The Washington Post and The New York Times publish the Unabomber's manifesto.
Theodore John Kaczynski ( k-ZIN-skee; born May 22, 1942), also known as the Unabomber (), is an American domestic terrorist and former mathematics professor. He was a mathematics prodigy, but abandoned his academic career to pursue a primitive life.In 1971, Kaczynski moved to a remote cabin without electricity or running water near Lincoln, Montana, where he lived as a recluse while learning survival skills to become self-sufficient. He witnessed the destruction of the wilderness surrounding his cabin and concluded that living in nature was becoming impossible. He resolved to fight industrialization and its destruction of nature through terrorism.
Between 1978 and 1995, Kaczynski killed three people and injured 23 others in a nationwide bombing campaign against people he believed to be advancing modern technology and the destruction of the environment. He issued a social critique rejecting leftism, opposing industrialization, and advocating a nature-centered form of anarchism. In 1995, he sent a letter to The New York Times promising to "desist from terrorism" if the Times or The Washington Post published his essay, Industrial Society and Its Future, in which he argued that his bombings were extreme but necessary in attracting attention to the erosion of human freedom and dignity by modern technologies that require mass organization.Kaczynski was the subject of the longest and most expensive investigation in the history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) up to that point. The FBI used the case identifier UNABOM (University and Airline Bomber) before his identity was known, resulting in the media naming him the "Unabomber". The FBI and Attorney General Janet Reno pushed for the publication of Industrial Society and Its Future, which appeared in The Washington Post in September 1995. Upon reading the essay, Kaczynski's brother, David, recognized the prose style and reported his suspicions to the FBI. After his arrest in 1996, Kaczynskimaintaining that he was sanetried and failed to dismiss his court-appointed lawyers because they wanted him to plead insanity to avoid the death penalty. In 1998, a plea bargain was reached under which he pleaded guilty to all charges and was sentenced to eight consecutive life terms in prison without the possibility of parole.
The Washington Post (also known as the Post and, informally, WaPo) is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most-widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large national audience. Daily broadsheet editions are printed for D.C., Maryland, and Virginia.
The newspaper has won 69 Pulitzer Prizes, the second-most of any publication (after The New York Times). It is considered a newspaper of record in the US. Post journalists have also received 18 Nieman Fellowships and 368 White House News Photographers Association awards. The paper is well known for its political reporting and is one of the few remaining American newspapers to operate foreign bureaus.
The Post was founded in 1877. In its early years, it went through several owners and struggled both financially and editorially. Financier Eugene Meyer purchased it out of bankruptcy in 1933 and revived its health and reputation, work continued by his successors Katharine and Phil Graham (Meyer's daughter and son-in-law), who bought out several rival publications. The Post's 1971 printing of the Pentagon Papers helped spur opposition to the Vietnam War. Subsequently, in the best-known episode in the newspaper's history, reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein led the American press's investigation into what became known as the Watergate scandal, which resulted in the 1974 resignation of President Richard Nixon. The advent of the internet expanded the Post's national and international reach. In October 2013, the Graham family sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a holding company owned by Jeff Bezos, for $250 million.