No one amongst those people had served in combat, but Colin Powell, Lawrence Wilkerson and his staff were all the combat personnel. And it’s funny, they were shuffled over at the State Department and the civilian ideologues were put over into the Pentagon and they were the people who came up with what we call TCCC, “Tom Clancy Combat Concepts.” They came out and just started reading these books and magazines and start thinking, “We’re going to be hard, we’re going to do these things, we’re going to go out and start popping people on the streets and we’re going to start renditioning people.” The decision makers were almost childlike in wanting to do high, Dungeons and Dragons, you know, dagger and intrigue all the time.
—Malcolm Nance
Quoted in Dirty Wars
Clancy was an insurance drone who longed for bigger things. He’s in Sam Peckipah’s "The Killer Elite" — he plays a psycho gun nut, and he’s quite convincing. The book that made his career, "Red October," was quite probably stolen from a 1971 novel, "The Arnbeiter Affair," about a Soviet sub captain who defects. Nevertheless, "Red October" was a hit in the Reagan White House, and the rest is destiny. Now Clancy rakes in cash while "writing" books "with" co-authors. So it goes, so it goes.
I loved "The Hunt For Red October," the movie, and I still do. It’s militaristic Cold War nonsense, but it’s beautifully shot and the sound effects of torpedos are tremendously scary. Clancy hated it, and demanded script approval of any movie made from one of his books afterwards. They are not beautifully shot nor scary. Nor, thankfully, did they make any money, so that franchise is dead.
@JMF – He’s okay but certainly no Ludlum. The funny thing about the script approval is that [i]Red October[/i] is the only one of those films that really works. But you are right: it is pernicious Cold War propaganda. Of course the Americans are good, just wanting peace. The Soviets just want to wipe out America with a first strike. The great irony is that it was always reversed from the way Americans thought: the Soviets thought they faced an existential threat and were always running to catch up with the Americans. That’s not to say there weren’t a lot of evil people on both sides, but the real worry was on the Soviet side.