I mean, they don't seem to be very angry people. They're considerate of others. Some of them are quite intelligent.

• 10:53Stephen J. Dubner?

  Listening back to this conversation from nearly 15 years ago, I'm reminded of two things, two disturbing things. One, that Ted Kaczynski doesn't sound like the kind of angry, antisocial person who would run around killing people, or at least how we think that kind of person should sound. And two, as you're about to hear, that Ted has such a deep reservoir of disdain for David that he makes it sound as if David, the man who stopped the bombings, is the bad guy. Because he, David, hadn't stayed the course. Because he hadn't stayed loyal to his big brother.

• 11:35Stephen J. Dubner?

  Is it fair to say that your relationship with David over the years, which obviously had a lot of peaks and valleys, is it fair to say that that was the most profound personal relationship you'd ever had?

• 11:47Speaker 01

  I would say it's the deepest personal relationship that I ever had between, oh, let's say, between my teens and about 1990, when I finally broke off.

• 12:02Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. In terms of you and David, how do you think that you two are most alike?

• 12:12Speaker 01

  That's a tough one.

• 12:14Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:15Speaker 01

  Over many years, we shared, shared great many days.

• 12:19Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:20Speaker 01

  And it's not clear to me to what extent this was simple imitation of me on his part. And it was simple imitation on his part, you wouldn't really call it, really call it a similarity.

• 12:30Speaker 02

  Right.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  But there's some similarities apart from that. I think we're both basically quiet, somewhat introverted types. Both a little on the shy side.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Another similarity between us would be that

• 12:48Speaker 01

  generally speaking, he's a very honest person.

• 12:50Speaker 02

  You wrote that his adulation of you disgusted you at certain points over the course of your relationship. Did you try to communicate that to him? Did you say to him, "Dave, this is not a healthy way to be. I'm, I'm glad you like me. I'm glad you respect me, but be your own person." Did you ever try to have that kind of conversation with him?

• 13:11Speaker 01

  No.

• 13:12Speaker 02

  Why not? I mean-

• 13:15Speaker 01

  And it would have been very painful to him for, to have me say that. And it probably wouldn't have done any good.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 13:24Speaker 01

  And, I mean, I could, in, in one way or another, he would appear to be overvaluing me. But it wasn't something that was so explicit that I could be sure that it was, it was really that.

• 13:41Speaker 02

  Right.

• 13:43Speaker 02

  In your dreams, literally in your dreams and in your thinking, it sounds as you really felt protective of David for many, many years, yes?

• 13:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  Do you think at some point that he ever began to feel protective of you? Do you think that as he moved into adulthood, especially after you had cut off communication, do you think that he ever began to feel protective of you?

• 14:02Speaker 01

  No.

• 14:03Speaker 02

  You don't.

• 14:05Speaker 02

  In what ways, if any, do you think he was jealous of you?

• 14:10Speaker 01

  Um, he was probably jealous of the fact that I got more attention from my, from our parents.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  He was jealous of the fact, simply that I was dominant in our, in our relationship.

• 14:24Speaker 01

  Jealous of the fact that I was smarter than he was. I could do, I could do most things better than he could. Athletics are one exception.

• 14:32Speaker 02

  In what ways, if any, were you jealous of Dave?

• 14:41Speaker 01

  The only way I can think that I might have been somewhat jealous of him was that when he was in high school, he always had lots of friends, he was socially successful. And I wasn't. And I may have had some jealousy about that, though I don't clearly remember that.

• 15:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  When we come back, how Ted Kaczynski went even further into the path of radicalism, and how his adoring little brother finally found his way back into the mainstream. What do you regret most in retrospect about your relationship with David, about the way the relationship devolved, I guess?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say basically that I didn't break off with him 20 years earlier.

• 16:05Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 16:38Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 17:26Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 18:00Speaker 03

  From WNYC and APM, American Public Media, this is Freakonomics Radio. Here's your host, Stephen Dubner.

• 18:15Stephen J. Dubner?

  Today's episode is from a prison interview I did nearly 15 years ago with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, for an article that was published in Time Magazine. I dug up the old tapes this week because the brothers charged with the Boston Marathon bombings reminded me of the strange, volatile dynamic of brotherhood, especially the pull of a big brother on a younger one. For years, David Kaczynski identified with his older brother's antisocial worldview.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  I mean, he was certainly alienated from the mainstream system of values. He just particularly hated Reagan and that whole political bunch.

• 18:59Speaker 01

  And yet, I wouldn't say exactly that simply for Hinckley or for radicals generally. And there was resentment there. And yet, there was never any hope or ambition on his part to actually do anything active or take radical measures.

• 19:20Stephen J. Dubner?

  In other words, as Ted Kaczynski sees it, his younger brother David wasn't radical enough to be taken seriously. And then, even worse, he went totally mainstream. He got married to a woman named Linda Patrick, who found Ted creepy, maybe even dangerous. David tried to keep up his relationship with Ted, writing long heartfelt letters. But eventually, Ted shut him out. What do you regret most in retrospect about your relationship with David? About the way the relationship devolved, I guess?

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Well, I'd say basically that I didn't break off with him 20 years earlier.

• 20:01Stephen J. Dubner?

  So you still feel that way?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I got a lot of satisfaction out of corresponding with him. I mean, it was a good relationship. It was in many respects, not all respects, but in many respects, a positive relationship from my point of view.

• 20:12Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 20:13Speaker 01

  But I don't think it was from my brother's point of view. And in the end, it turned out to be disastrous from my point of view, you could say.

• 20:19Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right. What do you think would have changed in his life if you had broken off earlier?

• 20:27Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, let me put it this way. I think that his attempt to... His sense of rivalry with Big Brother, his attempt to equal Big Brother and to win Big Brother's approval with very limited success. I think all this was very hard on him. I think that his self-esteem would have been in much better shape if he hadn't had me to compete with or compare himself with. And I think he would have... And he always had these time-making friends. He would have had close relationships with other people, so he didn't really need that relationship with me.

• 21:07Stephen J. Dubner?

  Right.

• 21:09Speaker 02

  If the roles had been reversed, if you had suspected David of being the UN bomber, right? After all the years that you haven't been communicating very regularly, what would you have done?

• 21:23Speaker 01

  I would have kept it to myself.

• 21:25Speaker 02

  Is that what you feel he should have done?

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  And what was your reaction to that when you first hear that David is involved in turning you in? What does that feel like?

• 21:38Speaker 01

  Well, obviously, I resented it.

• 21:46Speaker 01

  There was another strain to my feelings there. I don't know if I can explain it properly, but

• 21:55Speaker 01

  in a way, I was almost glad because my own brother turning me in, in a sense, made me feel good.

• 22:04Speaker 02

  How so?

• 22:05Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, it's

• 22:08Speaker 02

  That you had eluded everyone but someone who knew you?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Well, I didn't say I eluded anyone for anything. I mean, I have not, I have, I mean, I pled guilty, but that was because I was forced to do so. But it was that,

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I mean, if someone, I mean, if A screws B, then it tends to make B look good, even if otherwise it might not look good. I don't know.

• 22:42Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 22:43Speaker 01

  So maybe that was perhaps an ignoble thought on my part, but that thought was present, I have to admit.

• 22:49Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 22:57Stephen J. Dubner?

  When Ted was arrested, David fought hard to keep him from getting the death penalty. This made Ted angry. He wanted the death penalty. So where the rest of the world sees David Kaczynski turning in his older brother as an act of heroism, Ted sees resentment. And where the rest of us see David pleading for his brother's life as an act of mercy, Ted sees it as further punishment.

• 23:24Speaker 01

  I'm not depressed or downcast. It's, let me see, let's see if I can explain this. There's

• 23:34Speaker 01

  There's sort of, um, different levels of how you feel about your life.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  Let me try to explain it this way. When I was living in the woods, um, there was, um, sort of an undertone, underlying feeling that, that things were basically right with my life. That is, something might go wrong, I might have a bad day, I might screw something up, I might break my ax handle and, and do something else, and everything would go wrong, but still, somehow, underneath the, the, um, superficial unhappiness or bad feelings, there was an underlying feeling that my life was right. I was able to fall back on the fact that, um, here I was, a free man, in the mountains, surrounded by forests and wild animals and so forth.

• 24:26Speaker 01

  And this made, this made my life right, even if things were, for the time being, going badly. Here, it's the other way around. I'm not depressed or downcast, and I had things to do that I consider productive, like working on getting this book out.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  And, yet, the knowledge that I'm locked up here, here, and likely to remain so for the rest of my life is, um, it ruins it. It's, it's, the undertone in this case is, is a, is a, is an extremely bad one. And, um,

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I don't want to live long. I would rather get the death penalty than spend the rest of my life in prison.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Would you, would you take your own life, given the opportunity?

• 25:11Speaker 01

  I, I will not comment on that.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  I mean, at a superficial level, it isn't really that bad.

• 25:16Speaker 02

  Right.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  But just the knowledge that I'm locked up and I'm not free, sort of, it's just, to me, it's just not a life worth living.

• 25:22Speaker 02

  Right. What do you say, if you have a retrial, and are acquitted, and have your life back, what do you say to society, to relax them, to not let them worry about the Unabomber, is at large?

• 25:44Speaker 02

  Well, I don't know that I would have to relax them. Just let them worry. Okay. If David were to come visit you, if David's in the room now, what do you want to say to him? Nothing. I just wouldn't talk to him. I'd just turn my back and wouldn't talk to him. Yeah. Do you still love him? No.

• 26:22Stephen J. Dubner?

  We asked David Kaczynski to talk about his brother for this show. He understandably chose not to. Ever since Ted's arrest, David has worked hard to try to repair some of the damage done by his brother. While Ted has never expressed regret or apologized to the victims, David did. He donated money. He toured the country, speaking against violence. It's bizarre, to me at least. Listening back to this tape of Ted, he makes it sound as if he is the aggrieved party. Can you imagine having an older brother like that, who tells you that up is down and down is up? Soon, you might start believing him. And if he has bad intentions, violent intentions,

• 27:05Stephen J. Dubner?

  well, you might start believing that those are your intentions too.

• 27:14Stephen J. Dubner?

  We don't know enough yet about the Boston bombers to say for sure if Joe Har, the younger brother, was pulled into his older brother's orbit, or whether he followed willingly. But we do know that David Kaczynski didn't do what the younger Tsarnaev brother allegedly did. He didn't join forces. He didn't capitulate. He didn't run to do evil.

• 27:40Stephen J. Dubner?

  This episode has been talk, all talk, about actions, terrible actions. Talk may be interesting, but let's be clear, it's our actions that matter. All this talk offers no solace whatsoever to the victims of Ted Kaczynski, to the victims of the criminals in Boston. I wish we could do better, but at this moment, words are all we have.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC, APM, American Public Media, and Dubner Productions. Our staff includes Susie Lechtenberg, Catherine Wells, David Herman, Borey Lam, and Chris Bannon. Colin Campbell is our executive producer. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can subscribe to our podcast on iTunes or go to Freakonomics.com, where you'll find lots of radio, a blog, the books, and more.

• 29:27Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 29:59Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 30:44Stephen J. Dubner?

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• 31:08Speaker 04

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