The Guardian, April 1989
Eleanor Hudson had nothing but a handful of flowers. The guard at the White House gate could see that. He had dark glasses, a gun on one hip, a night stick on the other, and a big gold badge on his chest. He told her to back off and started closing the gate.
It was at that point that Eleanor Hudson ignited. All the bitter grief that had been burning inside her in the three months since her 16-year-old daughter, Melina, was killed in Pan Am 103, burst into defience in the guard’s face. ‘No,’ she wailed. ‘The flowers are going in. All the flowers are going in.’
Her voice was very loud. She turned to the other relatives of Pan Am 103 victims behind her, all these middle-aged, middle-class people with their anxious faces and their little wreaths. ‘They’re going to take all the flowers,’ she shouted. ‘All the flowers are going in. Bring your flowers.’
So they pressed forward, ignoring the guard and his poker face, and passed their flowers into the hands of the presidential aides lurking just inside the White House grounds and they kept on passing them until they had sent every last white carnation on its way to President Bush as a reminder of Melina Hudson and the 269 others who died with her. The guard had no answer to them.
President Bush will soon learn the lesson of the guard on his gate that these people are not to be put off. By some kind of behavioural fluke, it so happens that Pan Am 103 was carrying a group of passengers who were drawn disproportionately from the white middle class of the north-eastern quarter of the US: probably the most highly educated, highly motivated community in the world.
It took them a while. In fact, it took them exactly 60 days of being blitzed by sadness before, on February 19, their political instincts began to assert themselves and they organised into a pressure group of unusual guile and energy, which has now become the cutting edge of the effort to find the truth.
The prime mover was a high school administrator from New Jersey, a somewhat plump balding man named Bert Ammerman whose younger brother Tom was killed in the disaster. At first, like everyone else, he was consumed by his grief.
‘The grief was tough,’ he said. ‘After that, there was doubt about why this took place and the deafening silence of our executive branch and the State Department. Then the grief started to turn to disappointment and anger and frustration. And this organisation was developed to find out what in God’s name happened.’
The process of launching the organisation was in itself a spur to its formation. Pan Am, for example, refused to give Ammerman the names and addresses of the plane’s passengers on the grounds that this was private. Ammerman went to the State Department in Washington. They also refused. So he threatened them with Congressmen and unpleasant publicity, and finally persuaded them to circulate a letter from him to the bereaved families.
Pooling their experiences, the families found they had all suffered the same bureaucratic indifference to their suffering: no sign of an apology from Pan Am, no hint of any contact from the US government, no escorts for the bodies being shipped back like unwanted waste, no answers to their letters and, most of all, no information.
Only six weeks later, on April 1, they descended on Washington. They had lapel badges, T-shirts, banners, all printed with the slogan ‘Pan Am 103 – The Truth Must Be Known.’ They had photographs of every victim displayed on boards. They had produced their own video of interviews with the bereaved. They had a petition with a quarter of a million signatures. They had contacted every senator on Capitol Hill by letter and telephone. They had linked with other relatives in Britain, Spain, France, and West Germany.
They spent three days holding press conferences. The mild-mannered Bert Ammerman, suddenly thrust into the public eye, became an acerbic orator, denouncing ‘power and greed and political vested interests’ and challenging the governments of Britain and the US: ‘Get your act together and protect us, or let us put other people in there to do the job properly.’
Ammerman and four others got in to see George Bush and confronted him with his own report on terrorism, written in 1986 when he was Vice-President, which has never been converted into action. When they came out, the swarm of journalists asked if they were grateful that Bush had seen them. Wendy Giebler who lost her husband William in the disaster, slapped them down: ‘I’m glad we had the opportunity,’ she said, ‘but I’m not grateful, because we deserved it.’
They had a vigil in Lafayette Park right outside the White House, reciting poems, reading the names of the dead, piling up flowers in their memory. Those were the flowers that Eleanor Hudson then thrust into the White House.
As she did so, she was clutching a photograph of her daughter in one hand. ‘All I want in exchange for my daughter’s life,’ she said, ‘is the truth.’
The inevitable legal battle will be fought with equal tenacity. The stakes are high. American lawyers announced this week that they are claiming $25m (£14.8m) compensation for the widow of a British management consultant, Elizabeth Delude-Dix – the first British relative to join the joint US action against Pan Am.
Meanwhile Eleanor Hudson has begun to find out more about Melina’s death. Although she has never been to Lockerbie, she knows now the precise spot where her daughter died: at the end of Sherwood Crescent. But she wants to know everything, and she says she will.
