HARVARD AND THE MAKING OF THE UNABOMBER 2/2 by Alston Chase © 2000 The Atlantic Monthly, June 2000

http://www.newsmakingnews.com/unabomber%20article.htm

[Dr. G]...came waltzing over and he put on those electrodes but in that process, while he was doing that, kind of whistling, I was looking over the room, and right away I didn't like the room. I didn't like the way the glass was in front of me through which I couldn't see, but I was being watched and right away that puts one in a kind of unnatural situation and I noted the big white lights and again that heightens the unnatural effect. There was something peculiar about the set-up too, it was supposed to look homey or look natural, two chairs and a little table, but again that struck me as unnatural before the big piece of glass and the lights. and then [Mr. R]...who was bubbling over, dancing around, started to talk to me about he liked my suit...the buzzer would ring or something like that, we were supposed to begin...he was being sarcastic or pretty much of a wise guy...And the first thing that entered my mind was to get up and ask him outside immediately...but that was out of the questions, because the electrodes and the movie and all that...I kind of sat there and began to fume and then he went on and he got my goat and I couldn't think of what to say....And then they came along and they took my electrodes off.

And so it went. One subject, Hinge, thought he was "being attacked." Another, Naisfield, complained, "The lights were very bright...Then the things were put on my legs and whatnot and on the arm,...I didn't like the feel of the sticky stuff that was on there being sort of uncomfortable."

Although the "stressful dyadic proceeding" served as the centerpiece of Murray's experiment (it occurred during the second year of the three-year study), it was merely one among scores of different tests the students took in order to allow Murray and his associates to acquire, as Murray wrote, "the most accurate, significant, and complete knowledge and understanding of a single psychological event that is obtainable."

Before the dyadic confrontation took place, Murray and his colleagues interviewed the students in depth about their hopes and aspirations. During his same period the subjects were required to write not only essays explaining their philosophies of life but also autobiographies in which they were told to answer specific, intimate questions on a range of subjects from thumb-sucking and toilet training to masturbation and erotic fantasies. And they faced a battery of tests that included, among others, the Thematic Apperception Test, a Rorschach test, the Minnesota Multiphase Personality Inventory, the California Psychological Inventory, a "fantasy inventory," a psychological-types inventory, the Maudalay Personality Inventory, an "inventory of self-description," a "temperament questionnaire," a "time-metaphor test," a "basic disposition test," a "range of experience inventory," a "philosophical outlook test," a food-preference inventory, analysis of their literary tastes and moral precepts, an "odor association test," a "word association test," an argument-completion test, a Wyatt finger-painting test, a projective-drawings test, and a "Rosenzweig picture frustration test." The results were then analyzed by researchers, who plotted them in numerous ways in an effort to develop a psychological portrait of each personality in all its dimensions.

Only after most of this data had been collected did researchers administer the stressful dyadic confrontation. During the year following this session each student was called back for several "recall": interviews and sometimes was asked to comment on the movie of himself being reduced to impotent anger by the interrogator. During these replays, Murray wrote, "you will see yourself making numerous grimaces and gestures" and "uttering incongruent, disjunctive, and unfinished sentences."

During the last year of the experiment, Murray made the students available to his graduate-student assistants, to serve as guinea pigs for their own research projects. By graduation, as Kenneth Keniston, one of these researchers, summarized the process later, "each student had spent approximately two hundred hours in the research, and had provided hundreds of pages of information about himself, his beliefs, his past life, his family, his college life and development, his fantasies, his hopes and dreams."

Why were the students willing to endure this ongoing stress and probing into their private lives? Some who had assisted Murray in the experiment confessed to me that they wondered about themselves But they--and we--can speculate that some of the students (including Kaczynski) did it for the money, that some (again, probably including Kaczynski) had doubts about their own psychic health and were seeking reassurance about it, and that some, suffering from Harvard's well0known anomie, were lonely and needed someone to talk to, and that some simply had an interest in hoping to advance scientific knowledge. but in truth we do not know. Alden E. Wiseman, a former research associate of Murray's who has long been bothered by the unethical dimension of this study, said to me recently, "Later, I thought We took and took and used them and what did we give them in return?"

What was the purpose of the experiment? Keniston told me that he wasn't sure what the goals were. "Murray was not the most systematic scientist," he explained. Murray himself gave curiously equivocal answers. At time he suggested that his intent was merely to gather as much raw data as possible about one interpersonal event, which could then be used in different ways to help "develop a theory of dyadic systems." At other times he recalled the idealist goal of acquiring knowledge that would lead to improving human personality development. At still other times his language seemed to suggest a continued interest in stressful interrogations. For example, Murray explained in his "Notes on Dyadic Research," dated March 16, 1959, that an ongoing goal of the research which focused heavily on "degree of anxiety and disintegration," was to "deign and evaluate instruments and procedures for the prediction of how each subject will react in the course of a stressful dyadic proceeding."

Such equivocation prompts one to ask, Could the experiment have had a purpose that Murray was reluctant to divulge? Was the multiform-assessments project intend3ed, at last in part, to help the CIA determine how to test, or break down an individual's ability to withstand interrogation? The writer Alexander Cockburn has asked whether the students might have been given the hallucinogenic drug LSD without their knowledge, possibly at the request of the CIA. By the late 1950s, according to some, Murray had become quite interested in hallucinogenic, including LSD and psilocybin. And soon after Murray's experiments on Kaczynski and his classmates were under way, in 1960, Timothy Leary returned to Harvard and, with Murray's blessing, began his experiments with psilocybin. In his autobiography, Flashbacks (1983), Leary, who would dedicate the rest of his life to promoting hallucinogenic drugs, described Murray as "the wizard of personality assessment who, as OSS chief psychologist, had monitored military experiments on brainwashing and sodium amytal interrogation. Murray expressed great interest in our drug-research project and offered his support."

Forrest Robinson reports in his biography that Murray took psilocybin and in 1961 delivered a talk on his experience to the International Congress of Applied Psychology. That Leary had Murray's support was confirmed by Martin A. Lee and Bruce Schlain in their book Aicd Dreams: The Complete social History of LSD (1985),

Leary returned to Harvard and established a psilocybin research project with the approval of Dr. Harry Murray, chairman of the Department of Social Relations. Dr. Murray, who ran the Personality assessments section of the OSS during World War II, took a keen interest in Leary's work. He volunteered for a psilocybin session, becoming one of the first of many faculty and graduate students to sample the mushroom pill under Leary's guidance.

Kaczynski thinks he was never given LSD. And after exhaustive research I could find no evidence that LSD was ever used in Murray's research. Nevertheless, whether the research had a defense connection of some sort remains an open question. Although direct evidence of support from a federal defense grant is so far lacking, circumstantial evidence 3esists: the strong similarity between the OSS stress tests and the later experiments. Murray's association with the OSS, his grant proposal to do research for the Navy Department, and the lack of any clearly explained purposes for the study. Obviously, the dyadic studies would have had considerable utility for the defense establishment, either as a framework for testing recruits or as continuing work on how to improve interrogation techniques.

A TURNING POINT

What was the state of Kaczynski's mental health at the time of the multiform- assessments project and immediately afterward? The evidence suggest that hew as entirely sane during those years. By he spring of 1998 Kaczynski had obtained from the Murray Center his answers (along with those of other Murray-experiments participants) on the Thematic Apperception Test, which Murray had given to Kaczynski during the first year of the experiments. At Kaczynski's request, his lawyers sent these to a psychological-testing expert: Bertram Karon, at Michigan State University. Because participants were identified only by code names, Karon was able to conduct a blind evaluation--measuring the answers without knowing who had given them. Karon found that on a scale of 0 to 10, with 0 a complete absence of illness and 10 the highest degrees of illness, "Lawful" scored 0 to "Schizotypy" and 2 for "Psychopathy." Kaczynski's undergraduate experience and behavior had been unremarkable. The reports of his housemaster, his adviser and the university doctors attested to his normalcy, as did the observations of classmates. There is no evidence of immediate mental degradation in the project's aftermath. Emotional turmoil is another matter. As Sally Johnson, the forensic psychiatrist, reported, Kaczynski clearly began to experience emotional distress then, and began to develop his anti-technology views.

And there is one thing that come through clearly in he essays, test answers, and interview of Murray's subjects at the outset of the experiment: many of these young men already exhibited attitudes of anger, nihilism and alienation--reflecting, perhaps, just how persuasively a culture of despair had infused student attitudes and suggesting that some might have been especially vulnerable to stress.

Bulwer admitted that "right now I have sort of a nihilistic outlook on life....How do our justify studying if you regard yourself as an ant crawling through a great huge anthill with millions of others?"

Ives (speaking of living a conventional life) confessed,

And for doing all this I will hate myself. I mourn the world in which I live because for me there is no place unless I compromise. All I can do is gather up the shattered remains of my hope and love and in the debris of the world keep at least one small blaze of poetry burning....I most feel akin to the artist sand the philosophers and have a hatred for the scientists. The scientists I hate because they are pursuing goals which are destined to remove man even further from himself.

Naisfield averred, "I don't feel that there is any purpose in my being alive..."

To describe his philosophy of life, Oscar (roughly) quoted Bertrand Russell (whose writing were assigned in Gen Ed): "only on the firm foundation of unyielding despair, can the soul's habitation henceforth be safely built."

Quartz announced that there were "No such things as objective values."

Dorset wrote simply, "society as I see it stinks."

Sanwick, as one researcher put it, is "basically distrustful of the whole enterprise of life." Researchers found analyzing him "almost impossible," because "his whole life is conceptualized within a bombastic framework of philosophical concepts: being, life, death transcendence, preservation, liberation, repetition, chaos...One feels...a great tumult and chaos of awarenesses, perceptions and feelings."

The analysts deemed one subject "a young man in a state of considerable distress, depression, and confusion...extremely alienated" and another prone to "withdrawal, silence." And so on, and on.

It is clear, also that Murray's experiment deeply affected at least some of its subjects. From interviews conducted after the project ended, it is apparent that certain students had found the experience searing. Even twenty-five years later some recalled date unpleasantness. In 1987, Cringle remembers the "anger and embarrassment...the glass partition...the electrodes and wires running up our sleeves."

Likewise, twenty-five years later Drill still had "very vivid general memories of the experience....I remember someone putting electrodes and blood pressure counter on my arm just before the filming...[I] was startled by [his interlocutor's] venom...I remember responding with unabating rage."

What Hinge remembered most vividly twenty-five years later was being "attacked" and hating "having all my movements and sounds recorded....we were led over to the chairs and strapped in and as the wires were attached to us...I began to get move involved in the situation and I began to realize that...there I was, actually was going to be in front of the movie camera...I was surprised by how strongly he was attacking me..."

And twenty-five years later Locust wrote,

I remember appearing on afternoon for a `debate' and being hooked up to electrodes and sat in a chair with bright lights and being told a movie was being made....I remember him attacking me, even insulting me, for my values, or for opinions I had expressed in my written material, and I remember feeling that I could not defend these ideas, that I had written them not intended for them to be the subject of a debate...I remember being shocked by the severity of the attack, and I remember feeling helpless to respond...So what I seem to remember are feelings (bewilderment, surprise, anger, chagrin) sensations (the bright lights used for the filming, the discomfort of the arrangements) reactions (how could \they have done this to me; what is the point of this? They have deceived me, telling me there was going to be a discussion, when in fact there was an attack.)

And at his twenty-fifth college reunion Ives wrote to Murray,

My memories of the encounter 25 years ago... The young lawyer was surprisingly hostile... He had wavy jet black hair... The subject was the nature of love. I argued that love could only be for a specific person. He argued that one could love all mankind. We talked about Natasha from WAR & PEACE. I did not enjoy the experience.

We don't know what effect this experiment may have had on Kaczynski. As noted, I did not have access to his records, and therefore cannot attest to his degrees of alienation then. Diana Baumrind, a psychologist at the University of California at Berkeley, observers that deceitful experimentation can be harmful if the subjects "have been emotionally unstable prior to the experiment." Kaczynski must certainly have been among the most vulnerable of Murray's experimental subjects--a point that the researchers seem to have missed. He was among the youngest and the poorest of the group. He may have come from a dysfunctional home.

Lois Skillen, Kaczynski's high school counselor, is among those who believe that the Murray experiment could have been a turning point in Kaczynski's life. Ralph Meister, one of Turk Kacynski's (Kaczynski's father) oldest friends and a retired psychologist who has known Ted Kaczynski since he was a small boy, also raises this possibility. So does one of Murray's own research associates. The TAT results certainly suggest that at the outset of the experiment Kaczynski was mentally healthy, but by the experiment's end judging form Sally Johnson's comments, he was showing the first signs of emotional distress.

As Kaczynski's college life continued, outwardly he seemed to be adjusting to Harvard. But inwardly he increasingly seethed. According to Sally Johnson, he began worrying about his health. He began having terrible nightmares. He started having fantasies about taking revenge against a society that he increasingly viewed as an evil force obsessed with imposing conformism through psychological controls.

These thoughts upset Kaczynski all the more because they exposed his ineffectuality. Johnson reported that he would become horribly angry with himself because he could not express this fury openly. "I never attempted to put any such fantasies into effect," she quoted from his writings, "because I was too strongly conditions...against any defiance of authority...I could not have committed a crime of revenge even a relatively minor crime because...my fear of being caught and punished was all out of proportion to the actual danger of being caught."

Kaczynski felt that justice demanded that he take revenge on society. But he lacked the personal resources at that time to do so. He was--had always been--a good boy. Instead he would seek escape. He began to dram about breaking away from society and living a primitive life. According to Johnson, he "began to study information about wild edible plants" and to spend time learning about he wilderness. And like many American intellectuals before him, from Henry David Thoreau to Edward Abbey, he began to form a plan to seek personal renewal in nature.

Today society would not tolerate the deceptions inherent in the Murray experiments. The researchers seem to have failed at least two requirements in the American Psychological Association's current code of conduct: that they obtain "informed consent" from their subjects and that they "never deceive research participants about significant aspects that would affect their willingness to participate, such as physical risks, disc comfort, or unpleasant emotional experiences. But different standards prevailed then, and what we now view a the abuse of human subjects was common. Researchers around the country performed experiments on undergraduates that put them in psychological peril.

In an infamous experiment conducted in 1962 by the Yale professor Stanley Milgram, subjects (forty men recruited through mail solicitation and a newspaper ad) were led to believe that they were delving ever-more-powerful electric shocks to a stranger, on orders from the researchers. Nearly two third of them continued to obey the orders even when they were asked to administer the highest level of shock, labeled "Danger: Severe Shock." Some participants broke down on learning of third potential for cruelty. "I observed a mature and initially poised businessman enter the laboratory smiling and confident," Milgram wrote, concerning one of his study subjects. "within 20 minutes he was reduced to a twitching, stuttering wreck, who was rapidly approaching a point of nervous collapse."

A 1971 experiment by the Stanford professor Philip Zimbardo embodied the pursuit of scientific truth at the expense of students' psychological health. Zimbardo selected twenty-four students to play a game of guards an prisoners. Nine were "arrested" and taken to a basement "prison" where they were guarded by the others. In a very short time the guard began abusing the prisoners. This sadism erupted so quickly that Zimbardo discontinued the experiment after six days--eight days earlier than originally intended.

The Murray experiment may not have been as intensely traumatic as these other experiments. And its ethics were definitely acceptable in their day. But the ethics of the day were wrong. And they framed Kaczynski's first encounter with a reckless scientific value system that elevated the pursuit of scientific truth above human rights.

When, soon after, Kaczynski began to worry about the possibility of mind control, he was not giving vent to paranoid delusions. In view of Murray's experiments, he was not only rational but right. The university and the psychiatric establishment had been willing accomplices in n experiment that had treated human beings as unwitting guinea pigs, and had treated them brutally. Here is a powerful logical foundation for Kaczynski's latterly expressed conviction that academics, in particular scientists, were thoroughly compromised servants of "the system," employed in the development of techniques for the behavioral control of populations.

THE UNABOMBER

It was the confluence of two streams of development that transformed Ted Kaczynski into the Unabomber. One stream was personal, fed by his anger toward his family and those who he felt had slight or hurt him, in high school and college. The other derived form his philosophical critique of society and its institutions, and reflected the culture of despair he encountered at Harvard and later. The Murray experiment, containing both psychological and philosophical components, may well have fed both streams.

Gradually, while he was immersed in his Harvard readings and in the Murray experiment, Kaczynski began to put together a theory to explain his unhappiness and anger. Technology and science were destroying liberty and nature. the system, of which Harvard was a part, served technology, which in turn required conformism. By advertising, propaganda, and other techniques of behavior modification, this system sought to transform men into automatons, to serve the machine.

Thus did Kaczynski's Harvard experiences shape his anger and legitimize his wrath. By the time he graduated, all the elements that would ultimately transform him into the Unabomber were in place--the ideas out of which he would construct a philosophy, the unhappiness, the feelings of complete isolation. Soon after, so, too, would be his committeemen to positivism--morality was nonrational--made him feel free to murder. Within four years of graduating from Harvard he would be firmly fixed in his life's plan. According to an autobiography he wrote that chronicled his life until the age of twenty-seven, "I thought `I will kill, but I will make at least some effort to avoid detection, so that I can kill again." ... THE EVILS OF INTELLIGENCE ... Today Ted Kaczynski is serving four life terms in a maximum-security prison in Florence, Colorado. Out of sight, he is not out of play. His manifesto continues to be read at colleges around the country. ... It is unlikely that Kaczynski will someday be a free man again, but it is not impossible . Although he pleaded guilty in January of 1998 to the Unabomber crimes, that outcome is currently under appeal. He claims that his attorneys deceived him and acted against this wishes by preparing a "mental defect" defense for him, and that by allowing hits to happen, the court violated his Sixth Amendment right to direct his own defense. The Ninth Circuit Court has agreed to hear his appeal, and a new trial is a possibility. ... No one other than Kaczynski's three victims has yet been murdered by a fanatical environmentalist, but investigators consider it merely a matter of time before someone else is killed for similar reasons. "I think we've come very close to that line," one federal agent told the Oregonian, "and we will cross that line unless we deal with this problem."

We may cross that line sooner than we think. In a September, 1998 letter to me, Kaczynski wrote,

I suspect that you underestimate the strength and depth of feeling against industrial civilization that has been developing in recent years. I've been surprised at some of the things that people have written to me. It looks to me as if our society is moving into a pre-evolutionary situation. (By that I don't mean a situation in which revolution is inevitable, but one in which it is a realistic possibility.) The majority of people are pessimistic or cynical about existing institutions, there is widespread alienation and directionlessness among young people...Perhaps all that is needed is to give these forces appropriate organization and direction.

Seen from that perspective, it might seem that the rest of society is only a few steps behind Kaczynski. When Henry Murray spoke of the need to create a new "World Man," this was not what he had in mind.

The end.