Like his fellow bestselling author Michael Crichton, Clancy developed a prose style that integrated data as a form of drama: The novels are replete with datelines, time stamps, file names, and barely veiled allusions to real-world politics. What Reagan responded to in Clancy’s books was their delirious yet levelheaded blend of reactionary paranoia, anguished patriotism, and quasi-documentary realism.
Strangelove could compete with a B-movie actor learning diplomacy from books written by an autodidactic Midwestern insurance adjuster who was kept out of the Army Reserve in his youth by a case of myopia. Still, the legend of the president phoning up Margaret Thatcher to recommend Red Storm Rising-a White House–hotline version of a book of the month club-evokes and ultimately transcends Kubrickian satire. II and said after a screening that he now knew what to do in a hostage situation ). Step Aside, Jack Ryan, It’s Time for a New Tom Clancy Action Hero The ‘Jack Ryan’ Universe, Depicted Through Tom Clancy’s Final ScenesĪs the first movie star president, Reagan loved taking his cues from pop culture (he also enjoyed Rambo: First Blood Pt. The Gipper was famously Clancy’s biggest celebrity fan, and, according to insider myth, devoured a copy of 1986’s Red Storm Rising (another bestseller with a title drenched in bloody, commie crimson) before a summit with Mikhail Gorbachev. The mid-1980s were sold by Washington’s political architects as “Morning in America,” and Clancy’s novels-which he produced like clockwork after The Hunt for Red October-provided Ronald Reagan with his preferred bedside reading. The Hunt for Red October dramatized the potential end of the world as we know it, and captured an anxious zeitgeist and sought to soothe it as well, imagining a brave new world where a Soviet commander and an American intelligence analyst might sail off together into the sunset. The technocrat was also a technophobe: “It was one thing to use computers as a tool, quite another to let them do your thinking for you,” muses one character in 1984’s The Hunt For Red October, about a runaway Soviet sub with sonar-defying upgrades and first-strike nuclear capability. Reading them was a bit like flipping through a Sharper Image catalog or a quarterly profit report from Lockheed Martin. The bestsellers that Clancy wrote in the 1980s and ’90s were machine-tooled contraptions loaded with high-end technology. “His novels were about commerce from the get-go … bestsellers that were made into movies.” “ never aspired to literature,” wrote The Los Angeles Times’ David Ulin in 2013. If Tom Clancy did not exist, it would have been necessary for Hollywood to invent him.
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