Mercersbu rg Magazi n e spri ng 2011
Prevost was not the first flight instructor Moussaoui studied with; he had trained to fly Cessnas at a school in Oklahoma between February and May of 2001, but left the school without ever having flown by himself—unusual for a pilot with ambitions of guiding jumbo jets. Prevost later testified that Moussaoui seemed to grasp little of the important material needed to learn to fly. During their conversations, the subject of religion came up, and Prevost asked Moussaoui if he was a Muslim. Moussaoui replied, sternly and awkwardly, “I am nothing.” It was a turning point. That evening, Prevost went so far as to note the licenseplate number on the car that Moussaoui arrived in for a simulator session. The FBI spoke with Prevost and others at the flight school and arrested Moussaoui August 16. Just 25 days later, America changed forever.
ClanCy’s li fe On December 23, 2010, the 72-year-old Prevost died of stomach cancer at his winter home in Coral Gables, Florida. He was a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and a former U.S. Navy pilot. He was also a cancer survivor before he became a victim; in 1993, a brain tumor effectively ended Prevost’s 25-year career as a pilot for Northwest Airlines. After he made a full recovery, the airline asked him to stay on as a flight instructor to work with aspiring pilots. It wasn’t the first time Prevost had to successfully navigate a major transition; during the 1970s, as skyrocketing fuel prices crippled the airline industry, Northwest Orient (as the carrier was then known) temporarily laid off Prevost, who supported his family by working in a Pittsburgh steel mill for two years before the airline hired him back. (He was also married five times and was a recovering alcoholic who regularly attended AA meetings and stayed clean for the last 16 years of his life.) Prevost’s father, John ’29, was a
Mercersburg alumnus and also worked as the school’s medical director from 1967 to 1981. Three of Dr. Prevost’s four sons— Clancy, John ’54, and Lou ’67—followed him to the Academy. The younger John Prevost died in 1960 while serving as a pilot in the U.S. Navy; he served on the USS Oriskany with future Senator John McCain and died in the Philippines while on a training mission in preparation for the escalating Vietnam conflict. (Dr. Prevost, who was affectionately known as “Doc,” passed away in 2002.) The Prevost children—the three future Mercersburg students, plus daughter Sally and another son, Jim—grew up in the northern Pennsylvania hamlet of Wellsboro, which is about 50 miles from both Williamsport and Elmira, New York. “My father delivered almost 1,200 babies there,” says Lou Prevost, who owns the Radnor Hotel in the Philadelphia suburbs. “Everybody knew him. And he loved Mercersburg.” Before the September 11 attacks, Clancy Prevost told Lou of one of his students who had been arrested by the FBI and had a pattern of strange behavior. Clancy mentioned to his brother that he was wary of Moussaoui’s intentions once he learned to fly a jumbo jet, and that things didn’t add up. “Back then, we had no idea that there were guys who wanted to crash airplanes into buildings,” Lou says. “So I didn’t really think anything of it until [the attacks].” Lou is a longtime fan of the author and journalist Seymour Hersh, who writes for The New Yorker. He placed a call to Hersh on the night of September 11 and left a message with information that Clancy had told him about Moussaoui. Hersh called Lou back that same evening. “Hersh told me that he was on hold with the executive director of the CIA, who wanted to know how [Hersh] had all this information,” Lou says. “Hersh told me, ‘Clancy is a part of history. This is a huge event in the history of our country, and he’s in the middle of it.’”
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Clancy gave few interviews in the nine years between September 2001 and his death. Lou adds that the Al Jazeera television network even tried to track him down, to no avail. “Clancy’s phones were tapped for five years,” Lou says. “I would call him and you would hear the click on the phone [from the surveillance]. Clancy would say, ‘Let’s all say bye to the FBI.’” Clancy testified in the criminal proceedings against Moussaoui in 2002; Moussaoui pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to commit terrorist acts and to use weapons of mass destruction. He is serving a life sentence without parole in a federal prison in Colorado.
The final quesTion Ultimately, did Clancy Prevost consider himself a hero? The U.S. government sure did—it awarded him $5 million for alerting federal officials to Moussaoui’s erratic and suspicious behavior. The Harvard Business Review devoted a large part of an article about business instincts to Clancy and his interactions with Moussaoui. Lou Prevost says that whenever people told Clancy he was a hero, he frequently responded with the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Show me a hero and I’ll write you a tragedy.” “People called him ‘the reluctant hero,’” Lou says. “The surgeon who operated on him at the Mayo Clinic [for complications related to stomach cancer] turned out to be best friends with a good friend of mine from Wellsboro. When he discovered who Clancy was, the surgeon said to me, ‘He never told me that I was operating on a real hero. I guess that’s the sign of a real hero.’” In addition to siblings Lou, Jim, and Sally (Shoemaker), Clancy’s survivors include his wife, Sheilah; two sons, John ’82 and David; a daughter, Andrea; and seven grandchildren. In spring 2012, Clancy’s remains will be taken at his request to be scattered at Subic Bay in the Philippines— the spot where his eldest brother died more than 50 years before.