Falling to Earth (43 page)

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.