N 1952, when Kaczynski was ten, his parents moved from Chicago to the suburban community of Evergreen Park -- in order, they later explained to Ted, to provide him with a better class of friends. The community into which the Kaczynskis moved would soon be in turmoil. Evergreen Park was a mixed neighborhood of Irish, Italians, Czechs, and Poles who now felt themselves under siege by yet another group of new arrivals. 

On May 17, 1954, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka that segregated schooling was unconstitutional. To many people in Evergreen Park this was tantamount to a declaration of war. Even before the Court's decision they had feared what they saw as black encroachment. African-American communities stood just next door, and black families came to town to shop and eat at Evergreen Park restaurants. Black teenagers hung around Evergreen Plaza. 

This environment tended to isolate the Kaczynskis, who by several accounts were liberal on race matters. Aggravating their isolation was Evergreen Park's fragmented school system. Until 1955 the town had no public high school building, and students were bused to high schools in surrounding communities. Evergreen Park High School was not completed until 1955, and Ted Kaczynski, who became a member of the first class that spent all four years there, found himself in a school without cohesion or community, where few of the students knew one another. As Spencer Gilmore, a former science teacher, lamented, there was "no commonality in the student body." Howard Finkle, who was then a social-studies teacher, describes Evergreen Park in those years as a school for strangers. Soon the school was riven by cliques. 

Despite this fractured environment, school administrators sought to push the students hard academically. "The fact to keep in mind about Evergreen Park," Kaczynski's algebra teacher, Paul Jenkins, told me, "is that Gene Howard [the principal of Evergreen Park High School at the time] enjoyed a big budget. He had combed the country for the best instructors he could find -- folks who would be teaching junior college in most places. Yet most of the kids were incredibly naive. Some had never even been to downtown Chicago. The faculty was presenting them with ideas they'd never encountered before. Some hated the experience; others loved it. And it blew the minds of some, including perhaps Ted." The students, according to Finkle, were asked to read books ordinarily used by college undergraduates. The intellectually ambitious, like Kaczynski, adapted readily to these demands, but in a school where the most popular boys carried cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves of their T-shirts, excelling at academics meant social exile. 

What pressures did Kaczynski face among his family? Ted Kaczynski insists that the Kaczynski home was an unhappy one and that his social isolation came about because his parents pushed him too hard academically. David and Wanda say that theirs was a happy and normal home but that Ted had shown signs of extreme alienation since childhood. When family members squabble, it is almost impossible for anyone -- least of all an outsider -- to know who is right. And the Kaczynskis are squabblers. 

The letters and other materials Kaczynski sent me in the course of our correspondence -- including his 1998 autobiography, containing quotations from doctors, teachers, and college advisers -- naturally support his version. Unfortunately, however, I am limited in my ability to use these, because Kaczynski has continually changed his mind about the terms and conditions for the use of his autobiography and other documents. Nevertheless, most of the people I interviewed tended to support most of his claims. I offer my own interpretation of his family relations, which is supported by interviews and infused with knowledge of documents that Kaczynski sent to me. 

Kaczynski's father, Theodore R. "Turk" Kaczynski, was a self-educated freethinker living in a conventionally Catholic working-class community. In his autobiography Kaczynski claims, and a close friend of Turk's confirms, that Wanda tended to be fearful that their family would be perceived as different. Although nonconformist, the Kaczynskis wanted to be perceived as conforming. Thus, Kaczynski records, although the Kaczynskis were atheists, his parents instructed him to tell people they were Unitarians. The tension created by the family's efforts to look good to the neighbors increased significantly when, in the fifth grade, Kaczynski scored 167 on an IQ test. He skipped the sixth grade, leaving his friends behind to enter a new class as the smallest kid in the room. 

From then on, according to Kaczynski and also according to others who knew the family, his parents valued his intellect as a trophy that gave the Kaczynskis special status. They began to push him to study, lecturing him if his report card showed any grade below an A. Meanwhile, Turk seemed -- to Kaczynski, at least -- to become increasingly cold, critical, and distant. 

When Kaczynski was a sophomore, the Evergreen Park High School administration recommended that he skip his junior year. His band teacher and friend, James Oberto, remembers pleading with Kaczynski's father not to allow it. But Turk wouldn't listen. "Ted's success meant too much to him," Oberto says. 

Two years younger than his classmates, and still small for his age, Kaczynski became even more of an outcast in school. There was "a gradual increasing amount of hostility I had to face from the other kids," Sally Johnson reports Kaczynski as admitting. "By the time I left high school, I was definitely regarded as a freak by a large segment of the student body." 

Apparently caught between acrimony at home and rejection at school, Kaczynski countered with activity. He joined the chess, biology, German, and mathematics clubs. He collected coins. He read ravenously and widely, excelling in every field from drama and history to biology and mathematics. According to an account in The Washington Post, he explored the music of Bach, Vivaldi, and Gabrieli, studied music theory, and wrote musical compositions for a family trio -- David on the trumpet, Turk at the piano, and himself on the trombone. He played duets with Oberto. 

These achievements made Kaczynski a favorite of his teachers. Virtually all those with whom I talked who knew him well in those years saw him as studious and a member of the lowest-ranking high school clique -- the so-called briefcase boys -- but otherwise entirely normal. His physics teacher, Robert Rippey, described him to me as "honest, ethical, and sociable." His American-government teacher, Philip Pemberton, said he had many friends and indeed seemed to be their "ringleader." Paul Jenkins used Kaczynski as a kind of teaching assistant, to help students who were having trouble in math. School reports regularly gave him high marks for neatness, "respect for others," "courtesy," "respect for law and order," and "self-discipline. "No one was more lavish in praise of Kaczynski than Lois Skillen, his high school counselor. "Of all the youngsters I have worked with at the college level," she wrote to Harvard,

I believe Ted has one of the greatest contributions to make to society. He is reflective, sensitive, and deeply conscious of his responsibilities to society.... His only drawback is a tendency to be rather quiet in his original meetings with people, but most adults on our staff, and many people in the community who are mature find him easy to talk to, and very challenging intellectually. He has a number of friends among high school students, and seems to influence them to think more seriously.

LL Harvard freshmen in the 1950s, including Kaczynski and me, were immersed in what the college described as "general education" and students called Gen Ed. This program of studies, which had been fully implemented by 1950, was part of a nationwide curricular reform that sought to inculcate a sense of "shared values" among undergraduates through instruction in the Judeo-Christian tradition. 

Unlike the usual departmental offerings, which focused on methodological issues within a discipline, Gen Ed courses were intended to be interdisciplinary, with material arranged for students historically (chronologically) rather than analytically. Required Gen Ed courses focused on science, literature, philosophy, history, and Western institutions. The undergraduate curriculum, therefore, was initially designed to be neatly divided into two categories, one general and one specialized, one emphasizing history and values, the other emphasizing the value-free methodologies employed by scholars in the various academic fields. This attempt at balance would give rise to a battle in the long war between humanism and positivism.