When I moved to Alaska in the mid 90’s I only owned three books. One was a hardcover copy of Jonathan Livingston Seagull that my father had given to me as a gift on my 13th birthday. One was a collection of Martin Luther King Jr.’s quotes. The last was a paperback copy of Debt of Honor by Tom Clancy, which I read on the plane.
Tom Clancy was not a great writer, and his books were not amazing literary feats by any stretch of the imagination. Even what I would consider his best books pale in comparison to a dozen classical or contemporary authors I could name. His language was ordinary, his plots predictable, his villains one-dimensional and his heroes almost always perfect (John Clark not withstanding). I now recognize that it wasn’t the stories themselves that made an impact on me; it was the way that devouring them grew my appetite for reading, and shaped my opinion of the world politically.
One of the last memories I have of living in Santa Monica is of a young woman my own age knocking on doors in my neighborhood, trying to gather signatures for her petition to President Bill Clinton to cut military spending. She was all about eliminating the B-2 bomber. I considered myself a good liberal, from Earth Day-observing, Rainforest Action Network-supporting stock (it was Santa Monica after all). But unfortunately for this nineteen-year-old short-haired granola girl, I had just finished reading Red Storm Rising, and was a little in a fighting mood. We needed B-2 bombers, and I let the ninny know as much.
I, like probably every other Tom Clancy fan, pulled Debt of Honor off the shelf on 9/11 to reread the words of new President Jack Ryan, as he addressed his fictional nation after a plane had just destroyed the Capitol Building, and killed all of Congress and the Supreme Court. I knew how President Jack Ryan would respond to that attack, and hoped the real President Bush would show the same kind of resolve.
As I raised my family and watched real war rage for years on end, and politics got uglier than I had ever known during the peace years of my childhood, it was Clancy’s characters who navigated the murky swamps of Washington and gave an insight into the reality I was seeing played out before me on FoxNews and CNN. I learned to distrust NPR and Ted Koppel, and Bill Maher’s snarky cynicism seemed right out of the Tom Clancy villains from The Sum of All Fears.
His books shouldn’t have influenced me the way they did, but there is no denying it. Beyond the politics and the action they also whet my pallet for reading deeper. Paul Johnson, Shelby Foote, John Keegan, Winston Churchill, Cicero, would all follow. As much as my father would have liked for me to get my worldview from Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it was really the Ryan Doctrine that made the true impact.