After his short stint in jail, Doug Hughes returned home to collect a letter from a personal hero. Hughes, the 61-year old postal worker who piloted a gyrocopter onto the lawn of the Capitol, had tried to tell people that it was a harmless stunt to raise awareness of campaign finance reform. Nobody, it seemed, paid attention until the stunt sparked the kind of Washington, D.C. safety panic that livens up slow news days. One of the first signs that the message had actually gotten through came when Harvard professor Lawrence Lessig, one of America’s most visible campaign finance reformers, sent Hughes an “attaboy” through the mail.
“I’m not going to say it was for what I did,” says Hughes, “but it was for why I did it.”