Clancy, Tom (1947—)

Known for his potboiling thrillers with political, military, and espionage themes, author Tom Clancy's influence on American popular culture has been incalculable. Within the high-tech action adventure that has proved so beguiling to the movie industry and its audiences, as well as to a vast number of people who buy books of escapist fiction, Clancy evokes a disturbing picture of the world we live in, and has come to be regarded as the spokesman for the American nation's growing mistrust of those who govern them. If his name is instantly identified with the best-selling The Hunt for Red October (1984) and the creation of his Cold Warrior hero Jack Ryan (incarnated on screen by Harrison Ford) in a series beginning with Patriot Games (1992), his work is considered to have a serious significance that transcends the merely entertaining.

On February 28, 1983, the Naval Institute Press (NIP) received a manuscript from a Maryland insurance broker, whose only previous writings consisted of a letter to the editor and a three-page article on MX missiles in the NIP's monthly magazine, Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute. The arrival of the manuscript confounded the recipients. As the publishing arm of the U.S. Naval Institute, NIP is an academic institution responsible for The Bluejackets' Manual which, according to them, has served as "a primer for newly enlisted sailors and as a basic reference for all naval personnel from seaman to admiral" for almost a century. NIP created an astonishing precedent by publishing the manuscript, and the obscure insurance broker became a world-famous best-selling author of popular genre fiction.

Clancy's manuscript was based on the fruitless attempt of the Soviet missile frigate Storozhedoy to defect from Latvia to the Swedish island of Gotland on November 8,1975. The mutiny had been led by the ship's political officer Valeri Sablin, who was captured, court-marshaled, and executed. In Clancy's tale, Captain First Rank Marko Ramius successfully defects to the United States, not in a frigate, but in a submarine, the Red October. The Naval Institute Press published The Hunt for Red October in October 1984, its first venture into fiction in its long academic history. It skyrocketed onto The New York Times best-seller list when President Reagan pronounced it "the perfect yarn." In March 1985, author and president met in the Oval office, where the former told the latter about his new book on World War II. According to Peter Masley in The Washington Post, Reagan asked, "Who wins?" to which Clancy replied, "The good guys."

Born on April 12, 1947 in Baltimore, Thomas L. Clancy, Jr. grew up with a fondness for military history in general and naval history in particular. In June 1969, he graduated from Baltimore's Loyola College, majoring in English, and married Wanda Thomas in August. A severe eye weakness kept him from serving in the Vietnam War, and he worked in insurance for 15 years until the colossal success of his first novel. The book was a bestseller in both hard cover and paperback, and was successfully filmed—although not until 1990—with an all-star cast headed by Sean Connery. Meanwhile, he was free to continue writing, building an impressive oeuvre of both fiction and non-fiction. In a 1988 Playboy interview, Marc Cooper claimed that Clancy had become "a popular authority on what the U.S. and the Soviets really have in their military arsenals and on how war may be fought today." Indeed, his novels have been brought into use as case studies in military colleges.

In April 1989, Clancy was invited to serve as an unpaid consultant to the National Space Council, and has lectured for the CIA, DIA, and NSA. A 1989 Time magazine review added a moral dimension to his growing public authority: "Clancy has performed a national service of some sorts: he has sought to explain the military and its moral code to civilians. Such a voice was needed, for Vietnam had created a barrier of estrangement between America's warrior class and the nation it serves. Tom Clancy's novels have helped bring down this wall." It is the dawning of the idea that the novel as a textual form is slowly attempting to replace that which we conventionally labeled "history" that has been an important factor in the growing critical interest in Clancy's thrillers, dealing as they do with the politics of our times. Whereas the "literary" aspect of a text is traditionally located in its ability to deal with the ontological and existential problems of man and being, we now find "literary" values in those texts that deal with pragmatic problems: man and being in the here and now. Read from this standpoint, Clancy's thrillers can be seen not as an escape from reality, but as presenting real, and relevant, issues and experiences, drawing on society's loss of trust in the great myths of existence: truth, and the questionable value of official and governmental assurances.

Although Clancy claims, in The Clancy Companion, that he writes fiction "pure and simple … projecting ideas generally into the future, rather than the past," critics have labeled him the father of the techno-thriller. In his novels Red Storm Rising (a Soviet attack on NATO; 1986), Cardinal of the Kremlin (spies and Star Wars missile defense; 1988), Clear and Present Danger (the highest selling book of the 1980s, dealing with a real war on drugs; 1989), Debt of Honor (Japanese-American economic competition and the frailty of America's financial system; 1994) and Executive Orders, (rebuilding a destroyed U.S. government; 1996), the machine is hero and technology is as dominant as the human characters. In both his fiction and non-fiction the scenarios predominantly reflect the quality of war games. "Who the hell cleared it?" the former Secretary of the Navy, John Lehman, remarked after reading The Hunt for Red October. Clancy, whose work includes his "Guided Tour" series (Marine, Fighter Wing) and the "Op-Center" series (created by Clancy and Steve Pieczenik, but written by other authors), has always insisted that he finds his information in the public domain, basing his Naval technology and Naval tactics mostly on the $9.95 war game Harpoon.

In November 1996 Tom Clancy and Virtus Corporation founded Red Storm Entertainment to create and market multiple-media entertainment products. It released its first game, Politika, in November 1997, the first online game ever packaged with a mass-market paperback, introducing "conversational gaming" in a net based environment. Clancy has called it "interactive history." The huge success of his books, multimedia products, and movies that are based on his novels allowed him to make a successful $200 million bid for the Minnesota Vikings football team in March 1998.

—Rob van Kranenburg

Further Reading:

Greenberg, Martin H. The Tom Clancy Companion. New York, Berkley Pub Group, 1992.