The White House would invite Apollo astronauts to special events on occasion, but other than that I didn’t have too much involvement with the space program, past or present. I was pleased to be invited, but I still felt out of place. For the general public, the covers issue became a footnote while the great success of the Apollo 15 mission grew to eclipse it once again. I was happy for that. I felt that was how it should be. But public perception and private whispering are two very different things. A group of retired astronauts is like a bunch of high school kids brought together for gossipy reunions. We only all worked together for a short period in our lives, but the whispering about each other went on forever. And I felt I was still considered tainted. My peers no longer shunned me, as they had when I left Houston. But behind the smiles and the handshakes I sensed a continuing unease. I was the guy who had been fired. Perhaps I always would be to them.
I was successful in my post-NASA career. I was having fun. But I knew that my life should not have had this dark moment. And no amount of success, before or after it, could remove that nagging feeling.
While to the outside world we remained frozen in time, most Apollo astronauts went on to other things, many of them far removed from the space program. Dave finally left NASA in 1977, coincidentally, the same year the first Star Wars movie was released, featuring another Falcon spacecraft that flew just a little faster than ours. It was also a decisive year for Jim Irwin, but not for a good reason. Jim had his second heart attack while skiing in Colorado, not long after he’d had heart surgery. It took him off the speaking circuit, but once again, not for long. He soon jumped back into his busy evangelical schedule. I thought he was crazy.
That same year, I had my own tragedy to deal with. My father died in a horrific accident.
I had moved down to Palm Beach, Florida, by this time, and my parents followed me. They had sold the farm long ago and saved hard to move to a warmer state. They bought a home only ten minutes from mine. My father, now in his seventies, found another job as a movie projectionist. One afternoon he was driving some visiting relatives back to the Miami airport when he slammed into the concrete wall surrounding a toll booth. I received a phone call telling me that my mother and three relatives were in a Miami hospital, badly injured. And my father was dead.
At the funeral service for him up in Michigan, as my mother stoically received his ashes, I pondered the bitter irony. I’d lived a dangerous life, flying high-performance jets and a space mission. My easygoing father had always played it safe. And yet here we were at his funeral. I was glad I’d lived an adventurous life, because it didn’t seem to make any difference in the end. If it was your time, it was your time.
My mother moved back to Jackson and the grim Michigan winters. She wanted it that way. The whole family pitched in and fixed up a beautiful home for her. And I thought about what to do next with my life.
I’d hardened a little over the years. I like to think I had grown wiser. I had always been self-sufficient, but I realized with increasing clarity that I had also been a very naïve and trusting person, too easily led by people I looked up to. It was time to do something about that. I’d try and lead instead of follow.
I had been giving talks in the Palm Beach area, and sometimes these conversations touched on the problems our country faced. People seemed to like my opinions, and many said I should run for political office. Not a bad idea, I decided. I would put my money where my mouth was, and even if I didn’t win, people would at least understand I was serious. When a Florida congressional seat became wide open in 1982 because of a retirement, it seemed like the perfect moment.
Only 20 percent of the work of running for Congress is explaining your ideas to the public, I discovered. The vast majority is raising money. I enjoyed traveling the area and talking to people. But I had a hard time asking them to give me donations; it wasn’t in my nature. But I raised enough. I grew increasingly confident as I neared the primary vote.
I lost by a slim margin. But I was glad I had been through the process. It raised my confidence level, toughened me up some more, and gave me a new perspective.
The political process also brought me a surprising twist of good luck in my personal life. I had been adrift since a brief, unsuccessful marriage in the 1970s. Then a month after I began my congressional campaign, I met a widow named Jill Hotchkiss at a party. We hit it off instantly. Neither of us was looking for a relationship, but when you meet someone so funny, outgoing, and beautiful, it doesn’t matter. In July of 1982, in the middle of the campaign, we married. My campaign manager wasn’t happy; it would have been better for press coverage if I were a bachelor candidate. But Jill was more important than any campaign. We’ve been together ever since. I didn’t win a seat in Congress–but I did win Jill. I looked to the future with confidence.
I had heard some other Apollo astronauts talk about a sense of peaking after their missions: a feeling that they had done the most significant thing in their lives in their late thirties. What could top flying to the moon? I didn’t feel that way at all.
Going to the moon was wonderful, but in terms of personal achievement, it was a rote skill. It was something I learned how to do, like driving a car or flying an airplane. It didn’t take much intellectual capacity. I needed to memorize facts and know what the machines told me when they gave me information. It didn’t take a lot of creative thought. As a matter of fact, NASA didn’t want creative thought on a moon flight; I needed to focus instead on what was written down, what the structure of the mission was, and if all the systems worked.
I think the most important things we do in life are intellectual, not rote skills. Personally, running for Congress was a much bigger challenge than going to the moon. Where you stand on issues, how you live your life, and how much good you can do in the world are greater challenges than a lunar mission. I hadn’t been successful in my political ambitions, but that didn’t matter. I’d done my best to become a leader through the strength of my intellectual capacity and learned an important lesson. Just like athletes who have success early in life need to have ambitions for when they are no longer at the top of their game, I also needed to not peak early. I decided to find new goals and ambitions.
But first, I needed to take care of some unfinished business.
I had voluntarily turned over my flown postal covers to Chris Kraft during NASA’s investigation on the understanding that I would get them back once it was concluded. I had followed all of the rules when flying my Herrick covers, so I knew they were my personal property. I had never surrendered my ownership of them nor my legal rights to them. Although NASA never told me they believed they owned the covers, they transferred them to the National Archives in August of 1973, along with the covers Dave had carried. The transfer paperwork stated that “these records are historically important and will probably be retained permanently.” To remove them required the signatures of both NASA’s administrator and deputy administrator. I wasn’t informed.
In late 1974 the Justice Department finally informed NASA that no legal action against us was warranted regarding the covers. The investigation ended. The funny thing is that they could never find us guilty of anything. There was a federal statute against using government property for self-gain, but our actions were not enough to warrant its use. Poor judgment was the only charge that NASA could make stick, but that’s not against the law. And yet the covers were not returned to us when we asked for them back. It appeared that NASA wanted us to forget about them.