Despite the seven-year difference in their ages, Theodore and David Kaczynski are brothers with a lot in common. Everyone who knows them offers the same descriptions: smart, introspective, quiet. They went to Ivy League schools but didn't use their prestigious degrees to chase the almighty dollar. They both sought solitude in remote parts of the country, where they tried to shed whatever stood between them and the natural world. Both of them appear to have compelling notions about justice. Ted's may have led him to murder. David's led him to turn his brother over to the FBI.
Now that he is the man who the FBI believes may be the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski, 53, has begun to emerge from the obscurity and isolation he cultivated for most of his life. And as he comes to the surface, so does David, 46, his brother and his keeper. No one quite expected the saga of the Unabomber to encompass such poignance--and such eternal parables. The prodigal and the faithful son, the favorite and the outcast, the firstborn and the younger are characters as old as the Bible that resound in every family today. And here, with surprising pangs of recognition, are variations on themes that began with Cain and Abel.
Anyone with an imagination is using it these days to imagine themselves in David's shoes, facing the questions he has faced. When should the bonds of family give way to the obligations to society? And how, in the intricate and ambiguous dealings between brothers, can anyone be sure that an apparent act of principle isn't also, ever so slightly, a subtle act of retaliation? "David is a straight arrow, sensitive and moral. He didn't want to hurt his brother," notes Father Melvin La Follette, an Episcopal priest and a friend. "But at the same time, he was scrupulous. He wanted to do the right thing." David once trekked 40 miles to return an Indian flint knife to the place he found it after he learned it was wrong to move it.
David and Theodore Kaczynski have both put some distance between themselves and civilization. Unlike other baby boomers whose back-to-the-land impulses could be satisfied with a Neil Young album, they know what it's like to live without electricity or running water. On the 1.4 acres of Montana woodland that he bought with David in 1971, Ted spent whole winters living on dried root vegetables, some rice and flour and the snowshoe hares he tracked down with his .22-cal. rifle. In the early 1980s, David headed for the desolate Christmas Mountains of West Texas. The cabin he has used for part of each year stands 20 miles from the nearest paved road. Before it was finished, he hunkered down for a while in just a hole dug in the ground. To keep out what little rain fell, he pulled a tarpaulin across the opening.
But unlike Ted, who was once described by the chairman of the mathematics department at the University of California, Berkeley, as "almost pathologically shy," David was more personable, even talkative when he got going. And unlike Ted, he eventually reached an accommodation with the larger world. In 1990, just before their father committed suicide while suffering from terminal cancer, David came north, cut his hair and soon thereafter married his high school girlfriend, Linda Patrik. She teaches philosophy at Union College in Schenectady, New York, near where they live. For the past three years he has been a counselor for troubled teens at a youth center in Albany.