UNABOMBER '62

The evidence continues to accumulate that Theodore J. Kaczynski '62 was pre-destined to do bad deeds, and it seems that everyone who had contact with him during his time here can attest to that. Ted, as he must have been known by these intimates, is portrayed as a math prodigy conflicted by his poor social acumen--a bomber-in-the-making, and a smelly one at that.

A roommate of Ted's in Eliot House, Patrick S. McIntosh '66, regrets that he didn't fully foresee the destruction. He told the Crimson, "I thought Ted was a private person, but he sure made a god awful mess of his room and that should have been a clue." Of course, Pat, why didn't you say something sooner?

Richard Adams '62 recalls dining with Ted. "Not by choice," he said the day after his table-mate's arrest, "I never liked to sit with him because he wouldn't talk. It was always a very unpleasant, strange experience....He had the look of a guy who didn't fit in." Well, Rich, perhaps you might have tried a conversation about Bakunin.

Another classmate took the exploitation of Ted to another level: David Nyhan '62, a columnist for the Boston Globe, had the gall to boast of his affinity in a piece called "Old Classmate Resurfaces." He writes, "I didn't know him, I merely and vaguely remember seeing him around 30-plus years ago." Tell us more, Dave, please tell us more. Like how you don't remember having a conversation with him. How you recognize "the type" now--a lonely person.

Nyhan offers us more than his two-cents. He composes a complete psychological profile of Harvard in the pre-Vietnam era. "Lots of people were unhappy at Harvard then," he explains to us, "And lonely. And isolated from their fellows." Huh. Who woulda thought, George? Let's go feed the rabbits. Then we can go to the Fly and hang out with neat guys who are nothing like Ted and we can rejoice that Harvard fosters a jubilant social life.

All the attention just forces one to wonder what Pat and Rich and Dave would have told the papers had Ted gone on to the big time. He did graduate from Harvard. Then he got a Ph.D. from Michigan; his dissertation on "Boundary Functions" received an award for being the best at the university that year. Then he was an assistant professor at Berkeley. Intelligence works in mysterious ways, and who knows how far Ted's contorted mind would have taken him.

Pat might have attributed the messy room to the unfocused genius brimming over with energy. Rich might have thought of his silent dinners as brilliant meditations. Dave certainly would have published his affiliation with a Nobel Prize winner, and certainly the friendship implied therein.

Funny thing about college memories.