Wry Martinis

by Christopher Buckley

  “It was a great experience,” Clancy says with a smile, “and the next week we were back for the welcoming ceremony and the state dinner for the president of Argentina. So that was quite a week.” He adds, “I’m glad I voted for the guy.”

  Clancy shakes his head. “If I had his charm, I’d be the richest insurance hustler in the world. I’d just stand there on the corner and say, ‘Bring me your insurance.’ And they would!

  “It’s like walking into a spotlight. The only thing that’s missing in the Oval Office is a burning bush.”

  Though it’s not a political book, Red October has a strong anti-Communist point of view that’s somewhat atypical of the genre, where normally there isn’t much moral difference between the Soviet Union and America.

  The anticommunism was not part of any thought-out marketing strategy. The NIP’s editorial board didn’t sit around a table wondering what political tone the book should have. At the same time, the NIP, by its nature, isn’t the sort of outfit that would set out to make the boys in the Kremlin seem to be honest guys who are just trying to keep their heads above water.

  Red October hit because it is a darn good yarn. But it is a fair guess that Jimmy Carter might not have found it so, and that the book might not have fallen on such a sympathetic audience in Jimmy Carter’s America.

  Clancy looks surprised when he’s asked what influences his view of the Soviet Union. “The truth,” he says. He is skeptical about people who get arrested while demonstrating outside the South African embassy when, as he sees it, no one seems to care that the Soviets are committing genocide in Afghanistan, doing things like dropping mines specifically designed to kill and maim children.

  “Everything in the book is drawn from a real incident, one way or another,” he says. The commander of Red October decides to defect after his wife dies while being operated on for a burst appendix by a drunken physician. Clancy got the appendix idea from hearing an American doctor talk on a radio show about an incident in which an American tourist in Russia died from the same thing.

  “In the real world, that just doesn’t happen. But it did there. Soviet medicine is a joke. The Soviet Union is the only industrialized country in the world where life expectancy is decreasing. Very few things in that book are completely made up.”

  Clancy went on to do the things best-selling authors do—although live television made him nervous: “It’s actually the nearest thing to death.” He preferred Larry King’s late-night radio call-in show.

  He sold the paperback rights to Red October for $50,000. Putnam signed him to write another novel for an advance of $325,000. (His advance for Red October was $5,000.) The producer of the movie The Omen optioned Red October.

  Clancy became a free-lance expert, giving speeches “at every place you can shake a stick at.” Now when high-ranking KGB officers defect, CBS calls him to appear on morning television. On one trip to the studio, he was relieved to find someone there who knew more about defecting Soviets than himself—William Stevenson, the author of The Man Called Intrepid.

  “Success,” Clancy says as if he was talking about an amusing nuisance, “has complicated my life enormously.” Yes, we can see that.

  He seems surprised to find himself in such demand. “The transition from insurance agent to best-seller author is kind of like being cured of leprosy,” he says. “All of a sudden everybody wants to meet you and talk to you and ask your opinion on things. And hell, I’m the same guy I was two or three years ago. I was just as smart then as I am now—or just as dumb, depending on your point of view. So all it’s done, really, is open doors for me to a remarkable degree. If I want to ride on a submarine, it’s just a matter of picking up the phone.”

  The navy has adopted Clancy. For someone with Coke-bottle-thick glasses whose only previous experience in the military was army ROTC during college, it’s pure Walter Mitty. Last summer he spent a week on a Perry-class fast frigate doing research for his next book, Red Storm Rising. (“World War III at sea,” as he tersely describes it.)

  “They put me in officer country. I got treated like an officer, and I’m just a dumb landlubber. In many ways, that’s embarrassing.” He found himself in great demand aboard the FFG-7, with admirals wanting to know how he wrote Red October—and, of course, where he got his information.

  “They treated me like some kind of damn hero, and I’m not. I’m just a writer. All I do is write about the stuff they really do. They’re the heroes, not me. They’re the guys who go out there and work eighteen-hour days under fairly unpalatable situations.

  “The crew age on any ship is twenty-one, twenty-two. These are kids, and they’re awfully good at what they do. And nobody appreciates it. All the crap you see in the media is about the toilet seats and the wrenches and the gadgets that don’t work. And that’s not what it’s about. It’s about people, and they’re good people. Especially sub drivers. I don’t know how they do it.” We think we see his eyes misting up behind the glasses. “I’m a hopeless romantic,” he adds.

  So far the only subs Clancy has been on were securely tied to the dock—which is fine by him. “The first [submarine] I was on was the USS Whale. Before we went into the forward torpedo room, they took us into the auxiliary machine space, and I looked around—90 percent of the space is occupied by the machines themselves—and I thought, ‘My God, what if you’re in there and the lights go out and you hear water coming in?’ What do you do, other than say, ‘Get me out of this one, God. I’ll never chase women again.’

  “At that point I decided, no, I do not want to do this for a living. No thanks. It’s a special breed of cat, and I’m not that kind of cat.”

  Aboard the British nuclear ballistic-missile submarine HMS Resolution he got a chance to hoist a few beers in the control room. “They showed me around the missile control room,” he remembers. “That’s one thing I really got right”—a reference to the scene in Red October where his hero finds himself in the “boom boom room” of the Russian sub.

  The phone rings, and Clancy picks it up. He listens, puts the call on hold and says to his secretary across the room, “It’s a guy who wants a car quote. You wanna wing it?” She takes the call, and we return to best-sellerdom.

  “I wrote the kind of book I like to read,” he says, lighting another cigarette. “I like thrillers. I read Forsyth, Richard Cox, A. J. Quinnell, Jack Higgins. I didn’t think politics, I didn’t think philosophy; I just wrote the kind of book I like to read.

  “My two objectives were, first, to have fun; I wrote the book entirely for fun. I never really thought about the money. The other thing I wanted to do was portray the people and machinery we have out there as accurately as I could. And I’ve succeeded. I’ve had too many people tell me that I hit it pretty much on the head. I’ve had sub skippers tell me, ‘I gave this book to my wife and said, “Here’s the stuff I can’t tell you.” ’ And that’s very satisfying.”

  Clancy is writing his second book with a coauthor, Larry Bond, his son’s godfather and the creator of Harpoon, a naval-strategy game that sells in hobby stores for $9.95. Clancy says it was his best source for Red October. “It explains how weapons and sensors work. It’s played with miniatures. Mainly you do it on pencil and paper.”

  Though reviewers praised Clancy for his extraordinary facility in explaining Cold War technology, he almost dismisses it. “Everybody makes a big deal about the technical stuff. When I was researching the book, actually, that was the easy part. Simple. The hard part was getting into their heads. What kind of guy goes to sea in a ship that’s supposed to sink?”

  He reaches into an American Tourister briefcase and pulls out about three pounds of Red Storm Rising manuscript. He’s working on a Macintosh now, and told his paperback publisher he didn’t have the time to do a promotion tour, what with a February book deadline, a move into a new house, and the expected arrival of a new baby. (Anticipating a question we do not ask, he says, “Yes, if it’s a boy we’ll call him Red.”) After that he’s pl
anning three more novels in which Jack Ryan, the hero of Red October, will figure. He says he has “only just gotten to the point where I understand the guy.” After some hesitation, he also admits that Ryan is in part modeled after himself.

  Given how busy Clancy has become, is it safe to assume that his secretary will be winging it a lot this fall? Will he even stay in the insurance business?

  He ponders this. “Probably. Almost certainly. It’s a family business. I’m not going to walk away from it. I’ve got over one thousand clients. A lot of them are my friends; I’m not going to walk away from them.” Besides, he adds, “That’s where I get a lot of my stories.”

  Leaving the office to pick up the mail at the post office, he remembers a poster he saw in one of the subs he visited. It showed a gigantic, flaming orange mushroom cloud. Beneath it the caption read: “Twenty-Four Missiles Away. Target Destroyed. It’s Miller Time …”

  —Regardie’s, 1986

  Tired Gun

  “Let’s assume I get struck by lightning and I end up in the

  U.S. Senate. I’m there for six years. What’s the

  worst thing that could happen to me? I serve out my six years

  and I come back … and I write a book about it.

  And the book will sell!”

  —Tom Clancy, in The Washington Post Magazine

  Senator Jack Ryan stared at the papers on his desk. They were from the Government Printing Office, on North Capitol Street, between G and H Streets, and bore the characteristic “eagle” watermark. Ryan decided that the eagle was more like a turkey these days. This document made Ryan’s stomach juices churn, and he yearned for a cigarette, but the pantywaists who made the laws had outlawed smoking, along with school prayer, so he would have to wait until he got to the cloakroom, where he liked to blow smoke in the faces of the women senators. Ryan liked women. His mother was a woman, and his wife was one, too, but it was madness that they were allowed to serve in combat or in the Senate.

  The document was a second-degree amendment to a first-degree amendment closing the last military base in the United States. It mandated the confiscation of every last one of the two hundred million privately owned guns in the United States, even assault weapons used for shooting deer. He had filibustered against it for seventy-six hours. He was tired. He thought of Vietnam. Not that he had ever been to Vietnam, but he knew lots of people who had. Now another battle loomed, and Ryan had to summon every joule of energy in his weary musculature if it was to be won.

  He cleared his throat and shouted, “Mr. President!”

  All heads turned. A murmur of groans went up in the chamber. He was used to it. Ryan had been a thorn in their side for the past six years, and they could not wait for him to retire at the end of this term. He was not seeking reelection. He was going to become a novelist and write manly sagas about big guns that could vaporize the human heart in milliseconds. Who needed this?

  “Chair recognizes the gentleman from Maryland,” said the president of the Senate, who, according to the Constitution, was also the Vice President of the United States. He was a tree-hugging liberal who had smoked pot in his youth, but he had gone to Vietnam, so Ryan hated him a little less than he hated the others.

  “I move for a quorum call,” Ryan said. More groans.

  “With respect to the distinguished gentleman,” Senator Joe (Stalin) Biden, of Delaware, one of the most liberal men ever to sit in the United States Senate, said. He had had a hair transplant. Ryan had information from sources deep within the National Security Agency that the Soviets had implanted a microchip in Biden’s skull while he was having the hair plugs put in, and so could now control virtually every piece of legislation that went through the Judiciary and Foreign Relations Committees. It didn’t matter that the Soviet Union was now defunct, its heirs rattling the tin cup. Ryan knew that the Bear would be back. “Can we please just get on with it?” Biden said.

  Ten more seconds. If only Ryan could hold on. He stood up again. “Mr. President, I move for a brief recess.”

  Still more groans. What did they know of stamina, these people who had never met a payroll, or written fat beach books about expensive weapons systems that worked 100 percent of the time?

  Eight seconds … seven seconds …

  Suddenly, men in cool black uniforms, with blackened faces, carrying CAR-15s, M16s with M203 grenade launchers, and Belgian-made SAWs, swarmed into the Senate. It was the Army’s elite Ninja Seven company, a group of such efficient, highly trained killers that they scared even Ryan, and, Lord knows, he did not scare easily. They shot every liberal-wimp member of the Senate. When it was over, only Ryan and a handful of senators remained.

  “Sometimes democracy is messy,” Ryan said as he opened his desk and removed a Heckler & Koch MP-5 SD2 submachine gun, and administered the coup de grace with a few crisp bursts into a heap of twitching bodies. “But it’s still the best system we’ve got.”

  —The New Yorker, 1993

  Megabashing

  Japan

  Somewhere, if memory serves, Mark Twain said of one of Henry James’s books, “Once you put it down, you can’t pick it up.” Debt of Honor, the eighth novel in Tom Clancy’s oeuvre, is, at 766 pages, a herniating experience. Things don’t really start to happen until about halfway through this book, by which time most authors, including even some turgid Russian novelists, are finished with theirs. But Tom Clancy must be understood in a broader context, not as a mere writer of gizmo-thrillers, destroyer of forests, but as an economic phenomenon. What are his editors—assuming they even exist; his books feel as if they go by modem from Mr. Clancy’s computer directly to the printers—supposed to do? Tell him to cut? “You tell him it’s too long.” “No, you tell him.”

  Someone, on the other hand—friend, relative, spiritual adviser, I don’t know—really ought to have taken him aside and said, “Uh, Tom, isn’t this book kind of racist?” I bow to no one in my disapproval of certain Japanese trade practices, and I worked for a man who once conspicuously barfed into the lap of the Japanese Prime Minister, but this book is as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies. If you thought Michael Crichton was a bit paranoid, Rising Sun-wise, well then, to quote Mr. Clancy’s favorite President and original literary booster, Ronald Reagan, “You ain’t seen nothing yet.” His Japanese aren’t one-dimensional, they’re half-dimensional. They spend most of their time grunting in bathhouses. And yet, to echo Dr. Strangeloves Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, “the strange thing is, they make such bloody good cameras.”

  …

  The plot: Japan craftily sabotages the United States financial markets, occupies the Mariana Islands, sinks two American submarines, killing two hundred and fifty sailors, and threatens us with nuclear weapons. Why, you ask, don’t we just throw up on their laps and give them a countdown to a few toasty reruns of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Because, fools that we are, we have got rid of all our nukes in a mad disarmament pact with the Russkies. (Plausible? Never mind.)

  For a while it looks like sayonara for Western civ, until Jack Ryan, now White House national security adviser, masterminds such a brilliant response to the crisis that he ends up vice president. To make way, the current V.P. must resign because of charges of—sexual harassment. I won’t be ruining it for you by saying that Ryan’s ascendancy does not stop there; the President and the entire Congress must be eliminated in an inadvertently comic deus ex machina piloted by a sullen Japanese airman who miraculously does not grunt “Banzai!” as he plows his Boeing 747 into the Capitol. Former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman has recently had the arguable taste to remark, apropos this episode in Debt of Honor, that this particular fantasy has long been his own. I don’t like Congress either, but Abraham Lincoln, Lehman’s fellow Republican and mine, did go to some pains to keep the Capitol’s construction going during the Civil War as a symbol of the Union’s continuity. Oh, well.

  To be sure, the war enacted here is not the
fruit of national Japanese will, but rather a manipulation of events by a zaibatsu businessman whose mother, father and siblings had jumped off a cliff in Saipan back in 1944 rather than be captured by evil American marines, and by a corrupt, America-hating politician. But that hardly lets Mr. Clancy off the hook, for the nasty characteristics ascribed to Yamata (the former) and Goto (the latter) are straightforwardly racial. To heat our blood further, Goto keeps a lovely American blonde as his geisha and does unspeakable naughties to her. When she threatens to become a political hot tomato, Yamata has the poor thing killed. It all plays into the crudest kind of cultural paranoia, namely, that what these beastly yellow inscrutables are really after is—our women. (A similar crime, recall, was at the heart of Mr. Crichton’s novel Rising Sun. Well, archetypes do do the job.) Her name, for these purposes, is perfect: Kimberly Norton. “Yamata had seen breasts before, even large Caucasian breasts.” To judge from the number of mentions of them, it is fair to conclude that Caucasian breasts are at the very heart of Goto-san’s Weltanschauung. Farther down that same page, he expresses his carnal delight to Yamata “coarsely” (naturally) in—shall we say—cavorting with American girls. Jack Ryan is therefore striking a blow for more than the American way of life: he is knight-defender of nothing less than American bimbohood.

  It must be said that the hapless Kimberly Norton is a glaring exception among Clancy women: so much so that you wonder if he’s been reading Susan Faludi under the covers at night. With this book, Mr. Clancy stakes his claim to being the most politically correct popular author in America, which is somewhat remarkable in such an outspoken, if not fire-breathing, right winger as himself. Practically everyone is either black, Hispanic, a woman or, at a minimum, ethnic. The Vice President is hauled off on charges of sexual harassment; the Japanese Prime Minister is a rapist; the deputy director of operations at the CIA is a woman; there is Comdr. Roberta Peach (Peach? honestly) of the Navy; Ryan’s wife receives a Lasker Award for her breakthroughs in ophthalmic surgery; one of the CIA assassins is informed, practically in the middle of dispatching slanty-eyed despoilers of American women, that his own daughter has made dean’s list and will probably get into medical school; secretaries, we are told again and again, are the real heroes, etc., etc.