by Al Worden
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.
CHAPTER 13
REDEMPTION
To the outside world, it appeared that NASA had happily transferred me. But when I arrived at Ames Research Center, it seemed evident that I still had to go through a period of penance for daring to stay with the agency. Hans Mark assigned me to a tiny office at the very end of an enormous hangar, with crumbling paint, smudged walls and one little window that looked out on to the hangar floor. It hadn’t been used, or cleaned, in years. No one knew I was there. My boss in the airborne science division insisted that I give him everything I wrote for him to sign and pass up the chain of command. I sat in that office day after day and felt more alone than ever.
The center announced that they would host a meeting on space shuttle simulation work, and “an astronaut” would be in attendance. Unlike at Houston, this wasn’t an everyday occurrence, and a number of Ames workers grew excited. It turned out to be Karl Henize, who had yet to fly in space. It felt peculiar to see Karl lauded as the astronaut. No one at Ames seemed to think of me that way.
But the hangar was a good place for Hans to bury me while all th
e media interest about the covers ebbed. And the work was really interesting. It was a combination of the science experiments I had come to enjoy on Apollo 15 and rewarding flying time in a variety of aircraft. The airborne science group had a couple of Lear jets and an enormous Douglas DC-8. But they were dwarfed by the C-141 Starlifter. This specially modified airplane had a huge infrared telescope built in, and our research pilots flew it to the highest possible altitude, rolled up an opening on the side, and wearing oxygen masks, helped astronomers with their discoveries. We modified a Lear jet to do the same, installing a smaller infrared camera in the side. My workday often began at two in the morning, but the night flying was beautiful.
In December 1972 I did sneak back to the Cape for the launch of Apollo 17, the very last manned mission to the moon. It was a bittersweet moment. If it hadn’t been for those covers, I would have been strapping the crew into the spacecraft. Instead, no longer an astronaut, I watched as just another spectator. I went to a couple of the parties in Cocoa Beach, and Deke Slayton was there, but I didn’t try to speak to him. I felt a little awkward around him.
After about a year of hiding me in the deepest bowels of NASA, Hans promoted me. He quietly moved me over to an administration building and put me in charge of the futures forecasting division. Hans gave me forty talented people to manage, each of whom could look at cutting-edge science and engineering developments and report on how they might fit into NASA’s future plans. It was exciting work. Similar forecasting groups had tried to work in Washington, D.C., but they had found too much political pressure there to make objective reports. Out in California, away from the spotlight, technologies were much easier to assess fairly.
Hans was friendly, supportive, and seemed impressed with my work. After a couple of years, he put me in charge of the entire airborne sciences group. In addition to the astronomy work, we flew the Lear jets in zero-G parabolas to perform biological measurements. It felt nice to be weightless again. I also had three Lockheed U-2 reconnaissance airplanes. The U-2 had formerly been used as a spy plane to overfly the Soviet Union. We flew ours over agricultural areas instead. NASA used satellites to examine land use and gather crucial information about global food supplies. We proved that U-2s could provide information that was both clearer and cheaper.