Arthur Sulzberger has done it before. By using the New York Times Company’s bottom line in order to fund almost two-thirds of the MoveOn.org advertisement, in which they call General Petraeus a liar and a traitor, Mr. Sulzberger reminds me of an incident from more than a decade ago.

Do you remember the Unabomber? He was an environmentalist-terrorist who killed and maimed to advance a set of ideas that are a more radical version of the arguments that Al Gore makes in Earth in the Balance. Instead of running for President, Ted Kaczynski, Harvard ’62, chose scientists, intellectuals and others he disagreed with and tried to kill them. In three cases he succeeded, in many others he nearly did, maiming and injuring almost a dozen more.

In 1995, Kaczynski sent a ponderous précis of his anti-human ideas to The New York Times and the Washington Post, and suggested that if it was published, he might call off his terror campaign. After a little hand-wringing and a lot of self-congratulation, both papers did publish the thing, arguing that if Kaczynski were sincere, perhaps some lives might be saved. Arthur Sulzberger did run it by the Clinton administration powers that be, and, unlike now when we are at war, he said he would comply with their advice. Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh said that publishing it would neither help nor hurt their efforts to bring Kaczynski to justice.

However reporters at the Post revealed that there was a proviso to the the Unabomber’s offer, which Sulzberger withheld from the public. In actuality, as Sharon LaFraniere and Pierre Thomas reported (The Washington Post, July 1, 1995), “the bomber reserves the right to continue destroying property, and wrote the Times that the deal is off if law enforcement officials come after him.” Now since Reno and Freeh did not say they would call off the manhunt – far from it – Sulzberger published the Unabomber tract in full knowledge that doing so would not prevent a single additional act of terror.

So why did Sulzberger publish? I think he did only because, in many ways he agreed with Kacynski’s thinking – disagreeing only as allies will over tactics. As I asked readers in the Taki’s Top Drawer section of New York Press in 2001, “what if Kaczynski had demanded, say, the publication of a long rant explaining why African-Americans are genetically inferior? Or made a vivid argument that a fetus felt human pain and fear during an abortion? Or presented a carefully argued case that the Holocaust never took place, or a heartfelt plea that male psychoanalysts should date their lady patients? Sulzberger and [Katherine] Graham would have stood proudly on principle and refused to publish.” But because Sulzberger found the Unabomber’s cause attractive, he found reasons to publish his ideas - while deploring his methods, and pretending disingenuously to be helping protect the public from violence.

In 1995, as he just did this Sunday, Sulzberger made use of the publisher’s privilege of selection and rejection, giving or withholding a discount, to advance views with which he largely agreed, but chose, for reasons that were perhaps a mixture of cunning and cowardice, to let others – however distasteful, in the case of Move-on.org, or criminal, in the case of Ted Kaczynski – say for him.

The only difference was that Sulzberger gave the the Unabomber a discount of 100% - far greater than the folks at MoveOn.org received. If I were in their place, having to spend good money to buy space that the Unabomber got for nothing, I ‘d be looking up the number of a good FTC lawyer.

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