Cohen, Susan, and Daniel Cohen. Pan Am 103: The Bombing, The Betrayals, And A Bereaved Family’s Search For Justice. New York: New American Library, 2000. Available on Amazon.
What drives me is something . . . more personal, basic, primitive. My daughter was murdered, and I want to get the bastards who killed her, and the bastards who planned her murder, and the bastards who let it happen, and the bastards who are helping the bastards who are helping all the other bastards get away with it. Revenge is a word I do understand.
—Daniel Cohen
Daniel and Susan Cohen are perhaps the most visible, outspoken, and controversial of the American family members who lost loved ones on Pan Am 103. Theodora, a brilliantly talented theater major and the couple’s only child, was one of the 35 Syracuse University students lost over Lockerbie on December 21, 1988.
Published on the eve of the trial in 2000, Pan Am 103 chronicles the couple’s transformation from authors and parents to committed activists over the course of the decade following the destruction of Flight 103 on December 21, 1988, the day Susan Cohen’s “life came to an end.” Daniel and Susan’s description of the frenetic trip to the airport, during which Susan attempted to throw herself out of the car, sets the tone for the remainder of the text. The work is alternately poignant, anguished, angry, and vengeful. There are touching moments as well, particularly a message directed to Theo in the final chapter, yet the work is bereft of sentimentality—the passage begins with these sobering lines: “I know you can’t hear me, Theo. You are ashes in a graveyard now.”
Prolific authors, the Cohen’s have produced a book in which the writing is concise, direct, and devoid of artifice. Daniel and Susan speak to us through alternating subsections in each chapter, though the work isn’t especially dialogic in nature as the authors seek to address the audience rather than each other. Together, they provide detailed accounts of the chaos at JFK on December 21, the rise and eventual split of Victims of Pan Am 103, personal struggles with grief and depression, the machinations of lawyers and politicians, struggles with other family members over political methodologies, and above all, a steadfast willingness to speak as bluntly and openly as possible through any and every media outlet.
Critical reviews reflect the couple’s polarizing nature. Several critics were put off by the Cohen’s willingness to criticize other family members and the victims’ groups. Other took exception to the intensity of Daniel and Susan’s rage, their celebration of Pan Am’s demise, and the passage concerning Theo being reduced to “ashes.”
Given the Coehn’s reputation for controversy and the often mixed I approached the text with a fair degree of trepidation. Though their shared anger is disconcerting at times, their frustrations are often understandable. The work gives readers an insider’s perspective of what it’s like to operate as activists in collective and individual efforts against a larger background of pragmatism and obstructionism. The work is interspersed with touching moments as well, including Susan’s decision to bury Theo’s remains in a beautiful Cape May cemetery, an act that lends a deeper context to the oft-quoted line above.
Perhaps the most difficult portions of the work are those in which Daniel and Susan criticize other family members, though they often omit names, presumably to tone down the rancor still simmering over a decade after the attacks. Activism, like grief, can be intensely personal in nature, and the work’s uncompromising approach seems to occlude this reality at times.
Daniel and Susan remain visible in the media decades after the attack though Daniel suffered a stroke several years ago, limiting his ability to communicate.
Gerson, Allen, and Jerry Adler. The Price of Terror: How the Families of the Victims of Pan Am 103 Brought Libya to Justice. New York: Harper Collins, 2001. Available on Amazon.
The families were a new force in the world. To Kaddafi, they must have seemed powerless, virtually invisible—just like all the other grieving mothers and fathers, the sobbing widows . . . But, armed with their invincible grief and outrage, they made their own standing, in defiance of a tradition of sovereign immunity dating back to the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
—Allen Gerson and Jerry Adler
Written shortly after Abdelbaset al-Megrahi’s conviction, The Price of Terror provides a detailed history of the legal battles over the decade following the bombing of Pan Am 103. Coauthor Allan Gerson, an attorney for several family members including Bruce Smith, a Pan Am employee who lost his wife in the bombing, played a key role in the criminal and civil trials. His perspective, coupled with Jerry Adler’s fluid prose and detailed reporting, make The Price of Terror an invaluable resource for those interested in examining the legal and political struggles, failures, and successes in the wake of the terrorist attack.
Gerson and Adler open the text with a grim, clinical description of the bombing and its immediate effects on the passengers. They opt to do this not only as a reminder of the physical consequences of what 12 ounces of Semtex will do to a 747 flying over 500 miles per hour at 31,000 feet, but also as a segue into a lengthy, maddeningly frustrating tale of corporate malfeasance, governmental obstructionism, obtuse laws, and political pragmatism.
It all starts with the weeks leading up to December 21, 1988, the tragic date upon which political machinations intersected with Pan Am’s willful incompetence. Much has been written about the Helsinki Warning, the memo containing a bomb threat specifically targeting a Pan Am flight before Christmas. Although the threat was apocryphal, the authors provide a detailed explanation of just how inadequate Pan Am’s security was.
That Pan Am would charge a fee for “enhanced security” was unconscionable in light of recent, albeit poorly communicated, events in Germany. “Autumn Leaves,” the West German anti-terrorism operation that exposed a cell of bomb makers who planted Semtex explosive into seemingly innocuous Toshiba cassette radios. West German police boasted of having broken up a terrorist ring, although a number of bombs remained unaccounted for. Had Pan Am’s security outfit followed protocol and opened the unchecked Samsonite suitcase, they would have discovered a bomb matching the description of the one recovered in October. Instead, Pan Am’s woefully trained and unqualified security passed the suitcase through an outdated x-ray machine incapable of detecting plastic explosives.
Almost as galling are the insurance company and Pan Am’s efforts to deflect responsibility for the attack using any means necessary. Gerson and Adler present an insider’s look at the birth of one of the most tenacious and distracting of conspiracy theories—the assertion that the plane was brought down as part of a vast and complex CIA operation involving drugs, couriers, and subterfuge. Based on the testimony of a thoroughly discredited “agent,” this line of inquiry would cast Pan Am as the victim of circumstances well beyond their control. Years later, the Libyans would use a similar approach.
Family members understandably struggled to sift through the barrage of contradictory stories and information; worse, they faced a number of seemingly insurmountable obstacles to their quest for justice. Government officials were often outright unsympathetic, the Warsaw Convention limited monetary awards to the families of aircraft crash victims, and the principle of international sovereignty made the act of filing civil litigation against the government of a terrorist nation virtually impossible. Gerson and Adler lead readers through the complex maze of over a decade’s worth of political wrangling and complex litigation.
Despite their inexperience and the vast resources often deployed against them, the families were able to hold Pan Am and its insurers culpable for the bombing. They were able to bring enough political and economic pressure on Libya to force Kaddafi to agree to a trial in the Hague. Finally, they filed a groundbreaking civil suit against the Libyan government that ultimately won billions in settlement money, setting a precedent for civil action against terrorist states.
The authors maintain a critical but generally objective stance throughout the text. They are clearly sympathetic to the families, while at the same time they can acknowledge, through insider information and hindsight, that some of the travails family members encountered in the months following the bombing were often due more to confusion or misunderstandings than outright malfeasance, though they readily identify many examples of mistreatment and mendacity.
The text is eminently readable and informative. At times, the story strays rather far from the plight of the families, though this is primarily due to the complexity of the legal and political issues that under-gird the litigation.
Dornstein, Ken. The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky: A True Story. New York: Random House, 2006. Available on Amazon.
Once upon a time, I had a brother. He was older, bigger, wiser, more daring, more passionate, better spoken, and much better looking. He traveled farther away from home than I ever imagined I would. I admired him. I was nineteen when he died, a sophomore in college. Now I am in my midthirties. I have some memories of my brother, but not as many as I’d like to think. And each time I check, I seem to have one fewer.
—Ken Dornstein
Much like its subject, The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky is a study in complexity. Ken Dornstein’s chronicle of his attempts to recreate his brother David’s life defies easy categorization. As much an examination of the author’s life as it is an homage to a complex young man who died in Ella Ramsden’s back yard, The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky is a travel narrative, a study in psychology, a historical account of the bombing, a detective story, and a romance.
David Dornstien, a 25 year old graduate of Brown University, aspired to be a writer. At least one contemporary account of the tragedy alluded to the fact that he was in the midst of writing a work of exceptional literary prowess when the bomb opened Pan Am 103 to the Scottish night, ending a promising career and scattering, irrecoverably, the pages of his masterpiece.
Home for the holidays, 19 year old Ken Dornstein had little idea that his brother boarded Pan Am 103 after lengthy stay in Israel. Like hundreds of others, Ken and his family became unwilling inductees into a circle of loss when David’s flight shattered over Lockerbie on the night of December 21, 1988. Unlike many relatives, it took Ken some time to learn of the disaster: “The night my brother died, I slept fine., back in my old bed in my old room in my old house where I grew up.” He awoke the next morning to the news of the crash, blissfully unaware that “David had been dead on the ground since early the night before.” The family would learn of David’s death when Pan Am agents phoned on the afternoon of the 22nd. Ken would deliver what he later titled “my awful eulogy” at David’s memorial service.
Dornstien blazes a convoluted trail through the process of grief and discovery, eschewing a chronological narrative in favor of a series of vignettes that take us to Lockerbie, California, and Israel, all while skipping back and forth through decades. We learn small details about the history of the 747 (the spiral staircase on early model 747s was a touch specifically requested by Pan Am), details of the flight itself (Crocodile Dundee II was the in-flight movie), and the contents of David’s pockets on the day he fell to earth.
More importantly, we see Ken’s quest to reconnect with his mercurial older brother, and how this search ultimately raised more questions than it answered: “my idea was this: I would help David finish whatever it was that he had started to write. But the more I read, the less clear I grew about what that really was . . . this map he left, once I tried to follow it, led only to imaginary places.” Though he filled dozens of notebooks with his thoughts and ideas, including a prescient sketch for an unwritten story about a talented writer who dies in a plane crash, David Dornstein never penned the great work supposedly lost in the bombing.
Ken Dornstein’s investigation reveals David’s complex and often disturbing patterns of behavior, hints of his deep internal struggles that often boiled to the surface, and a chilling intimation of sexually abuse. David’s life casts a shadow long after it came to an end at Park Place; as he uncovers murky details from his brother’s life, Ken becomes increasingly entwined in the very story he seeks to record. This is especially evident as he interacts with 2 of David’s ex-girlfriends; his relationship with one forms that core of much of the text and a driving force behind struggle to honor his brother while extricating himself from David’s legacy.
The Boy Who Fell out of the Sky is a fascinating, dizzying, and powerful exploration of memory and mourning, and a revealing study of how our perceptions of others, even those close to us, often prove illusory. Dornstein’s writing is polished and evocative even if the book’s chronological and spatial leaps are dizzying at times.
Deppa, Joan. The Media and Disasters: Pan Am 103. New York: New York UP, 1994. Available on Amazon.
Those who can turn from the despair of such tragedies to the forging of new and positive relationships and to the active pursuit of a safer, more peaceful world deserve to be applauded and abetted. Theirs is the good news, that humanity involves caring for and about one another, even when the bond originally was forged out of tragedy in a small market town in the southern hills of Scotland.
—Joan Deppa
Joan Deppa, a professor at Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Communication, confronted several overly-enthusiastic journalists on the steps of Hendricks Chapel on the night of December 21, 1988. The ensuing chaos and handling of the coverage of the bombing by the British and American press, Scottish authorities, Syracuse University, and Pan Am, prompted her to write this detailed but accessible analysis of what she saw as one of the first major tragedies to occur in the early years of new information technology.
For the first time, reporters had access to modems, satellite uplinks, cell phones, and many of the tools that, while primitive by today’s standards, were revolutionary in 1988. These tools enabled the rapid dissemination of news which, combined with editorial pressure and the often vastly disparate goals of the various institutions, businesses, newspapers, and television stations entangled in the tragedy, led to often shockingly insensitive and intrusive actions.
Deppa relates 3 incidents that struck me in particular: the recording and broadcast of a woman collapsing in tears and screams at JFK (I vividly recall that coverage to this day, over 25 years after the bombing), a television station’s decision to obtain and broadcast a list of Syracuse University students who were slated to be on the plane before word reached many of the families, and a reporter’s decision to peer through the front window of the Pi Beta Phi house at the grieving young women within.
Not all journalists were so callous. Through a lengthy period of research, Deppa interviews a number of reporters whose empathetic approaches lead to stories of great depth and compassion.
The Scottish authorities receive some of the highest praise for their remarkable degree of efficiency and preparedness. S.U.’s response to the crisis was mixed at best, while Pan Am seemed to stumble at every turn.
Deppa is somewhat of a pioneer in that she incorporates a considerable amount of psychological analysis in the text. Written in an era when journalists were supposed to epitomize a gritty detachment, The Media and Disasters contains a number of cautionary tales of journalists and first responders who found themselves incapable of dealing with the horrors they witnessed in Lockerbie. Furthermore, she admonishes journalists to understand the psychological state of the bereaved; she is particularly (and rightfully) critical of that most awful of questions so often posed to grieving friends and relatives: “How do you feel?” She concludes that most relatives, still trying to process the shock of the tragedy in light of often misleading or incomplete information, were numbed by the tragedy.
One of the tales that resonated most deeply with me was the account of a student who, on the eve of the tragedy, expressed feelings remarkably similar to my own when he said the following to a campus minister: “I don’t know anyone on the plane. Why does it hurt so much?” I asked myself the same question dozens of times in the months following the bombing of Pan Am 103.
Equal parts history, analysis, ethical tract, and psychological study, The Media and Disasters is a useful work for those interested in the application of media ethics and practices in a rapidly-unfolding scenario.
On a personal note, Journalism was one of the fields I considered as I entered college in 1986. I took Newspaper Writing in the fall of 1989, where I encountered an instructor who embodied the hard-nosed journalistic ethos of the time. Though I’d shifted my focus away from the press at that point, the coverage of Pan Am 103, coupled with often heated arguments in the classroom, left me with a bitter taste that took years to dissipate.
