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Clinton had a somewhat easier time getting access to O'Grady than most others who have sought him since his rescue. An aide of Dan Rather's hounded the crew of the U.S.S. Kearsarge, the ship O'Grady was taken to from Bosnia, and insisted repeatedly that he be put through to O'Grady's stateroom. The aide had no luck. Jane Pauley managed to persuade O'Grady to appear on Dateline NBC, but only after an endless series of phone calls and personal notes. And as O'Grady's father William says, "we're being contacted by everyone" for book and movie deals. So far, none has been struck.
The man deciding who in the ravenous press O'Grady talks to is Brigadier General Ron Sconyers, chief of Air Force public affairs. "We've set up a crisis cell here in my office," he says. "We're protecting him from the media." Three Air Force public affairs officers now work full time on O'Grady. A fourth officer is assigned to the pilot's mother and a fifth to his father (the couple divorced 11 years ago).
"Protect" may have been used loosely, judging by O'Grady's Tuesday morning TV schedule. Having taped some segments earlier, he could be seen on CBS's This Morning at 7:08 a.m., followed by NBC's Today at 7:09, ABC's Good Morning America at 7:10, Fox Morning News at 7:31 and CNN's Early Edition at 8:09. Asked what they thought the Air Force was trying to do to O'Grady, several public-affairs officers at the Pentagon volunteered the word exploit rather than protect.
O'Grady has been protected from hard-news shows and print journalists, however, and public affairs officials at the Pentagon say that is no accident. "If you're marketing a hero, at some point all the easy questions have been asked," explains a senior official, who calls last week's p.r. initiative The Scott O'Grady Show. "Then the hard ones start. 'So just how was it you didn't know this missile was there?' 'Is it right that you were flying up there without sufficient electronic countermeasures?' The Air Force doesn't want him to answer those types of questions. If it were me, I wouldn't let him near a pencil either. If I were trying to milk O'Grady but not get him burned, I'd keep him on TV. It's tougher to ask tough questions that way."
After his TV appearances on Tuesday, O'Grady was admitted to the hospital at Andrews Air Force Base. His feet were still raw and inflamed from six days of exposure in his soaked pilot's boots. Scott would remain "under lock and key" for what Air Force officials said was an indefinite stay.
Well, not quite. That night O'Grady resurfaced on Larry King Live with his father and sister Stacy. He took a call from Nancy Reagan. But the apprehensions of his Air Force handlers were demonstrated by his responses to King's seemingly innocuous questions about how high he was flying ("I shouldn't say"), whether he saw the missile ("No comment, Larry"), whether Serbs were shooting at him as he parachuted down ("Can't talk about that") and even his feelings about returning to his fighter wing ("Can't answer"). "What is this," King asked in frustration, "a KGB hearing?"