Remember Scott O'Grady? If you don't today, there was a time when you probably did. In June, the twenty-nine-year-old Air Force captain was referred to by major media outlets more than 1,500 times, in accounts stemming from his rescue in Bosnia by U.S. marines six days after he was shot down by Serbian forces. O'Grady -- devout, humble, refreshingly guileless -- returned to a p.r.-orchestrated triumph. He was feted at the White House and the Pentagon and stormed the TV talk shows. Then, his fifteen minutes having expired, O'Grady's blip disappeared from the radar screen.

His rescue from Bosnia was a euphoric occasion. Unfortunately, the barrage of O'Grady coverage pointed up how -- in a kind of reverse alchemy -- the p.r.-infotainment axis can reduce a golden moment into something base; how media hype, like a surface-to-air missile, can home in on something authentic and blow it away, leaving only an ephemeral puff of smoke in its place.

Take the assertion -- first made by President Clinton on June 8, the day the rescue was announced -- that O'Grady was "an American hero." This line was immediately taken up by major news outlets. The Chicago Tribune tagged him the "Hero Pilot." A CNN transcript listed participants in a ceremony as "Brian Christie, Anchor . . . Gen. Ron Fogelman, Air Force Chief of Staff," and "Captain Scott O'Grady, American Hero."

Newsweek's June 19 cover story ("An American Hero") said O'Grady was a member of the Right Stuff brotherhood whose "code is understated: cool." (An odd description for a pilot who burst into tears in public at the drop of a hat and told NBC he may have seen a vision of the Virgin Mary in the Bosnian forest.) NPR commentator Daniel Schorr said, "[It] takes me back to Charles 'Lucky' Lindbergh."

In fact, O'Grady was not a hero. He had less in common with Lindbergh than with little Jessica McClure, whose rescue from a well in Texas riveted America in 1987. O'Grady, like Jessica, was a victim who displayed a strong will to survive and got lucky. The marines who braved surface-to-air missiles to rescue him were the heroes, as O'Grady himself stressed. To hype him as a hero diminishes their efforts and robs O'Grady's story of its authenticity.

So why did we exaggerate? In part because we live in a culture that is increasingly prone to collapse the old categories and equate heroes with victims and screw-ups -- thanks largely to Oprah Winfrey and like-minded talk-TV impresarios. They pioneered the replacement of chat show guests of true distinction with folk who are easier to identify with -- you know, recovering diet pill addicts, survivors of dysfunctional families. They're not Mother Teresa, but people who help themselves, and the spirit in which they are celebrated is essentially narcissistic. Hyping O'Grady was very much in that spirit: he was a man who helped himself come back from the brink. In today's lexicon, that makes him a hero. Book him and mike him up.

A further explanation for O'Grady's acclaim is suggested by historian Daniel Boorstin's 1962 observation about modern celebrity worship: "These new model 'heroes' are receptacles into which we pour our own purposelessness. They are nothing but ourselves seen in a magnifying mirror." O'Grady became just such a looking glass, reflecting how America sees itself and its role in the world. Lindbergh was the perfect symbol for the late '20s -- an emblem of daring and promise and the budding of Henry Luce's American Century. The Apollo astronauts were the embodiment of that promise realized, that century in full flower. But now, with so much confusion about our post-cold-war role, O'Grady is the perfect symbol. He didn't achieve a feat of aviation, but was shot down, becoming an objective correlative to such questions as: Why are we involved with Bosnia in the first place? Whither are we drifting as a nation? His vulnerability -- exposed to the elements, subsisting on insects, weeping and thanking God -- struck a famiar chord. He was us, in all our frailty. So, needless to say, we embraced him as a hero: we love ourselves despite our foibles.

O'Grady was the ideal visual aid, with wholesome good looks a la Lindbergh. But how to use him? President Clinton cited O'Grady as evidence that government can work, in feel-good ceremonies that stressed how well the rescue mission had gone, not how badly the Bosnia policy was going.

By then, O'Grady's saga was taking on an empty circularity (much as Boorstin observed of Lindbergh). The novelty of his rescue wore off, and the story line shifted from what he had endured to how much publicity he was getting. Meanwhile, O'Grady was transformed by the limelight from a naive flyboy into a political promoter and spinmeister. On the Today show, after Clinton invited him to the White House, O'Grady effused: "He [Clinton] is a great man!" O'Grady ducked questions about the intelligence failure that had left him vulnerable to that Serbian missile with all the agility of a p.r. ace.

O'Grady even helped puff up the celebrityhood of other personalities, demonstrating how, as Boorstin puts it, "celebrities live off one another." On Larry King Live, O'Grady took a call from a gushing Nancy Reagan and gushed back at her: "Ma'am, it's the greatest honor in the world. I can't believe I'm talking to you." Mrs. Reagan counter-gushed: "The feeling is mutual." If that wasn't enough, O'Grady verbally puffed up the celebrity-anchors whose ratings he was boosting. He said to Joan Lunden of GMA: "It's an honor just talking to you. This is unbelievable."

Finally, after days of denying hero-hood, O'Grady appeared to waver. He was on Larry King Live when a woman called from Fremont, California, to say: "I just wanted to thank you for giving my four young sons a true American hero to look up to." Instead of demurring as usual, the pilot delivered the kind of message expected of celluloid heroes: "I'd hope that the kids out there, you know, basically listen to their parents . . . and try to do something good when they grow up." Acknowledging that the nation needs heroes as an antidote to bad news, he said he would try to catch up with his fan mail.

Thus, by the time our hero had been back in America for several days, the original Scott O'Grady was becoming a little hard to make out in the video fog -- a state of affairs that CBS This Morning's Harry Smith evoked inadvertently, interviewing O'Grady live at a remote location. He said to the pilot's image on a TV monitor: "It's great to see you in person."

Having propelled O'Grady skyward, the press began angling to bring him down, or at least clip his wings. Reports questioned his survival preparations -- he had forgotten to wear his jacket and suffered badly from the cold. CBS's David Martin suggested he might have been blasted out of the sky because he was "too cocky." London's Independent newspaper dove in from 12 o'clock high with a report that O'Grady "did just about everything wrong."

All things considered, it was a good time to head for cloud cover. That's what he did, zooming out of the national spotlight with the avowed aim of seeking privacy. Right. Within a few weeks, he had signed a book deal ($500,000 advance), with movie possibilities, and announced he was leaving active duty to become a promotional speaker for the Air Force. So it's back to the celebrity circuit, Captain. Don't forget to wear your flak vest

cjr  |  archive  |  resources  |  contact  |  search  |  subscribe