The Many Sides of the ‘Talk of the Pentagon’ : Best-Selling Author of Military Thrillers Still Sells Insurance in Maryland Hamlet

He is, quite simply, the talk of the Pentagon.

But here on the tobacco farms nestled between Chesapeake Bay fishing villages, Tom Clancy is not known as the best-selling author of the military thriller “Hunt for Red October,” and a second war novel published this week, “Red Storm Rising.”

Here Clancy is still what he was before he hit the best-seller lists out of nowhere with the first book he ever attempted--an intricate, modern war scenario so suspenseful and realistic that critics thrust him in the same category with revered military writers such as Jules Verne (“Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea”), H. G. Wells (“The War of the Worlds”) and Gen. John Hackett, whose essay, “Third World War,” was said to be kept at President Jimmy Carter’s bedside table.

Here, in a quiet hamlet of 1,700 people four miles off the shore of the Chesapeake, Tom Clancy is an insurance salesman.

Although Clancy estimates he will earn $2 million from his first two books alone, he will continue to sell automobile, boat and home-owner policies (no life insurance--”That’s morbid!”) for the foreseeable future. Since he graduated from Loyola College in Baltimore with a degree in English 17 years ago, selling insurance is the only regular job Clancy has had, and he’s not going to quit now, just because he’s famous, a millionaire and a best-selling author.

“I have 1,000 clients. I can’t walk away from them,” Clancy said. “I have responsibilities.”

Yes, these matters are not to be taken lightly. You can’t just let people like this fend for themselves. There was the time one of Clancy’s policyholders, following the directions of a parking attendant, backed his car right over the attendant’s foot, crunching several bones.

“I’ve had some real beauties,” Clancy said, talking in his home recently over the clamor of 3-year-old son Tommy and the bulldozer that was digging the swimming pool just outside the window. Clancy lives here with his wife, Wanda, and four children ranging in age from 9 months to 13 years.

While not many other small-town insurance salesmen have a $39,000 Mercedes 380 they just bought “on sale,” the critical difference between Clancy and other policy purveyors is contained in a small smoke-filled room in his house. This is the room where a 39-year-old man whose “career” has been “marriage” can put on his Coke-bottle-bottom glasses and forget that bad eyesight robbed him of his dream of a military career. Here he can become anyone, go anywhere, see everything.

Book-Lined Room

This is the room where Tom Clancy reads and writes.

Three walls are lined with thousands of books he arranges alphabetically and scales with a ladder. National Geographics are heaped in a corner, on the floor. “Charles and Diana” join “Wired,” a set of encyclopedias, “The World’s Missile Systems” and George Burns’ “How to Live to Be 100” in a mixed population among the shelves.

“I like being around books. It makes me feel civilized,” Clancy said in his library. “The only way to do all the things you’d like to do is to read.”

Tucked in a small corner of the library is an Apple personal computer, attached to a laser printer. This is where he sits, flipping cigarette ashes into a shell casing from an M-1 tank, and performs magic. Or at least something close to it, to hear the military people tell it.

“The technical detail is superb,” said Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger, who not only knows something about military matters but also has reviewed books on an occasional basis.

“There are lot of spy novels and novels involving military technology,” said Weinberger, who once panned Robert Ludlum’s popular “Bourne Identity,” “but I don’t call to mind many, if any (that would compare to Clancy’s “Hunt for Red October”), based on accuracy, ability to communicate, narrative skills and plot. It’s hard to stop reading this book.”

President Reagan invited Clancy to the White House after reading it.

John Keegan, himself a respected military author and the defense correspondent of the Daily Telegraph of London, raved about “Red Storm Rising” (Putnam $19.95) in a review he wrote for the Washington Post. The new book is a scenario for World War III that has the Soviets starting a war against NATO, with both sides using state-of-the-art technology in conventional land, sea and air battles in Germany, Iceland and the North Atlantic. After reading Clancy’s idea of how a Third World War might be fought, Keegan wrote that John Hackett’s “Third World War” essay “bears the same resemblance to Tom Clancy’s flights of imagination as a high school essay does to a Ph.D. dissertation.”

Main Fascination

The main fascination with Clancy’s work has centered around how anyone outside the inner loop of the Pentagon could know so much about the most complex military technology and strategy. Was this guy CIA?

Not quite. He was HIA.

Hartford Insurance Agency.

“The funny thing is, I made up stuff that turned out to be real,” Clancy said. “There are mistakes in my books. But I don’t know what they are.”

Weinberger said that in the considerable talk he heard at the Pentagon about Clancy’s first book and his knowledge of weaponry, “I’m told there were only one or two minor errors, which is quite remarkable.”

Even more remarkable than that is the source of much of Clancy’s detail of submarines, fighter planes, tanks, satellites and the like. Many Washington readers have been discussing whether Clancy might have gotten hold of some classified information. This is a matter of some amusement to Clancy, who gleaned most of his technical information for the first book from a war game called Harpoon.

After Clancy invested $10 in the war game Harpoon, he was so taken with it that he got in touch with the game’s creator, naval analyst Larry Bond, and arranged to meet him at a war games convention in Baltimore. The two became such good friends that Bond became the godfather of Clancy’s son.

Bond and Clancy collaborated on “Red Storm Rising” and Clancy said he expected each of them to make $1 million on it, implying an even split of labor and profits. Bond’s name does not appear as a co-author of “Red Storm Rising,” a matter of some apparent tension that Clancy declined to discuss. Clancy does acknowledge Bond’s contribution in the author’s note in the book. Bond could not be reached for comment.

‘In Business to Have Fun’

“I have never, ever been exposed to classified information,” said Clancy. “And if I were, not for a moment would I consider using it,” he said. “I’m in the business to have fun and make money. And I have a very old-fashioned view that anyone who divulges classified information ought to be hanged.”

Despite his hard-line view of those who give away military secrets, Clancy does take a measure of delight in the trick he has pulled: exposing high-level military strategy as something an insurance salesman playing a war game could throw together in his spare time.

“Their principal worry,” Clancy said of the Pentagon, “is that I already know enough things to figure out things they don’t want me to figure out.”

Clancy’s books have been translated into Russian, among several other languages, and smuggled into the Soviet Union, where they are banned. Clancy was told by a contact that at least one Russian admiral stayed up all night reading “Hunt for Red October,” in which the United States outwits the Soviets with superior submarine technology.

“If he believed it, so much the better,” Clancy said of the Russian admiral. “I hope it scared the living hell out of him. American and British submarines, all by themselves, could sink the Russian navy in two days.”

Asked if his books romanticize war, Clancy bristled.

“Anybody who romanticizes war should be institutionalized,” he said. “That’s the greatest pornography of all. I’m a storyteller, examining an issue no one has examined yet,” that issue apparently being modern, full-scale world war.

Asked his feelings about violence, Clancy again looked annoyed.

A Fact of Life

“A day doesn’t go by that I don’t think about blowing somebody away,” he said sarcastically. “Violence is sometimes necessary to preserve society. You can’t prevent violence by ignoring it. That invites more. It’s an unfortunate fact of life.”

Those who would just lump all this war stuff into a category labeled “violence” miss the point, Clancy indicated.

“You’re equating good guys and bad guys,” he said. “That’s like equating pharmacists and drug pushers.

“I happen to believe we’re the good guys and the Marxists-Leninists are the bad guys. They’re evil. The President was right. Anyone who doubts it ought to read Solzhenitsyn.”

After “Hunt for Red October” made Clancy a celebrity among the military ranks, he was invited on board four nuclear submarines at dock and spent a week at sea on a frigate carrying helicopters and surface-to-air missiles.

“It was neat ,” Clancy said, not even attempting to suppress a little-boy enthusiasm. The frigate “has 193 on board and handles like a sports car, goes 0 to 30 in one minute. You put pedal to metal on this baby and she moves.”

Growing up in Baltimore the son of a mailman and a department store employee, Clancy devoured books on military history and yearned to become a soldier. But his poor eyesight caused him to flunk his physical for third-year ROTC in college, bringing his military career to a premature and permanent close.

“I wanted to be a tank commander. I just like tanks. . . .” And, turning to his 3-year-old, he asked, “Tommy, do you like tanks?”

Tommy, who had been photographing the interview session with a toy camera that plays a tune, interrupted this endeavor to answer, “Yes! I’m going to drive tanks! Bang! Bang! I’ll kill all the houses down!”

(After Tommy acted out another war scene, Clancy commented, “I don’t teach him to be a Nazi. He’s never even seen me fire one of my guns. I used to hunt but I gave it up because my girls didn’t understand. Now that I have a son I may take it up again.”)

Soldier or Writer?

It is not readily apparent if Clancy is a soldier at heart who is settling for writing about it or a writer at heart whose pet topic is soldiering. Now that Clancy has seen much more money and success in his writing than he probably ever would have as a military man, he was asked if, given a choice, he would prefer writing about soldiering, or doing it.

“I’d rather do it,” he said easily. “That’s much more important. The happiest people I know are in the military.” He holds this view, even though he admitted later that he is “basically afraid” to fly and would never be able to stand the claustrophobia of submarine life--a surprise since it is often said his best writing involves submarines.

Although Clancy was an English major and had wanted to write a novel since he was in high school, he went right into the insurance business after college.

“I was getting married. Marriage was my career plan,” Clancy said. “I took the first available job. The insurance business.”

More than a decade later, Clancy finally found the time to write his novel and did “The Hunt for Red October” in six months, “just for fun,” he said.

“There’s no mystery to writing. It’s mainly hard work with a little thought behind it. To be honest I don’t think about my writing skills.”

His first book was published by the little Naval Institute Press, which had not handled a novel since its founding in 1902. No one expected much to come out of “Hunt.” Clancy was “thunderstruck, dumbfounded,” by its success.

Now a major publisher, Putnam, has, according to Clancy, signed a minimum-$1-million deal for the new book, a turn of events he finds “just plain crazy. It’s not real.”

There is very little in Clancy’s new home, built after the first book succeeded, to suggest his new wealth. A modern split-level with cedar siding and beamed pine ceilings, the house’s interior does not sport any of the standard appointments of the East Coast Rich--no signs of Oriental rugs, antiques or art--and the wood paneling throughout the first floor is the kind you buy in thin sheets.

Scrimped and Saved

“I was doing fine as an insurance salesman. We had scrimped and saved and bought out the business a few years ago,” Clancy said. Of his new money, he said, “I just don’t think about it. My financial guy parks it somewhere. Money can ruin your life if you let it.”

Clancy has started a third book called “Patriot Games,” which he said is actually the first in a trilogy that includes “Hunt for Red October” and “Red Storm Rising,” he said. This plot spins around terrorism. Clancy’s source?

“The FBI,” he said, smiling. The first book made him fans in many high places.