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
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
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
