TIME: Almanac 1990/1990 Time Magazine Compact Almanac, The (1991)(Time).iso/time/082189/08218900.025

Text File | 1990-09-19 | 14KB | 254 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.