I was eager to get back to work. After all, pilots and astronauts want to fly, not give speeches. But as I searched for my next role in Houston, I began to receive disturbing letters from a woman in England. She was in a mental hospital and wrote to me about imaginary animals—mostly elephants, I recall—that walked through her room and on the walls. I turned the letters over to our security officers.
The letters kept coming. She was now out of hospital, she told me. One letter enclosed the key to her apartment and told me to visit when I was next in Europe. I continued to turn over the letters to security.
The last letter said, “I am on my way.” I didn’t know what that meant, but I grew very concerned. My two young daughters lived right across the street from the space center, and there had been plenty of press about the location of my space-age bachelor pad. We wouldn’t be hard to find. The security team who guarded the space center stayed alert.
A couple of days after the last letter, they came across the woman walking along the fence line of the center. I don’t know how they dealt with her. I was told that they put her on an airplane back to England. I never heard from her again. If this was fame, I was not sure I wanted it.
At least there was work to do again. Dave, Jim, and I were assigned as the backup crew for Apollo 17, which would attempt the final lunar landing. Heading back into training so fast was normally a sign that Deke was pleased with your work, and you would soon rotate into a prime crew once again. This time, however, was a little bittersweet. After Apollo 17, there would be nothing left to fly. We were asked because we were fully trained, not because there was any prospect of a future moon flight.
Still, I was pleased. I intended to stick around, and the only other work then available in Houston was advanced design work on the space shuttle. I wasn’t keen on shuffling paper around the office. As a backup crewmember I’d train on real hardware instead. And if something happened to Ron Evans, on the prime crew, I’d head back to the moon for the second year running. Ron was training to perform a spacewalk and run a SIM bay. I would have enjoyed doing it again, flying over different regions of the moon.
Years of intense training meant I already knew the spacecraft inside out. However, there was no end to the geology and science experiment knowledge I could absorb. I happily soaked it up once again as I rejoined the training routine.
Dave and Jim were less keen. Dave told me he was eager to get another flight, and I sensed he didn’t want to wait until the shuttle flew. The crews for the Skylab space station missions were already assigned: no chance to fly there. But one last Apollo flight was planned after that. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project would be the first joint mission with the Soviet Union. Dave naturally expressed interest in it. Command of the first international spaceflight would be the crowning glory of his space career. Of course, there was no shortage of contenders for that seat. But with three flights now under his belt, Dave had increasing influence in the office politics that could decide the issue.
Jim wasn’t interested in Apollo 17 for a different reason: he was ready to quit. After the relentless pace of moving from Apollo 12 right into Apollo 15, he had no interest in the training grind again. Worse, he was the backup for Jack Schmitt, the only professional geologist assigned to a lunar landing. The scientific community had pushed for Schmitt to walk on the moon for years. If Jack caught a cold, we had the feeling that Jim wouldn’t replace him. Instead, NASA would spend millions of dollars delaying the mission until Jack was better. Jim had no chance to fly again. His heart wasn’t in it.
A couple of years older than me and Dave, Jim had already put in twenty years with the air force, meaning he could retire from military life and draw an air force pension. Dave and I still had a couple of years to go before we could do that. So Jim began to look for something else to do. He found it in religion.
When Jim began to talk about how he had felt the presence of God on the moon, I was confused. For one thing, Jim hadn’t shared this experience during the flight or on the world tour. Secondly, I just couldn’t understand why, if someone felt that God was all around him in everything he did, they’d be closer to God on the moon than on Earth. I had long talks with Jim as I tried to puzzle out what he meant. The general public frequently asked us about spiritual experiences in the otherworldly realm of space, and Jim’s response seemed to answer that constant inquiry a little too neatly for me. But the more we talked, the more I understood he was firm about rededicating his life to this new, spiritual direction. I hadn’t felt any connection to a spiritual deity when I was in space. But if Jim said he had, then that was fine by me.
Jim grew close to a minister at the local Baptist church in Nassau Bay and began to give religious speeches around Houston in his free time. He had a direction. So did Dave, it seemed. I wasn’t sure what I might do. I could stick around and one day command a space shuttle flight. Or I could go into private industry and put all of my aerospace engineering experience to good use. For now, however, I wanted to make Apollo 17 as good a flight as possible.
Then that promising world crumbled and slipped out of my grasp.
In the fall of 1971, right after the flight, I had sent Herrick his forty-four covers, keeping to our understanding. I expected him to keep his word and not sell them. Additionally, at some point during our busy travel schedule when my mind was elsewhere, Herrick called to ask what I was doing with my own covers. They were sitting on my office desk, I told him. He suggested that, for safekeeping, I send them to him so he could look after them for me in his safety deposit box. I trusted him and followed his suggestion. I was a fool.
My arrangement with Herrick was completely within NASA rules. The other deal, with Eiermann, was also under way. I understood that Dave had, as he agreed, sent a hundred covers to Eiermann, who in turn passed them to Sieger. Soon afterward, I received a German bank book in the mail with the agreed amount in it. So did Jim and Dave. I didn’t give it much thought, figuring the money was safely out of the country in a foreign bank, and that I could forget about it for a few years, until Merrill and Alison were ready to go to college. I’d been assured, after all, that the covers would only be discreetly sold many years after we were out of public life.
Then I heard a disturbing report that Herrick had begun to publicly sell his covers through a stamp dealer in Connecticut. Worst of all, the news came from Deke. He had received a letter from a stamp-collecting company asking him for confirmation that the covers now on the market were genuine. Deke, of course, asked me what this was all about. I calmly told him. With the Herrick arrangement, I had nothing to hide; I had worked completely within NASA’s rules.
Privately, however, I hit the roof. Herrick had betrayed me. I wrote him a scathing letter and demanded to know what the hell he was doing, explaining that he might destroy my career with his actions. I never received any explanation. Whether he meant to do this to me all along, I can only speculate. All I knew was that our verbal agreement had been extremely clear, and I should never have trusted a guy I now realized I hadn’t known at all. After all, I didn’t even know his first name—and I still don’t. My gut feeling about him had been completely wrong.
I didn’t think it could get worse. Then it did—much worse. The covers in Germany began to hit the stamp-collecting market, too.
To this day, I don’t know why for sure, because my involvement in that deal was limited to nodding my head at a dinner meeting. I heard later that Eiermann had never instructed Sieger to delay the sales for a few years, so Sieger began to sell them almost immediately to his list of private clients.
Dave did the right thing. In the spring of 1972, he told Sieger to forget the whole thing. Keep the covers, cancel the bank accounts, keep the money. The three of us wanted nothing more to do with this. We each returned the bank books. We lost the twenty-one thousand dollars by doing so. And, I should stress, we did this before NASA asked us anything about a deal with Sieger—before NASA even knew about it. The whole world of postal covers felt seedier with every passing day, but I could at least maintain a scrap of moral pride, knowing we were out of it without being told by officials to cancel the deal.
Yet we were not out of it. It didn’t take too long for Deke to also get word about the German covers. While I was busy with Apollo 17 training around the country he began calling me regularly, asking me for details.
I told him everything about the Herrick deal, and suggested that the Sieger deal was best explained by Dave. Apparently Jim told Deke exactly the same thing.
But Deke kept coming back to me. “I understand that you are the stamp collector on the crew,” he’d tell me, strongly implying that I arranged both cover deals. I could only explain the Herrick deal again—embarrassing, unfortunate, but I had done nothing wrong—and advise him to ask Dave about the rest.
Then Deke dropped another bombshell. He told me that Dave had said I was the stamp collector on the crew and that all questions about all covers should be referred to me.
What was going on? Did Dave tell Deke that I had also arranged the deal with Sieger? Or was Deke just seeing what I would say when accused? I guess I’ll never know. I never questioned Dave about it. At the time, the three of us didn’t talk much about the covers with each other. I think we were all trying to keep our heads in the sand, stay away from the issue as much as we could, and hope it would blow over. Plus, Dave was my trusted commander, and I assumed he would take care of me and Jim. I didn’t want to believe he would say such a thing.
As our boss, Deke took the obvious next step. He called me and Dave in for a meeting. Jim was also invited but was out of town.
I think Deke still hoped, until that meeting, that there had been some kind of mistake. He had spent many years protecting his astronaut team from all kinds of outside influences who tried to steer and regulate the astronaut office. In return, he expected us to live up to the trust he placed in us. I think that is what he was looking for when we closed the door and sat down opposite his desk.
I was relieved when Dave didn’t try to pin the Sieger deal on me. Perhaps Deke had misunderstood, I thought. However, Dave did not explain to Deke that he had arranged the deal. Instead, it was presented that the crew, as a whole, had entered into the arrangement. I wasn’t going to speak out and dispute that. After all, it was true that I had gone along with the deal. Plus, at the time I thought it would be wrong to rat out my commander. We were still a team, I told myself, and we had defied death together in space.
I was more concerned with the look that Deke gave us both as the details came out. He was a boss whom I trusted and highly respected. I knew he would be angry with us—and he was. I knew he would be confused and ask us what the hell we were thinking—and he did. What I wasn’t prepared for was the look of hurt in his eyes. He’d trusted me to never place him in a situation like this. I had let him down. While I had never meant to, I can still never forgive myself for that.
Deke had no choice. This was the kind of situation he wasn’t allowed to deal with alone; he could no longer protect us. He had to take it to his superiors, then steel himself to clean up the mess.
The word came down in the spring of 1972: the NASA office of special investigations was going to look into it. I was also informed that Chris Kraft was involved. The original flight director, Kraft was a person of immense power who was taking a step up the ladder that year to head NASA’s entire operation in Houston. If he liked you, Kraft could guide you through a stellar career. If he didn’t, you might as well leave. A number of astronauts had incurred his displeasure in the past, and none of them had ever flown again. They had not been fired. NASA didn’t do that since it might create bad press. Instead, these unlucky guys sat around in their office for a couple of years until they realized they would never be offered another space mission.
I didn’t want to become one of them. So when Kraft asked me to voluntarily turn over all flown covers to him while the investigation took place, I jumped into action. I blasted Herrick again and insisted he return my covers to me. I received only sixty, along with a list of excuses. Some had been chewed up in the mail, he told me, and had to be destroyed. The others had somehow been “lost.” I couldn’t believe he would destroy something that had flown in space, and I told him so. But there was nothing else I could do.
I took the sixty covers, added them to the one hundred covers that Dave had unexpectedly given me after the flight, and placed them in a large envelope. Then, to be on the safe side, I gathered up every other flown item I had in my possession and added them to the package along with an itemized list. If they were going to investigate what we took on the flight, they might want it all. Of course, the little personal items I had flown for friends had long been given back to them. But I still had many flags and other little items from my PPK. I put them all in the package and sent it through the internal mail to Kraft’s office. To my mind, it all had intrinsic value.
About three days later, I received everything back except the covers. That was all the investigators were interested in, I was told, and they’d be returned to me too once the investigation ended. I was surprised that they only wanted to look at the covers.
I was nervous that an official investigation was taking place. On the other hand, crazier things had happened in the astronaut office in the past—the Time-Life deal came to mind—and I had been told that every crew before ours had signed a similar stamp deal. Surely we wouldn’t be singled out? It was time to concentrate on Apollo 17. There was a lot to do.
I was in a desert in the southwest a couple of weeks later—May 16, 1972—on a geology training trip. At seven in the morning, Deke called me in my hotel room. It was a Tuesday, and I looked forward to an intense week of geology training.
“Al, here’s the deal,” Deke began. “I have good news and bad news. The good news is that the air force will take you back.”
Oh, shit. I knew what Deke wanted me to ask. “What’s the bad news, Deke?”
“You have got to be out of your office by next Monday. You’ve got to be gone. Get yourself back to Houston today. I have already turned your name in to the air force for reassignment.”
There was no opportunity to discuss, to argue, to plead. The conversation was over. I was in shock. Astronauts didn’t get fired. Well, guess what? I’d just been fired.
I had plenty of time to think it over as I flew back to Houston, still numb. I could guess what Deke was trying to do; by sliding me back into the air force, he could divert the flak away from NASA and report that the issue was resolved. He was probably also trying to protect me, by getting me away from the investigators. But I didn’t want to go back to the air force. I’d been to college, to England, and then on loan to NASA; I had been out of the military mainstream for a long time. All of my peers had built up impressive combat records in Vietnam. And I’d noticed that Deke had said the air force “would take” me back—not that they wanted me back.
When I returned to Houston, I followed Deke’s orders and called the air force personnel office to find out my options. On such short notice there weren’t many, they told me. They could assign me to the Air War College in Alabama for a while, then possibly move me into a public relations role at the Pentagon. Neither of those options sounded too appealing.
I figured I had nothing to lose by talking to Chris Kraft, so I headed to his office on Wednesday. I didn’t expect to be welcomed with open arms, but neither did I expect what happened next. The decision to release me was a management decision in the best interests of NASA and Houston, he told me. All of NASA management concurred. He would not move me into a desk job, and I should go back to the air force. Then he really let rip. Now that I had made my flight, he growled, I was “just another dime-a-dozen engineer. I want you out of here as soon as possible. And don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.”
I returned to my office and, not knowing what else to do, wrote down everything Kraft had said to me. I was still in disbelief. My God, I thought, it really is all over.
I tried to puzzle out why Kraft felt so determined to humiliate me. He was inheriting command of the most well-known NASA center, and the first thing on his work pile was to sort out the mess of the covers. That would annoy anyone. We’d let NASA down. But to what extent? Had we disgraced the whole program? Had we killed anyone? There was more to it, I felt sure. But no one would tell me.
Deke had fired me and told me to be out of the office by Monday. Screw it, I thought, I am not leaving. What could he do? Fire me again? Have security escort me off the premises? I stayed and continued to talk to people further and further up the chain of command. I didn’t see it as embarrassing myself or them. I’d risked my life for NASA. I’d lost my marriage. I’d busted my butt flying on what people had told me was the pinnacle of NASA’s science and exploration efforts, and done it well. I figured that earned me at least a couple of weeks to work out what to do next before I was thrown in the trash.
I took a deep breath and headed to the office of George Low, the NASA deputy administrator. I had always seen George as a friend. I began to explain to him what had happened. But he didn’t care. “We are a clean organization,” he told me icily, “and you did something bad. We are going to show the world that we’re getting rid of you. You need to go back to the air force.”
I was ready to leave his office when George stopped me. “One other thing,” he added. “I made sure to add enough bad remarks in your air force file that you will never be promoted again.”
That parting shot almost broke me. I was devastated. I sure as hell wasn’t going back to the air force now. If NASA had helped me make the move, I probably would have gone quietly. But George had just deliberately killed my career stone dead. So why do what he wanted me to do? I grew more stubborn.
After making more careful notes about my meeting with George, I headed for a meeting with Jim Fletcher, the NASA administrator. Like Kraft, he was relatively new to his position. Jim, at least, was polite with me. But he sidestepped my questions. “What’s wrong with returning to the air force?” he asked me. “You’ll be fine. Go on back.”
There was nowhere else to turn, I thought. I was in a most ironic of circumstances. I loved NASA. And despite the humiliation poured on me by its leaders, I was fighting to stay.
Jim Irwin received the same treatment, but he didn’t need anything more than a word from Deke and he was gone. Jim already planned to retire when Apollo 17 was over. So when Deke asked him to move his retirement date up, Jim had no problem doing it. With Jim leaving, we were all pulled from Apollo 17 duties and three other astronauts were assigned to replace us.
It was quite clear I needed to get the hell out of Houston. But NASA was where I felt at home. If I had to work my way through a lot of antagonism and mean-spirited comments to stay, I was prepared for that. However, I was running out of people to talk to.
I considered Dale Myers, the associate administrator for Manned Space Flight, to be a friend. But then I had thought that about George Low, too. I requested a meeting with Dale and steeled myself for another humiliating lecture.
To my immense relief, when we met on May 31, Dale was friendly and sympathetic. “You need to get out of Houston,” he agreed. “I’ll see if I can find you a job at another NASA center and hide you there. Where would you like to go? Huntsville? The Cape? Langley?”
I could have wept, I felt so grateful for this act of kindness. We talked about the different centers and settled on the Ames Research Center in California. They did a lot of flying there, and it was far enough from Houston and NASA Headquarters that I could evade the witch hunters. “Go and talk to the director out there, and I’ll arrange the rest,” Dale told me.
I flew out to Ames, south of San Francisco. It’s a beautiful part of the country, not far from hills covered in redwood forests, and I mentally crossed my fingers that the job interview would go well. I hit it off with Hans Mark, the director of Ames, immediately. He took me around and showed me the hypersonic wind tunnel they used to test space shuttle designs, and the space medical studies. Of most interest to me was their airborne science division. They had a whole fleet of aircraft used to perform in-flight scientific experiments. It looked great to me, as it was similar to the research I had carried out in lunar orbit. We agreed that I would start work there in September.
In the meantime, I was still in Houston and wondering why I had fought so hard to stay. I was a pariah in the office. None of my fellow astronauts wanted to talk to me. They were mostly polite, but reserved and distant. It was clear I wasn’t welcome at the weekly astronaut meetings, so I stopped going. I was toxic, tainted. But I understood the deal. This is what had happened to others before me. It was as if I were a pilot who had brought dishonor to his squadron. My colleagues were just protecting themselves and their careers. They couldn’t be associated with me.
Even Dave, whom I expected to talk with me, no longer dropped by. That hurt me. Dave had been an incredible mission commander and was always in charge. Even after the flight, on our world tour, he had made it very clear that we were to follow his orders. With such command, I figured, came responsibility. Dave had led me into the covers deal with Eiermann and had told me it would be fine. I hoped he would now tell my superiors what had happened and sort out the mess. But he wasn’t even talking to me.
My parents, on the other hand, stayed very supportive when I discussed it with them. They felt sad for me, coming so soon after the parades and celebrations. But they were also realistic and stoic types. It happened, it’s over and done with, and now you have to move on, they told me. Don’t brood over it, pick up the pieces of your life, and move on. When I thought about the many tough times in their lives, and how they had kept plowing forward, I realized it was good advice. I needed to persevere and I would come out the other end alright. There would be—there had to be—brighter days ahead.
First, however, my world grew darker. Before I could make the move to California, I was informed that Dave, Jim, and I would be required to appear before a Senate committee in Washington, D.C., on August 3, to testify about the covers. Members of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences had seen newspaper reports about the covers and began to question Jim Fletcher. The Justice Department started to investigate, too. Stories swirled in the press that listed varying numbers of covers, incorrect details, and wildly speculative amounts of money that were supposed to have changed hands. NASA statements to the press gave differing cover numbers, too. No wonder the committee wanted to ask questions of us directly.
On July 11, a few weeks before the hearing, NASA publicly issued a reprimand declaring that the three of us had “exercised poor judgment in their action.” I couldn’t argue with that. The next day, news reports stated that I would be “reassigned from the astronaut corps to another position within the space agency,” effective August 1. It seemed that my bosses were backing down; I was spared further public humiliation. Two days later, John Donnelly, a NASA spokesperson, officially told the press that “there is no evidence at all” that I profited in any way from my arrangement with Herrick. I was grateful for the partial vindication.
On July 26, the anniversary of our flight, Dave moved into a desk job. It was a prestigious position: technical assistant to the manager of the Apollo spacecraft program. Nevertheless, when reporters asked NASA spokesperson Jack Riley if Dave had no choice about remaining an astronaut, he responded “That’s right,” adding “It was decided he would be transferred from the astronaut office.” The press pounced on these often-contradictory stories from different NASA sources. It was chaos.
We began to hear more details about the forthcoming Washington hearings. As well as the Apollo 15 crew, the committee would call Jim Fletcher, George Low, Dale Myers, Chris Kraft, and Deke to testify. Legal matters would be addressed by Neil Hosenball of NASA’s legal counsel. This was going to be interesting.
Deke was pissed that he had to go before Congress about this issue. Years later, Wally Schirra gave me a copy of a letter Deke wrote to him a couple of weeks before the hearings. Deke was sending his copy of each mission’s PPK lists back to their respective commanders. In the accompanying letter, Deke told Wally that the authorities were leaning on him.
“Demanding I release all lists for Senate hearings next week, and I’m refusing. My position is the lists as well as contents are crew property and not my prerogative to release. Legal people tell me if NASA doesn’t fire me in the meantime, Senate could get me for contempt. My solution is to turn lists over to crew commanders so there’s no way they can force them out of me. You can burn, use in bathroom or whatever. Possible someone may come to you for them but it’s your property and your choice. Only way I would release is to get each crewman’s permission and haven’t got time for that before they put gun to my head.”
Reading the letter, I felt a new respect for Deke for pushing back against the pressure from the investigators, as well as a new wave of sadness that he had been placed in that position. Especially when I read the very last line. “Come see me in Leavenworth—love, Deke.” The reference to the maximum-security prison was only half joking.
I flew Jim up to Washington, D.C., in a T-38 the day before the hearings. Jim had retired from the air force just a couple of days before and was preparing to leave NASA. We agreed that we would tell the committee everything. But we also felt nervous. If these senators didn’t like us, they might do their best to have us locked up for a long time.
We joined Dave, and then the three of us met with Julian Scheer, NASA’s head of public affairs. What a nightmare we were handing him. However, he was pleasant and reminded us that we were entitled to attorneys. We decided against it. We’d take what was coming to us.
Dave was once again the commander and in charge. He was pissed that Jack Riley had said he was moved out of the astronaut office against his will. Not true, he insisted. We needed to give the committee a clear story, he told us, and stop all these rumors in the press. We would go in there as a crew and we would answer for our actions as a crew.
Jim and I didn’t argue. We felt guilty about going along with the covers deal and figured we would sink or swim together. We were good soldiers, and once again we’d follow our commander into danger. So while we told the committee everything, we chose not to specify who had arranged the Eiermann deal.
The next day, we sat before a panel of seven senators. They began by praising our work on the Apollo 15 mission. I felt embarrassed: the last time I had spoken before a group of senators, I had been addressing a joint meeting of Congress and had received a standing ovation. I doubted that was going to happen today.
We were told that the meeting was merely an opportunity for us to explain our actions—we were not on trial. However, the committee reminded us that we were entitled to legal counsel and we could refuse to answer, because our statements could be used in future legal proceedings.
Press reports from the fall of 1971 were entered into the official record. They included something that really got my attention. Apparently the same issues had arisen on Apollo 14, Al Shepard’s flight. According to the reports, the Franklin Mint, a commercial company, had offered two hundred silver medals to the public if they signed up with their collectors’ club. The advertisements said the medals contained metal flown to the moon on Apollo 14. Congresswoman Leonor Sullivan had demanded to know what was going on at NASA. The NASA heads had denied responsibility and blamed the crew. Forced to respond, Deke told Sullivan that it was “unlikely” that other items flown in space would be sold “because most of these things are treasured heirlooms.”
Deke had also made a statement to the press, saying the agreement with the mint was “an unwritten gentleman’s agreement,” which sounded all too familiar. He had then added, “I take full blame for the coins, since I was responsible for everything that went along on the Apollo 14 flight. We have an understanding between the guys in the flight crew and ourselves that they won’t commercialize medals they have on the flight. It’s my job to make sure that things in poor taste don’t get on the ship. This is the first time that anything commercial has happened, and we aren’t about to do it again.”
Now I understood a little more why Low, Kraft, and Deke were so angry with our crew. They had just finished dealing with a scandal that had reached congressional ears, and Deke had promised them it would be the last time. Now they were back again, forced to explain another incident. The committee was questioning if they had any control over their employees.
Why hadn’t I heard about the Apollo 14 incident before? I’d been deep in mission training, frequently out in California, and out of the office loop. Plus, I was forced to conclude, no one in Houston had talked about it. After all, what happened to Al Shepard because of the medals? Nothing. After the flight, he resumed his duties as chief of the astronaut office. Apparently, he was untouchable. And I wasn’t.
Another gentleman’s agreement was also of interest to the committee. With Deke’s blessing, Dave had placed a tiny sculpture on the surface of the moon that symbolized all deceased astronauts and cosmonauts. I thought it was a beautiful gesture—my friend C.C. Williams was now memorialized forever on the lunar surface, along with the cosmonauts who had died just before our flight. But the sculptor had decided to go public and sell copies of the sculpture. NASA wasn’t happy, and neither was Dave. This seemed to be the equivalent of my Herrick deal, a handshake oral agreement gone wrong.
The sculpture was named The Fallen Astronaut. That title could have described the three of us just as well. To the committee, it was just another example of a lengthening list of commercial deals that involved Apollo flights.
Clinton Anderson, the committee chair, was also informed by Jim Fletcher that Al Shepard had carried two golf balls to the moon with him, only one of which Deke had approved. Now, I had heard this story since I’d returned from the moon. There was a rumor in the office that Al was in covert discussions to allow the golf ball manufacturer to publicize their connection with the space program. That wasn’t going to happen now.
Fletcher also told Anderson that Dave had “carried a Bulova chronograph and a Bulova timer on the Apollo 15 flight, and these were not approved as items to be carried on the flight.” Only two people at NASA knew about them, Dave explained: he and Deke. And even Deke didn’t know until after the flight. Dave had decided to “evaluate” them in flight, he said, following a personal request from an individual within the company. The committee seemed suspicious. But Dave assured them that he had not planned any commercialization of the timepieces.
When it came to the covers, Jim Fletcher explained that all of mine had been authorized by NASA management to fly on the mission. “Everything was authorized with the exception of the four hundred on Colonel Scott?” one of the senators asked. “Correct,” Fletcher replied.
The senators asked if we had broken any laws. No, Neil Hosenball responded, possibly some administrative rules, but nothing illegal. Had we profited in any way from the covers? “They did not profit,” Hosenball confirmed.
The senators’ questions then moved away from us and firmly onto Fletcher. They seemed more interested now in NASA’s chain of command. They were critical that NASA seemed to have no clear regulations in place. If regulations were broken, managers were not informed until months later, they noted. They were puzzled that NASA’s legal team kicked the entire matter over to the Justice Department as if they couldn’t handle their own mess personally. And they were unimpressed that their committee had learned about the issues by reading reports in the newspapers, not from NASA.
I watched Fletcher, Low, and Kraft squirm at these retorts. I felt sympathy only for Deke. His informal, unregulated system had been deliberate, to allow his fellow astronauts great freedom. He’d stuck his neck out for us. “Our feeling is that they are all mature adults,” he told the committee, “and it certainly is not our prerogative to tell them whom they can associate with socially.” And now, because we’d let him down, upper management would no doubt force a new set of rules and regulations on him and never allow him the freedom to manage the office again.
Deke was honest with the committee. They asked him if he would have approved the extra four hundred covers for flight if Dave had asked. Yes, he answered, even though the admission was now likely to get him into more trouble. “There was no law that had been violated,” he explained, adding that he took full responsibility for not immediately informing Kraft and Fletcher about possible issues with the covers. “We have done similar things on similar occasions,” he admitted. He even apologized. My admiration for Deke grew. He could have dumped the whole mess on us. But he was too honest for that.
Deke also explained how hundreds of items such as patches flew on every mission and were given to NASA employees and contractors. He explained that “there has not been any effort on our part to control what the crew did with these items. I think we considered them their personal items.
“We cannot guarantee what any person will do who is given one as a memento,” he continued. “We hope he will retain it as a personal memento, but we cannot control what he will do with it.” The committee even noted that they had personally received flown state flags following space missions, some of which were framed on their office walls.
Deke was then asked for the inventories of the PPKs. He told the committee that he no longer had them; only the mission commanders did. If the committee wanted to see them, they would have to call in each commander personally. On this issue, Deke had politely told the committee “none of your damn business.” He got away with it.
Senator Stuart Symington asked us about our educations and whether we had attended service academies. With that type of military education, he noted, did we not know that such a deal was wrong? My mind went back to the West Point honor code. Should I have told Deke about the deal as soon as it was presented to me? If so, would that have stopped our crew from flying to the moon? I guess I’d never know now.
Dave was asked to tell the committee how the covers deal had taken place from start to finish. He explained that Eiermann had become a “rather close friend” of his. He admitted that the deal was wrong. The rest of his testimony, however, was mostly “we,” as a crew. This included his initial account of making the three hundred extra covers, as if Jim and I had known about it.
I had agreed with Jim and Dave that we should take our punishment as a crew. Nevertheless, I imagined that, at some point, Dave might tell the committee how he had pulled Jim and me into the deal. That moment never came.
Dave didn’t evade the blame heaped on the crew as a whole. “I have no excuses for why we did it,” he told the committee. “We just made the mistake, sir. I regret that we did it. I do not understand why we did it. We know better.” Dave answered a little differently only when pressed directly and repeatedly by Senator Margaret Chase Smith about the four hundred covers.
“Were you responsible?” she finally demanded. “The other two were not?”
“Yes, ma’am, I was responsible,” Dave admitted. “I have to accept the responsibility.”
I was glad he’d finally said it. But the moment passed, and the committee moved on. They asked Chris Kraft if Dave and I were moved out of the astronaut office as part of disciplinary action resulting from the covers incident.
No, Kraft replied, and stated instead that we were being moved where our technical expertise would be of most use while the Apollo program wound down. That answer was unexpected. I remembered the meeting I’d had with Kraft and his evaluation of me as a dime-a-dozen engineer unfit for a management role. It seemed the official story would be played out differently. But I had no doubt that Kraft’s wrath would return the moment I returned to Houston.
Senator Anderson told the press after the hearing that our testimony had been “forthright and complete.” They reached no conclusions that day, but planned to study the issues in more detail, including further examination of whether we had violated any laws. Fletcher, in the meantime, had told the members of the committee that no decision had been made on what would happen to the covers, but they were in a “safe place” until it was decided. Of the covers made by Herrick, Hosenball told the committee, “I think the Justice Department will have to issue you a ruling. If their ruling is that they belong to Colonel Worden, they certainly will be returned to him.” His conclusion was that “he probably does own the covers.”
Senator Barry Goldwater, also on the committee, wrote to Jim Fletcher after the meeting with a formal request. If we had broken only NASA regulations, he suggested, the letters of reprimand placed in our military records should be rescinded so that our military careers were not destroyed. Goldwater’s request was never honored.
The hearings could have been worse. I’d been prepared to be taken out and shot. The committee seemed much more annoyed with our bosses than with Dave, Jim, and me. And with the hearings over, we parted ways as a crew. We’d planned on being in the history books—and we’d succeeded—but we’d never imagined our partnership would end on this low note.
I flew back to Houston that evening. Dee O’Hara was at Ellington Field to meet me, along with Beth Williams and her daughters. They were the only people in town still talking to me. I felt emotionally drained and seeing them there cheered me up. We chatted over hamburgers and Cokes before I climbed back into a T-38. I was heading to California to prepare for my move there.
By mid-September, NASA released its last official statement on the covers issue. In addition to repeating statements about our poor judgment, it added that “some of the management communication lines within NASA were weak, and that certain administrative procedures were deficient.”
In the meantime, NASA’s investigators discovered that twenty astronauts had previously signed postal items for Sieger in exchange for money. Kraft briefly suspended a number of them, although some had already left NASA service. Each astronaut had signed at least five hundred stamp blocks; some had signed more. Many had given the money directly to charity, but not all. One guy lost a spaceflight assignment because of it. But no one was fired.
Astronauts on prior flights gathered up their flown covers and put them in safety deposit boxes for a couple of decades. Would you like to know how many covers flew on missions prior to Apollo 15? I doubt you ever will. Once Deke returned all the PPK lists, the trail went cold for the government investigators.
The brief public glimpse into Al and Deke’s management techniques was also closing. By November, that door was firmly shut. Alan Shepard, in his role as the chief of the astronaut office, wrote a public letter to an American stamp-collecting group who felt they should have been included in selecting postal items carried to the moon. “I cannot believe that your group would deny the astronauts the privilege of carrying whatever items they desire, including philatelic material, for their personal, non-commercial use,” he wrote. In short, none of your damn business.
By then, however, I was gone. Moving out of Houston was a bittersweet experience. I had little to hold me there anymore. My apartment was rented. I’d even traded in my white Corvette that symbolized our Apollo 15 crew’s teamwork and leased a new model. I hooked a trailer on the back and loaded up my possessions.
Only two things made me want to stay: my daughters and a relationship.
Merrill and Alison were very upset I had to leave town. They lived only half a block from me, and with the flight over I’d been able to spend more time with them at last. They were old enough to understand a lot of the covers scandal, but they didn’t care about that. They didn’t care too much about flying to the moon either—everyone’s dad at school did that, or worked with someone who did. They did care that I had to move to California. They were heartbroken, and so was I. But Houston wanted me gone.
I’d fallen in love again, too. I hoped this lady would want to come with me to California. But her life was in Houston, so she didn’t. With much regret, we ended the relationship. It was another blow to add to my deep sense of failure.
Heading down the street to leave my neighborhood, I had to pass the space center. They didn’t want me anymore. No one had said good-bye. It was as if I were a ghost. Some of them, like Deke, never spoke to me again.
I’d arrived in Houston six years earlier feeling I’d gained the greatest job in the world. I left wondering if life were still worth living.