TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/082189/08218900.025

Text File | 1992-09-23 | 14.1 KB | 271 lines

                                                                                BOOKS, Page 66

Of Arms and the Man


Tom Clancy, the military's minstrel, longs to live the life he
writes about

By Walter Shapiro


    What an exhausting five-year run it has been for backwater
insurance agent turned blockbuster novelist Tom Clancy. Forget
the four straight best sellers published since 1984 and the 20
million copies sold. Forget the movie version of his first
novel, now in production. Forget the $4 million advance for his
latest thriller, Clear and Present Danger. Forget such crass
calculus of cash-register commerce.

    Dwell instead on what this chain-smoking, nearsighted,
42-year-old family man with a hyperactive imagination has
boldly orchestrated on the global stage. It would have been
enough that he engineered the defection of a Soviet nuclear
submarine in The Hunt for Red October. But no, Clancy had to go
fight World War III without firing a single nuclear weapon in
Red Storm Rising -- and make sure that the good guys narrowly
won.

    Then there was Patriot Games, where Clancy's plucky hero
Jack Ryan just happened to be in London in time to rescue two
royals, seemingly Prince Charles and Lady Di, from a terrorist
attack, and, of course, was rewarded with a knighthood from a
grateful Queen. Call that just vacation fun compared with what
Clancy pulled off in The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Not only did
he virtually save the job of a reform-minded Soviet leader but
he also spirited a defecting KGB chief onto Air Force One to fly
to the land of freedom, opportunity and new Tom Clancy novels.

    This time around, in writing Clear and Present Danger
(Putnam; $21.95), which is being published this week, Clancy got
mad. Not at his usual villains, like the Soviets or
international terrorists. Instead, what aroused his ire was what
the Iran-contra affair revealed about "how the Government makes
decisions, what kind of people make those decisions, and what
happens when things go wrong." That is what settling insurance
claims teaches: how often in real life things go wrong. And when
that happens to soldiers and spooks, Clancy says, "very often
you get hung out to dry. All those Marines who got blown up in
Lebanon got hung out to dry. William Buckley, the CIA officer
who got captured by the bad guys in Beirut, was hung out to dry.
We do that a lot; it's probably the most despicable thing our
Government can do. But it happens, and that's what I decided to
write about."

    The book that arose out of these emotions is Clancy's most
politically sophisticated and philosophically complex. (Beach
readers, have no fear; this is not Sartre.) There are no direct
references to Iran-contra, no arms-for-hostages deals and no
Ollie Norths; Clancy is too accomplished a craftsman for such
overt gambits. The closest parallel comes in the fictional
National Security Adviser, Vice Admiral James Cutter, who is
reminiscent of John Poindexter. Almost from the moment the
admiral is introduced, readers can sense Clancy's scorn: "Cutter
was the sort of sailor for whom the sea was a means to an end.
More than half of his career had been spent in the Pentagon, and
that . . . was no place for a proper sailor."

    Clancy's intricate plot begins with Cutter's winning
presidential approval for a covert operation against the
Colombian drug cartel. The ill-conceived plan: insert four
platoons of elite U.S. Army light infantrymen into the Colombian
jungle to identify drug-running planes and disrupt cocaine
production. With his trademarked obsession for military detail
and shrewd insights into the psyches of fighting men, Clancy
recounts the training of Sergeant "Ding" Chavez and the other
"light-fighters" (fast-moving small units unencumbered by heavy
equipment) for their quasi-legal mission.

    Almost as soon as Chavez and his fellow grunts hit the
ground, things begin to go awry. Big things, like the
assassination of the FBI director on a secret visit to Bogota.
Before long, U.S. pilots are dropping untraceable bombs (dubbed
"Hush-A-Bombs") on the fortified castles of the Colombian drug
lords, while Chavez and his compatriots are hung out to dry --
abandoned in the jungle on Cutter's orders.

    It should come as scant surprise to connoisseurs of
Clancy's earlier novels that along about now the sometimes
cloyingly straight-arrow CIA man Jack Ryan mounts a daring
maneuver to rescue the light-fighters. There are other familiar
Clancy touches. While the author has moved beyond the narrow
genre of techno-thrillers, the novel still explains ordnance
with the avidity that Judith Krantz devotes to designer labels.
There are also a few mawkish passages: "Clark embraced Ryan in
the way that men do only with their wives, their children and
those with whom they have faced death."

    Best-selling novelists are often bedeviled by potboiler
reputations, and Clancy echoes a familiar lament when he says,
"It is disconcerting that the critics don't think of thriller
writers as serious writers." In fairness, he should not be
dismissed as merely another book-biz commodity, the
action-adventure counterpart to Danielle Steel or Sidney
Sheldon. For one thing, Clancy's narrative prose rarely descends
to the all too familiar level of "I'm dictating as fast as I
can." More important, to measure Clancy's output solely in terms
of bookstore Q-Ratings and royalty statements would be to
distort the moral seriousness that undergirds his fiction.
Clancy believes passionately in professionalism, preserving
order, patriotism and playing by the rules. As Ryan says to the
President near the end of the novel, "Sir, the oath our people
take when they put the uniform on requires them to bear `true
faith and allegiance' to their country. Isn't it written down
somewhere that the country owes them the same thing?"

    Little more than six years ago, Tom Clancy was spending
every spare moment at the dining-room table composing his first
novel on an IBM Selectric that he lugged home from the office.
His wife Wanda, who had just given birth to a son, brooded over
his neglect of his insurance business, and his two daughters
balked at having to eat all their meals off TV trays. But Clancy
saw his writing as a way to climb out of "the middle-class
trap."

    When it came to creating a pedigree for his alter ego, Jack
Ryan, Clancy made certain that he came equipped with the fiscal
independence that the author so painfully lacked. Near the
beginning of Red October, Clancy wrote, "(Ryan) was not afraid
to speak his mind. Part of that came from having money and
being married to more money . . . Ryan could not be bought,
bribed or bullied."

    These days, the study alone of Clancy's new eight-bedroom
dream house overlooking the Chesapeake Bay in Huntingtown, Md.,
is larger than the Calvert County insurance agency that he
escaped from. And what home boasts such self-indulgent extras
as Clancy's private underground pistol range? "When I set up the
background for Jack Ryan," Clancy recalls, "I gave him
everything I thought one could possibly need in life." But this
study can serve as an index of the author's own wish list. There
are toys (a pool table), tools (a MacIntosh computer), tributes
(five director's chairs from the film set of Red October) and
tokens that symbolize Clancy's embrace by the U.S. military (the
bookshelves are punctuated by upwards of 80 souvenir caps
bearing logos like USS CASIMIR PULASKI). Looking around the
room, Clancy laughs, as much to himself as anyone else: "Now I
have more than Jack Ryan."

    Following the up-from-nowhere success of Red October,
Clancy, who was dropped from the ROTC program at Loyola College
because of severe myopia, quickly became the Navy's favorite
houseguest. Captain J. Michael Rodgers, who commanded the
destroyer squadron in which Clancy first went to sea aboard the
U.S.S. Gallery, puts it this way: "The Aeneid begins, `I sing
of arms and the man.' In that tradition, Tom is our minstrel."

    That voyage not only launched a friendship between Rodgers
and Clancy, a fellow classicist, but it also gave the novelist
a new vocational dream. "I've told my friends in the Navy for
five years now, I would trade what I do to be a commanding
officer of a ship," Clancy says. One could almost see him
standing on deck, a tall, sandy-haired C.O., wearing dark
glasses and an intense expression. "As I get a little older, I
get further away from it, but command of a ship is probably the
best job in the world."

    Many in the Pentagon were stunned by the accuracy of Red
October. "When I first met Clancy at a White House lunch,"
recalls former Navy Secretary John Lehman, "I joked that if he
had been a naval officer, I would have had him court-martialed:
the book revealed that much that had been classified about
antisubmarine warfare. Of course, nobody for a moment suspected
him of getting access to classified information."

    Clancy prides himself on the verisimilitude of the
technical details in his novels, but insists that his
methodology is simple: "It's amazing what you can get from the
public press." Yet in conversation, Clancy can also purport to
be privy to more than a layman's share of sensitive information,
thanks to his legion of admirers in the military. At times, he
will break off an anecdote by saying, "It's a shame that I can't
tell you about that."

    Surprisingly, Clancy claims to have researched Danger in
less than a week. He felt no compulsion to visit Colombia, since
he subscribes to the
you've-seen-one-jungle-you've-seen-them-all philosophy. Clancy
finds it routine that he learned all that he needed to know
about the Army's light-fighters during a three-day visit to Fort
Ord, Calif. "A warrior is a warrior," Clancy insists, using a
favorite term of praise, "whether they're light infantrymen,
submariners, fighter pilots or whatever. The way they express
themselves may be different, but the personality types are
pretty much the same."

    Clancy has been at loose ends since he came down from the
adrenaline rush of completing Danger (he wrote the final 45
manuscript pages in a single day to meet his May 1 deadline).
His self-reward was a cross-country train trip with wife Wanda
and their four children (the youngest is a three-year-old
daughter), plus Rodgers and his wife. Clancy, who shares his
hero Ryan's aversion to flying, rented an entire Amtrak parlor
car for the trip.

    Clancy has resisted signing a new book contract with his
publisher, Putnam, "because I don't want all the pressure over
me, the delivery date and all that stuff." Even though he talks
boldly about taking an entire year off "to do something
different," Wanda predicts that his sabbatical will not last
another two months. Over the summer, Clancy has already been
tinkering with three different books -- a new Ryan tale, a World
War II naval adventure and a half-completed novel called Without
Remorse, about a moralistic CIA assassin named Clark. Clancy's
rationale for his new spate of writing: "You just can't sit at
the computer and stare at the blank screen."

    But such frenetic activity cannot dispel the persistent
sense that Clancy is grappling with his own form of mid-life
crisis: the dilemma posed by answered prayers. "Tom is doing
what you and I would do when we achieve a goal," says Lieut.
Commander Gerry Carroll, a Navy pilot who has been Clancy's
close friend since high school. "He's asking himself, `Now what
should I try to do?' It's not the great American ennui in the
sense of a mystified now-what. It's more of an earnestness to
hitch up your wagon and get on to the next horizon."

    For Clancy, the beckoning horizon has long been Government
service. He is still enough of an earnest outsider to recall
each of his seven visits to the White House (the most recent:
in March, to watch a screening of New York Stories with George
Bush). But ever since Ronald Reagan stepped forward as Clancy's
First Reader, the author has had more reason than most to muse
about the what-ifs of being officially on the inside.

    In April he was asked to serve as an unpaid consultant to
the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Dan
Quayle. Although Clancy is still negotiating the wording of the
standard nondisclosure agreement so it does not impede future
novels, his eagerness to serve is palpable. "They wouldn't have
asked me in if they didn't think I'd be useful," he says, the
hope almost audible in his voice. But the novelist can also
sound like Ryan when he declares, "Somebody in my position has
the unique ability to look an official in the eye and say, `What
you just said is garbage.' " But the Bush team has other ideas.
"What we had in mind," says an Administration insider, "is
tapping his expertise in creating public enthusiasm for the
space program."

    Novelists can become captives of their own Walter Mitty
fantasies (remember Norman Mailer's political career?). It may
be Clancy's entree to the powerful that now encourages him to
aspire to something beyond the National Space Council. For
although he has no formal military or national-security
credentials, what he privately covets is nothing less than
Ryan's job as deputy director (intelligence) of the CIA. It may
be only an armchair ambition, but at moments he seriously weighs
whether he could handle the challenge. "I think I would be
pretty good at it," he muses. "Maybe I could find out someday
if I'm as smart as I say I am."

    That self-confident veneer is vintage Clancy. "I don't
think Tom believes there's anything on this planet that he can't
do," says Carroll. But even if he never gets to test his talents
in government, Clancy has already performed a national service
of sorts: more than any recent popular novelist he has sought
to explain the military and its moral code to civilians. Such
a voice was needed, for Viet Nam had created a barrier of
estrangement between America's warrior class and the nation it
serves. Tom Clancy's novels may be romanticized, but they have
helped bring down this wall. Not bad for a small-town insurance
man who thought he might try his hand at popular fiction.