Apollo 13 Hero's Fall: How Jack Swigert Lost Everything to a Stamp Scandal

Jack Swigert rose to the heights of human courage in April 1970, guiding a crippled spacecraft home from the edge of death and earning the gratitude of a nation. Yet the same man who improvised salvation from cardboard and tape could not resist a smaller, meaner temptation — the quiet profit of postmarked envelopes carried to the Moon. His fall from NASA's trust was swift and permanent, a reminder that the architecture of a life can be undone not by catastrophe, but by the ordinary hunger for gain. He died in 1982 at fifty-one, one week before taking his seat in Congress, having traded an immo