Unresolved Evil
GELERNTER, DAVID
On January 22, the man known as the Unabomber struck a deal: He pled guilty to the murders and mayhem he had committed over two decades of terrorism and was sentenced to life in prison. It was a bad...
...The prosecutors believed that truth and justice demanded the death penalty...
...My guess is that, two generations ago, a large majority of Americans would have condemned such a course as disgusting, and most intellectuals would have shrugged it off...
...When it's 3 a.m...
...We have come a long way since then...
...a self-aggrandizing theme, but absorbing...
...The crowd babbles and sulks, and no one can understand it...
...her husband was murdered by a bomb in New Jersey...
...So we sat in court chatting about the bathroom situation, waiting for the trial to start...
...But it is a perfect crystallization of the credo we have learned to associate with intellectuals—not all of them, but too many: "Si le geste est beau...
...Rumors flew thick and fast...
...a trial is a powerful public ceremony, too, and we no longer trust ourselves to pull it off...
...The room lacks majesty, stateliness, bathrooms...
...Up at Harvard last term in Lit 129, "Reading the 18th Century Through 20th Century Eyes," the reading list included Beaumarchais, Diderot, Kant, Rousseau, Fou-cault, Kundera, and "Unabomber," among other distinguished thinkers...
...Prosecution-related people sat in front on the left, defense people on the right—"sort of like a wedding," an FBI man explained...
...Every big trial in modern America is a national humiliation waiting to happen...
...I got ready for it by working on a series of three paintings that gradually elbowed all my other work aside, pictures of David getting set to take on Goliath...
...Harvard rewarded his hard work with the thing he wanted most...
...We hold trials to deal justly with the accused, but that's not all...
...I once saw him, when the judge said something he didn't like, lean back in his chair and stare silently at the ceiling as if he were exasperated with God and wanted God to know it...
...Public life is a conversation forever, year to year, generation to generation...
...Power and money ranking higher than childrearing on our moral scale...
...The session was supposed to start at eight...
...They'd fetched us at the airport the night before, and they shepherded us around Sacramento in their white government-issue Chevy Luminas...
...Which leaves us today with a new responsibility: to respond to the response...
...I believe them...
...The prosecutors were already there: Freccero, Cleary, and Lapham...
...I dreaded it, naturally...
...their grids, their numbered charts, their endless roomsful of evidence could give you the queasy impression of a well with no bottom...
...The younger FBI agents are so nice it's alarming...
...Elite public opinion acts on the Justice Department, the jury, and the judge...
...We found the man and put him away...
...A plea bargain in a case like this is an abrogation of the public's responsibility to face facts and come to grips with the truth...
...Kaczynski would plead guilty to the crimes that were charged in Sacramento, and his other crimes too, for which he might have been tried in other states— three murders in all, plus a bunch of attempted murders...
...and I can't sleep, I don't think, ever, about the evil coward who worked hard, burned the midnight oil, and made that Harvard reading list at last—an American success story...
...FBI agents do the legwork and handle trial logistics...
...In police terms, which are important, our communal response to Kaczyn-ski's crimes succeeded...
...One of them (I was told) made a sketch of me, and I decided that the next day I came to court I'd bring pencils and make a sketch of her...
...Three unlucky men died to make Kaczynski's name at Harvard...
...And they were beleaguered and exhausted...
...How we dispose of the criminal doesn't matter...
...A painting is a form of trapped energy, like a compressed spring or a rock at the top of a hill...
...I had come with my wife...
...For sophisticates like us, destroying worlds is no big deal anymore...
...A famous passage in the Mishnah, tractate Sanhedrin, lays down that to murder a man is to destroy a whole world...
...The FBI had set up a "witness room" where we could gather and get briefed, away from the press...
...our assignment was to lay out for the jury what it's like when a package explodes in your face and you almost die...
...Bad men can be good writers...
...On that day I met her in the witness room, Susan Mosser was dignified and beautiful and dressed in black...
...I asked a couple of them what they thought of Director Louis Freeh, and they praised him by citing anecdotes about how much time he spends with his kids: how one child had told Janet Reno that Dad couldn't come to the phone because he was playing Nintendo...
...Of course not...
...It was important that the man be sentenced to death, and whether the execution were ever carried out would barely have mattered...
...What to expect of a society that no longer roots for its own best instincts...
...We can and must hold it responsible for failing to condemn every evil act...
...They were painfully discreet: Freccero praised the judge several times in our many long conversations, and never said a word against him...
...The spectator pews are divided by an aisle down the middle...
...He'd waited till the whole cast was assembled, and we were on the verge of starting, then tossed his wrench into the works with casual arrogance and perfect aim and, sure enough, the machinery clanked to a halt...
...Judge Garland E. Burrell Jr.'s courtroom is done up in mid-'60s Holiday Inn style...
...Harvard knew perfectly well that, by and large, its faculty, students, and moneyed supporters wouldn't give a damn...
...And so what...
...Most of the survivors were on hand, together with other witnesses and assorted family members...
...Which is exactly what happened to the murderer Kaczynski...
...I never did hear the straight story...
...We can and must hold it responsible for failing to condemn every evil act...
...A summary version of the evidence had arrived in the care of an FBI man, dozens of loose-leaf binders carefully arranged in what looked like a fancy shopping cart...
...The community will either seal the defeat by shrugging it off or, by admitting that it was a defeat, and a painful one, turn it into a kind of victory: a reaffir-mation that evil will always exist but we will never accept it...
...He attacked us with bombs for exactly this purpose: to get famous, win attention for his ideas...
...The prosecutors tell me they did the best they could under the circumstances...
...Occasionally he would criticize the defense or the press in quiet, guarded terms...
...We need to hear them, and hear good acts praised, too...
...the prosecutors played that part...
...Had he been condemned to death, apologized, and repented, I might have been inclined myself to commute the sentence...
...there is suppressed tragedy in his voice...
...But nowadays we disdain to do that, and we are haunted as a nation by unresolved evil—we dine at Macbeth's every night, and pretend not to see Banquo's ghost...
...out moral substance—but praising good...
...Just a guess...
...When a criminal commits an evil act, a healthy society denounces it as such...
...Lit 129 speaks loudly in its own small way...
...We can't hold society accountable for failing to prevent every evil act...
...Ceremonies of all sorts are beyond us, from trials to political conventions to weddings...
...The metal detector outside the courtroom is more sensitive than your standard airport model...
...Yes he had, in the great American tradition, traded up...
...What matters is our communal response to the crime...
...They had dotted every i and crossed every t, but entering the funhouse of the modern U.S...
...It's up to the community to redeem the evil and collectively transcend it, by responding with dignity, assurance, and absolute clarity...
...how the director had missed an official ceremony because of a boys' soccer match...
...Towards eight, my wife asked an FBI man when the defendant would arrive...
...When the trial reconvened later that afternoon, it was only to arrange a recess...
...No longer talks intelligently to itself...
...With the right communal response, we can redeem the prosecutors' bargain...
...justice system, you could feel them setting their jaws...
...But ever since the intelligentsia took over the cultural elite, moral leadership is hard to find...
...that's why we have paint too...
...They lost—we lost—because the community was called on to condemn terrorist murder in the strongest possible terms, unambiguously, definitively—and we blew it...
...No one is killed but forty-seven people are hurt...
...There are a few honorable exceptions, which are precious to those of us with a personal stake in the thing...
...A cool, collected voice: He and his lawyers were having a serious disagreement about how to proceed, he said...
...they were bears at a bear-baiting...
...he used to live in an unimproved shack in the wilderness...
...the murder of her husband would have been tried separately in New Jersey...
...the walls are paneled in wood that has somehow been made to look plastic...
...Paris, 1893: A terrorist bomb explodes in the Chamber of Deputies...
...There's a lot worse going on in academia today...
...The furniture is austere...
...Epstein and I were among the first witnesses on the agenda...
...We were ready...
...The Epsteins were there, with their son and daughter—Professor Epstein got blown up the same day I did...
...Maybe...
...Should we decorate Harvard for guts at least, pin a medal on its chest for courting public outrage in defense of depravity...
...Cleary and Freccero both radiate intense moral seriousness...
...His features are blunt and forceful...
...Some thinkers (I don't deny) agree with his anti-technology ideas...
...The prosecutors struggled but lost...
...Such houses don't come cheap, and I still haven't delivered...
...Bull's-eye...
...the traveling itself, the courtroom scene, the press, the testimony...
...a dream come true...
...And if an appeals court decreed a second trial, could it win again...
...In moral terms, which are even more important, our response was a failure...
...He's already here," the answer was, "over at the defense table...
...A sustained, unanimous hiss rises from the crowd—or at least is supposed to...
...The criminologist John DiIulio estimates that there are maybe half a million of them in our big cities...
...Next morning we flew home to Connecticut...
...When the prosecution team huddled in court, Cleary in the center, Freccero and Lapham leaning sharply toward him on either side, you could picture the heat-shimmer overhead...
...The whole FBI talks like a social-work agency...
...Could the prosecution win anyway, succeed in getting the murderer condemned to death...
...The Department of Justice is a powerful institution—but the community as a whole is more powerful, as it ought to be and has to be...
...I got ready by working on a series of three paintings that gradually elbowed all my other work aside, pictures of David getting set to take on Goliath...
...No one told us to rise...
...There never was a next day...
...Children learning about sex instead of morality...
...There were (maybe) thirty of us, and one elevator, and a lot of after-you'ing as we arranged ourselves into elevator-sized groups...
...The judge adjourned to chambers, taking along the defendant and the defense Every big trial in modern America is a national humiliation waiting to happen...
...O. J. Simpson is merely the best-known example of what is today a regular garden-variety, Mister-Rogers'-Neighborhood American type—the murderer at large...
...The judge walked in...
...In moral terms, our response to Kaczynski's crimes was a failure...
...The plan was to get us downstairs into the courtroom before the reporters got in...
...The anarchist intellectual Laurent Tailhade is asked to comment...
...I'd bet money that Harvard is not the only college with this particular terrorist on its reading lists...
...Mosser I wasn't thinking about children...
...I couldn't get through without setting off the alarm, on account of the metal in the fake thumb I wear strapped to the remainder of my right hand or, maybe, the shrapnel fragments still floating around in my chest...
...Cost to the defendant (special deal, one time only): life in federal prison without parole...
...that's all...
...what came to mind for some reason was a promise I'd made my wife a long time ago, that someday I would buy her a house by the shore...
...The first voice we heard after the judge's was the defendant's...
...But when I met Mrs...
...Cleary was the head man— tall with a trim beard and dark piercing rabbinical eyes...
...therefore, a healthy society talks to itself—in laws and editorials, court judgments and theater productions, public lectures, political speeches, university courses...
...There are evil men in every society, and they do evil things...
...Part of the prosecution's job is to establish what happened...
...Goodness is unnatural, and we need to cheer one another on...
...We can't hold society accountable for failing to prevent every evil act...
...that evil had been done, and they knew who did it, and they knew what ought to be done with that man...
...we will always fight it...
...Maybe...
...Harvard risked nothing...
...ish...
...In retrospect I wasn't David...
...The date approached, and (with generous help from the FBI) we planned our trip...
...And if you are an ascetic bent on winning fame by preaching against society and the state, you couldn't ask for a bullier pulpit than a federal jail cell...
...They believed I dreaded the trial...
...A terrorist murderer who is rewarded instead of punished...
...Amid all the grimness and high-tech: two sketch artists with neat ranks of Derwent colored pencils—such a whimsical, out-of-place touch, it made my day...
...Freccero is broader, looks and moves like a boxer, speaks in grim slow-motion, like a Gary Cooper sheriff...
...The bathroom situation was a hot topic that morning...
...He is not humorless, but I rarely saw him smile...
...Nonetheless, they lost...
...but someday I believe I will...
...Harvard's course makes no difference in itself...
...The evidence had been put online too, and there was sophisticated computer equipment on hand...
...Simpson is merely the best-known example of what is today a regular, garden-variety American type— the murderer at large...
...In a series of long conversations last fall they explained their strategy and kept us informed, and the preliminaries seemed to be on course...
...Unresolved Evil On Justice and the End of the Unabomber By David Gelernter There never were any group meetings among us targets of the so-called Unabomber, but we nearly had one in Sacramento on the day the trial began...
...Moral chaos...
...But I do wonder sometimes what promises Thomas Mosser made and will never keep...
...In court I met a senior FBI man with a gruffer delivery and a hardboiled Tip O'Neill face, but he used the word "supportive" twice in one conversation...
...Such ritual denunciations strengthen our good inclinations and help us suppress our bad ones...
...A third of babies born out of wedlock...
...I pointed out that the Mossers' youngest child was 15 months old when her father was murdered, that no one remembers life at that age, and that the crime of erasing a father from his child's memory is the evilest crime I can imagine...
...But in the end (my impression is) there were too many maybes for comfort—and there was the worry in the back of everyone's mind that things could somehow go horribly wrong and the murderer could walk...
...What I blamed on the intelligentsia was our morally bankrupt response—especially the press's response...
...Not because the murderer is alive and not dead...
...When I wasn't working on the paintings, I carried them around with me, studied them for hours, stayed up nights reworking them...
...It came time for us to be escorted down in batches...
...The same thing could have happened nearly (though not quite) anywhere in modern academia...
...The prosecutors had prepared us well...
...I wrote a book in which, some people claimed, I blamed the intelligentsia for Kaczynski's crimes...
...There was a bond among us after all, everyone was friendly and polite—and no one was in any hurry...
...Some claimed that once the judge arrived, you weren't allowed out until recess...
...The prosecution was colossally meticulous...
...I'm grateful to Thomas Lipscomb for pointing this out to me...
...They tried me a few times, then waved me through...
...Trouble is, Kaczynski made the Harvard reading list not despite his vicious crimes but because of them...
...She wouldn't have testified in Sacramento...
...We need to hear the crowd (hear ourselves) praising good and denouncing evil...
...You can't put everything in words...
...When a terrorist murders a man, it is a meaningless act...
...The way to do it is by telling them, "You lost, no question—but we honor you for fighting...
...The defendant himself was a proven first-rate manipulator, and our legal system is wide open to manipulation...
...A president who grows more popular the worse he behaves...
...And my guess is that, today, a bare majority of the public would still find it disgusting and a large majority of intellectuals would still shrug it off...
...But elite public opinion tends to oppose the death penalty and seemed especially prone to oppose it in this case...
...Such an accusation would have been ludicrous, and I didn't make it...
...half a million murderers at large...
...What difference do the victims make if the gesture is beautiful...
...He speaks prophetically for the 20th-century intelligentsia and for Harvard University circa 1998: "Qu'importe les victimes si le geste est beau...
...But no serious person ever claimed that his thoughts were new, or that his manifesto was well argued or well written...
...Susan Mosser was there...
...Others said that leaving was no problem, but you couldn't get back in...
...We were seated by seven-thirtyDavid Gelernter, a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard, is the author of Drawing Life: Surviving the Unabomber (Free Press) and, most recently, Machine Beauty (BasicBooks...
...Harvard rewarded his hard work with the thing he wanted most...
...Failure to hold the trial was a defeat in itself...
...For myself, I'm left with three painted Davids, one per prosecutor...
...I'd written the Justice Department when it was pondering whether to seek the death penalty in this case...
...lawyers and a court reporter...
...Not commiserating and whining and preening, not promising to be non-judgmental and always to love one another just as we are (you wish) and showering each other with ersatz forgiveness like tinsel snow at a grade-school Christmas play—those are lollipop gestures, cheap and childish, sticky-sweet and withThree unlucky men died to make Kaczynski's name at Harvard...
...A few weeks later the prosecution made a deal, and the trial was canceled...
...She had come to register support and see what happened...
...Kaczynski made that Harvard reading list on the basis of our shattered hands and shattered eyes, permanent injury and permanent pain—ours, the lucky ones who survived...
...They'd come to see me in New Haven several times and showed me FBI photographs of the crime scene: my office, a bathroom where I'd stopped briefly and pointlessly to wash out my eye, the staircase I'd walked down—everything drenched in blood...
...It was a bad deal...
...Evil is easy, good is hard, temptation is a given...
...denouncing evil...
...I'm sorry I can't rise to address you," he added, "but the marshal told me to remain seated...
...a self-aggrandizing theme, but absorbing...
...I'd got to know Freccero and Cleary, and to admire them...
...He attacked us with bombs for exactly this purpose: to get famous, win attention for his ideas...
...Norman Mailer once stabbed his wife, and I've written about him myself and praised his books...
Vol. 3 • April 1998 • No. 29
