"I Don't Want To Live Long. I Would Rather Get The Death Penalty Than Spend The Rest Of My Life In Prison"

(5 of 6)

I had expected, I must admit, a more united front. Only now do I realize their desire to turn Ted in may not have been unilateral: Linda was afraid of this man she had never met, while David loved at least a part of him. That their marriage could survive such pressure--even before the media wave--says a lot about it.

Alone, David is looser. He plays baseball in an over-30 league, and one morning he took me to his game. (He played first base and pitched, batting two for four.) Baseball, he says, is the one thing that allows him to forget the ordeal, if only for a few hours. On the drive home, he spoke passionately about his love of nature, literature and philosophy. Before long, though, his mind returned to the Unabomber. Soon after his brother's arrest, he says, "I had a depressive realization that I don't know if I'll ever really feel carefree again, ever come upon those moods where you just feel unalloyed delight and joy." Before his discovery that Ted was the Unabomber, he adds, "ethical questions weren't that important to me. I was more interested in trying to break through and find the transcendental. But now I have all kinds of questions about other things. I thought I knew the difference between right and wrong." Clearly, that difference has been forever muddied--for his decision to turn in the Unabomber was the right thing to do, as wrong as it feels to have imprisoned his brother.

And now comes Ted's book, charging that David's decision was in some part based on resentment. "I think he's wrong there," David says, while acknowledging that "there have been times when I felt some resentment of Ted" and that Ted sometimes made him "very angry."

David, it seems likely, will forever wrestle with the horrible bind his murderous brother put him in. Balancing his devotion to Ted with a devotion to the aftermath of Ted's actions, he is the opposite of a kid who begs his parents for a puppy and then abandons all custodial duties. Last year, for instance, he spent months lobbying Congress (unsuccessfully) to exempt the Unabomber reward from taxes so the bulk of it could go to the victims' fund he and Linda established. Yet David's life, oddly, may be richer now than it has ever been. As a man who has long existed in the shadow of someone else--first his brother, then his wife--he at last finds himself at the center of things. There are humanitarian awards to accept, anti-death penalty interviews to give, victims'-rights speeches to deliver. He has even considered a lecture tour with one of Ted's victims.

Might he even leave his counseling job for a life of public speaking and advocacy? "Yes," he says, "but I'm leery of making money or celebrity out of this terrible tragedy. On the other hand, it's an amazing opportunity to be listened to... Obviously, I'm not immune to flattery, and it feels good to get those kinds of strokes from people."

Asked whether he feels guilty for having turned Ted in, David says, "Guilt suggests a very clear conviction of wrongdoing, and certainly I don't feel that I did wrong. On the other hand, there are tremendously complicated feelings not just about the decision itself but a lifetime of a relationship in which one brother failed to help protect another." Even now, he hopes Ted will one day agree to see him, but when asked whether he has envisioned their reconciliation, he grows quiet. "No, I don't think it would be helpful," he says after a time. "The future never meets us in the ways we imagine."

Ted Looks to the Future
Ted Kaczynski too enjoys a certain amount of attention these days. He receives mail from sympathizers and admirers. He has accepted an offer to donate his personal papers to a major university's library of anarchist materials. He wrote a parable for a literary magazine at another university. Speaking with him, one is struck not by the burning anger that characterized his Una-bomber campaign but by a satisfaction that the world, at long last, is treating him like a valuable human being.

His spirits don't seem particularly low--not nearly as low as the relatives of his victims might like them to be. To me, in fact, he seems optimistic about life in general.