David and Ted were living strikingly similar lives, until David was pulled out of his hole. Literally. Project Unabom is an Apple Original podcast, produced by Pineapple Street Studios. Listen and follow on Apple Podcasts. https://apple.co/Project_Unabom
Ted Kaczynski has written three autobiographies.
He wrote the first in 1959 when he was 17 as part of his participation in the Murray experiment at Harvard.
It's not very long, but he talks openly about his difficult relationship with his parents, his shyness around women, and his discontent with what he terms the social world.
He wrote his second autobiography 20 years later, at age 37.
He was back home with his parents in Chicago after nearly a decade living in his cabin in the woods.
And it's almost uncomfortably intimate.
It feels more intimate than TeDs journals themselves.
He describes a teenage sexual encounter with another boy, talks about girls he lusts after and professors he hates.
His own lifelong feelings of social inadequacy are everywhere in this document.
Ted says there's a particular reason he's writing it.
Hes going to start killing people.
And if hes captured or killed by the police, he wants people to find the document, read his life story as he sees it.
TEDS third autobiography is called truth versus lies.
Its 548 pages long written during his first years as a prisoner.
In it, Ted attempts to rebut nearly every claim made about him in the wake of his arrest.
But he also spends nearly half the book, over 200 pages, writing about his relationship with his brother David.
There's a chapter titled my brother's character, another called my brother's ambivalent feelings toward me.
There's even a chapter entitled I hurt my brother's feelings cruelly.
On page after page, Ted comments on the hundreds of letters he and David exchanged over the years, and he chronicles his own increasing rage as their close sibling relationship slowly breaks apartheid.
David says he thought the letters were mostly just them debating ideas, talking about their parents, occasionally questioning the wisdom of a choice one or the other was making in his life.