Hijacker targeted president in 1974; for George and Hattie Jean Ramsburg, the events of Sept. 11 are painful reminders of a 1974 hijacker's plot to fly a jetliner into the White House and kill Nixon

0 Comments | Insight on the News, June 24, 2002 | by Sam MacDonald

After several weeks of furious partisan debate about "who knew what and when" about the potential for the Sept. 11 terror attacks, Washington has settled on an uncomfortable consensus: While egregious intelligence failures severely hampered the flow of information, nobody envisioned suicidal maniacs boarding commercial planes and flying them into American landmarks. Unfortunately, the people who reached this conclusion failed to ask a Maryland couple, George and Hattie Jean Ramsburg. They lost a son on Feb. 22, 1974, in a tragic attack that bears an eerie resemblance to Sept. 11.

On that morning, George Neal Ramsburg, 24, a police officer with the Maryland Transportation Authority (MdTA), was manning his post at Baltimore Washington International Airport (BWI), just a few miles from the home he shared with his parents in what now is Columbia, Md. In a recent interview in the living room of that home, his elderly parents tell INSIGHT that Neal, as the family calls him, was filling in for another officer who had taken the night off. Neal was scheduled to take his younger brother, Kenny, to a doctor's appointment in Baltimore when his shift ended in the morning.

But Neal Ramsburg never made it home. At approximately 7 a.m. Samuel Byck, a tire salesman from Philadelphia, unleashed what he called "Operation Pandora's Box," a plot to commandeer an airliner and crash it into the White House and to kill the president. Armed with a handgun and a makeshift gasoline bomb, Byck shot and killed Ramsburg as the officer screened passengers for the flight. Byck then boarded the plane, stormed the cockpit and demanded that the two pilots take off. When they refused he shot them both, killing one.

The assassin then grabbed a terrified passenger, demanding that she help him fly the plane. An Anne Arundel County policeman took the fallen officer's gun and shot and wounded Byck through the cabin window. Aware that his plan was in shambles, Byck killed himself with his own gun.

Byck was known to authorities for mailing threats to the president as early as 1972 and sending strange taped messages to luminaries such as conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein. On Christmas Eve in 1973 he raised eyebrows by picketing the White House dressed in a Santa suit. So infamous did Byck become that Stephen Sondheim made him a character in his play Assassins about people who have tried to kill a president.

The story is so tragically bizarre and full of parallels to Sept. 11 that one would expect the Ramsburgs to be inundated with media inquiries. They are not. They say that the interview with INSIGHT is the only one they have conducted and that they have not seen any media report mention the 1974 plot to destroy the White House with an airliner. "No one's ever called us," Hattie Jean says. "I didn't think they would talk to us, but I did think it would be mentioned in some of the papers."

Only the Dallas Morning News and a few smaller outlets have mentioned the incident in relation to Sept. 11. The Wall Street Journal's online OpinionJournal.com referred briefly to the Dallas piece in late May. The lack of attention is unfortunate because the couple has a unique perspective on Sept. 11, the war on terrorism and the struggle to carry on in the face of tragedy.

The Ramsburg home is itself a testament to their staying power. They moved in with their young family in 1951 when the area was known as Simpsonville. They had more than an acre of isolated land. Now they are sandwiched between U.S. Route 29, which runs through what used to be their front yard, and a ballooning number of sprawl communities with names such as Kings Contrivance.

George, 76, and Hattie Jean, 74, both retired from the telephone company in the mid-1980s. He is a tall, powerfully built man with silver hair. She requires an oxygen tank, but manages to maneuver deftly through her home's overflowing knickknacks and memorabilia. They speak freely about their son and the incident that took his life.

Neal was the eldest of four children. After graduating from Atholton High School, he attended college for one semester before becoming a military policeman in the Army. After his service he began looking for work in law enforcement. He had been on the job approximately a year and still was living at the family home when Byck gunned him down. "He had a girlfriend," his mother says. "I suspect they would have gotten married that summer, but it did not turn out that way."

The Sept. 11 attacks were doubly heart-rending for the Ramsburgs. In addition to the horrible attacks, the very idea of suicide bombers flying planes into landmarks took them back to the day their son died in 1974. George heard the news on his car radio and hurried home to tell his wife. They watched on television as the second tower was attacked. "I think what I thought about at first was, my Lord, those people will never get out of that building," Hattie Jean says. George tells how it hit home for him: "My idea of it was, they copied that idea from twentysome years ago, from the [attempted] hijacking down at BWI.... When they crashed into the towers up there in New York, why, it was a copycat. I still believe it is."