Magnificent Desolation_ The Long Journey Home From the Moon - Buzz Aldrin [84]
H. R. (“Bob”) Haldeman, President Nixon’s White House Chief of Staff, and a key figure in the Nixon Watergate scandal, came in to the dealership one day. Bob had been born and raised in California, so no doubt he was glad to be out of the Washington, D.C., fishbowl for a few days. I could relate to enduring a media frenzy, and we chatted idly for a few minutes about his ordeal. I showed him some cars while we talked about President Nixon and his Watergate troubles, but do you think that I could sell him a Cadillac? No way. I couldn’t sell a car to save my life. In fact, I didn’t sell a single car the entire time I worked at Hillcrest. But at least I drove a nice blue-and-white Cadillac for a while.
LATER THAT SAME month, I ventured out to Edwards Air Force Base to view the first atmospheric “free” flight of the Enterprise, NASA’s new space shuttle test vehicle, as it landed on its own after being hitched to the back of a 747 jumbo jet. The shuttle was originally intended to be named Constitution, but Star Trek fans led a write-in campaign urging that it be christened Enterprise. It was my first time back at Edwards since my ignominious departure five years earlier. It felt a bit odd to be standing in street clothes among the spectators for the test event, but I also felt relieved on a personal level, and hopeful about the new direction in which NASA was headed.
The space shuttle captured the public’s attention with its dazzling display of a different kind of flying spacecraft as it landed on a dry lake-bed runway seven and a half miles long. The winged seventy-five-ton spaceship had already flown piggyback-style, locked to the big jet in a “captive” flight a few weeks earlier. Now, for its first free flight, cars and campers crowded the desert highway that led to the base. Thousands of spectators made the predawn drive over the mountains from Los Angeles to the Mojave plateau to watch the test landing. Already, NASA was planning to send the shuttle on its first flight into space in 1979 from Cape Canaveral, and that mission and the next three to follow were scheduled to end with airplane-like landings at Edwards on the special clay, silt, and sand lake-bed runway.
THE DAY AT Edwards, exhilarating as it was to watch the landing of the shuttle, was also a bitter reminder that I had been trying to exist on my Air Force retirement pay, half of which went to Joan and the kids, and the new job I was trying out at the Cadillac dealership. Added to that, I was still dealing with periodic bouts of depression. My life seemed a perennial struggle, in which I often wondered, Where do I fit in after being an astronaut on the moon? The Technicolor had drained from my life, and I felt discouraged. I couldn’t see how anything could change in the near future. The orderly progressive structure of my early years in which I had achieved so much had stalled. Inevitably, it seemed, I would spiral downward when the people at NASA or the aerospace companies for whom I served as a consultant refused to consider my ideas, ideas that I knew beyond a doubt could help forward our space program. When I was “up,” I charged ahead, believing that change was possible, and that I could make a difference. But when I was “down,” numbness overcame me and after a while I soothed my uneasiness by turning to alcohol.
About that time, Dr. Joseph Pursch reminded me to seek out Clancy Imislund. I had met Clancy while I was still married to Beverly, when I attended one of the meetings recommended by Dr. Don Flinn, but I really didn’t become part of his group until Dr. Pursch recommended him as well. Clancy was known as a more rigid recovery group leader. He could be a little rough around the edges, and he shot straight with the people who came to his meetings, sometimes too straight. “Half of you attending this meeting are going to die drunk,