At that time, I didn’t push the issue. I still felt guilty and penitent. I knew I had screwed up and almost felt that NASA deserved to punish me. But as the years went by, I began to feel I had done my sentence and paid the price. In fact, with hindsight, I felt I had paid a bigger price than my actions deserved. NASA managers had wanted to make an example of me to my fellow astronauts and they had. But in the process, I thought that they had gone overboard to prove their point.
In December of 1978, the Office of the Attorney General quietly issued a memorandum opinion on the Apollo 15 covers and sent it to NASA. Among its conclusions, it stated that NASA had no legal claim to the covers as they were not purchased by public funds nor prepared at public expense. It also found that it was “routine NASA practice” to allow astronauts to carry covers into space. They concluded that Dave’s failure to secure authorization to carry his covers was “inadvertent” and not enough cause for NASA to retain them. NASA’s only claim to my covers, the report suggested, would be if I’d had a commercial arrangement to sell the covers with Herrick. I’d already satisfied investigators that I hadn’t. The memorandum did query whether our crew should ever be able to profit from sales of the covers, but concluded that once we left NASA employment even that stipulation would no longer apply.
The memorandum was not a full exoneration of our actions, nor should it have been. But it blew apart most of the claims NASA had made to keep hold of the covers. Not surprisingly, the memorandum was not widely distributed. I didn’t hear about it myself until October of 1981. When I did, I decided to take some action.
I felt that NASA had washed its hands of the issue by transferring the covers to the National Archives, which just didn’t seem right to me. In fact, it felt like a violation of my constitutional rights. They had taken my personal property and placed it in the archives without following due legal process. I’d been cleared of any illegal acts, but NASA’s actions did seem illegal to me. I thought they violated my right of due process under the Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution, one of my country’s oldest and most venerated laws.
A decade after my spaceflight, I started to talk to lawyers, trying to find one to represent me. Many did not want to touch the case. It was too political, they told me. I would never be able to sue the government and win, even if I were in the right. Perhaps I should find a senator who would fight for me, they suggested. But I didn’t want to drag the case into the political arena. I just wanted what was legally fair and just.
I could understand the lawyers’ apprehension. After all, taking on the government is a big deal. Their reaction did give me second thoughts for a while. But eventually I found an attorney in Palm Beach who would take on the task. It took a lot of explaining to brief him on the intricacies of the events, but luckily I’d kept good documentation. In January of 1982, my attorney officially wrote to NASA and politely but firmly asked for my covers back. I hoped the request would resolve the issue. I really didn’t want to sue NASA. Despite everything, I still loved them.
After a year of fruitless waiting, in February of 1983, we filed a lawsuit in federal court. We requested a jury trial. I was confident that any group of citizens would see the justice in my case.
A number of NASA lawyers contacted me, begging me to drop the case. Couldn’t I see that I had done something wrong all those years ago? Yes, I admitted, I had made a stupid mistake. But two wrongs did not make a right. And I had politely asked for my covers back with no luck, so a lawsuit was my only option.
As the case progressed, I learned that NASA had actually wanted to give the covers back to us based on the advice of the Justice Department, but a number of congressional committees had been against the idea. I learned, too, that the Apollo 16 crew had also turned in their personal covers, and NASA had impounded them. They’d had no luck getting them back either. And an interesting precedent had been set in October 1977 by Ed Mitchell, who had sold one of the covers he took with him to the moon on Apollo 14. According to newspaper reports, some NASA officials were furious, but Ed was a private citizen now, so there was nothing NASA could do. He’d operated under the same lack of rules as our crew.
I was confident about getting my Herrick covers back. Then I discovered that there were even less legal grounds, according to the Justice Department, for NASA to hold the covers that Dave had carried for the three of us. Unlike the covers given to Sieger, they had not been created specifically to sell, only for us to keep. And unlike the Herrick covers, they had never left our possession.
Based on that information, in April 1983 I widened the lawsuit. I contacted Dave and Jim and asked if they wanted me to represent all of us to get those covers back. They agreed. Dave had made his own strong inquiries over the years pressing for the return of the covers and was eager to have them. Jim and Dave did not join me in suing the government, but they helped with the legal fees. If I lost the case, all they would lose was a little money.
NASA didn’t help its case any by beginning to fly postal covers into space itself. The same year I filed my suit, NASA announced plans to carry more than two hundred sixty thousand postal covers on the eighth space shuttle mission in August 1983. They expected to sell them to the public immediately after the flight, make more than one and a half million dollars from the deal, and split the proceeds with the post office. I only learned about it after I’d filed my suit, but I was very amused by the coincidence. It made our little handful of covers look like no big deal at all, especially since NASA’s covers were intended for unabashed commercial exploitation.
In May, my lawyers asked NASA for all documents relating to personal items carried on Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo flights and their distribution and current whereabouts. We asked for the dates that each item had been given to a person and where it was now. It sounds like a simple request and was of obvious relevance to my case. In theory, it should have been easy for NASA to comply. But, of course, they’d never kept track of the items astronauts personally carried. They also had very little information about the tens of thousands of items given over the years to public officials. From the president on down, recipients could have sold their gifts long ago, given them away, or passed them on to someone else. In a jury trial, those individuals—including the president—could be called to give important testimony. We planned to depose many of them.
I also asked NASA to produce any and all official orders, directives, and memoranda on PPKs up to and including the time of my flight. If there were rules, I wanted to know what they were. If there were no rules in place, a jury should know that, too.
Given the difficulty that our simple requests would have caused NASA, I wasn’t surprised when the next response was an offer to settle the case.
The settlement agreement between me and the government was finalized on July 15, 1983. They agreed to completely and unconditionally release all the covers to us, at which time my legal counsel would terminate the lawsuit.
As part of the agreement, the three of us on the Apollo 15 crew also agreed not to pursue any further liability against the government in the matter of the covers. It was called an “amicable resolution.” I’d seriously considered saying no to the deal and pursuing a claim for damages against the government for the seizure of my property. I thought I had a strong case and think I would have won a substantial settlement. But, on reflection, that wasn’t the reason I was doing this. I did it to resolve a painful episode in my life and move on.