Of Arms and the Man

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.

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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola

CAPTION: MEGATHRILLERS