“Ten years ago the world was a very different place,” says the author, who is 47. So Clancy is alone, left to find his way in a wilderness of mirrors where the enemies are not clear and danger lurks in small packages. Ronald Reagan is no more than a distant memory, and even George Bush seems relegated to a bomb-fearing, Red-baiting past. Since 1984, when Reagan picked up that first Clancy book, however, the world has changed – and changed drastically.
Read Peter Travers’ 1990 Review of The Hunt for Red October Three of his books have been made into movies, and his protagonist and alter ego, Jack Ryan, a role fleshed out by Alec Baldwin and Harrison Ford, has become an American icon. Subsequently, Clancy wrote seven more novels, which have sold more than 30 million copies, gave up selling insurance, built a house, sold it, built another and visited the White House. It was also about 400 pages, and Reagan read them all, enjoying the book enough to call it “the perfect yarn,” a dream blurb that sent sales through the roof. It was about the East and the West, good and evil, nuclear weapons, submarines, war.
The book, The Hunt for Red October, was written by an unknown insurance agent, a Baltimore native named Tom Clancy who dreamed up the intricate plot while sitting in his office. In the last decade of the Cold War, Ronald Reagan read a book.
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