Word: novelists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Initially, Hitler attracted those like himself, unappeased outsiders, misfits, losers. Joseph Goebbels was an unsuccessful novelist and playwright. Julius Streicher was a blackmailer. Ernst Rohm was a sadistic homosexual who advocated violence and murder. Hermann Goring was an air-force veteran without a scruple to his name. "I have no conscience," he liked to declare. "My conscience is Adolf Hitler." But then, Hitler was the conscience of all his cadre. Pan-Germanism was their creed, Adolf their Messiah. When criticized, Hitler would say, "Two thousand years ago, a man was similarly denounced . . . That man was dragged before a court...
Confession is a religious ritual and a literary device, a point that John Gregory Dunne has illustrated a number of times during his career as a U.S. journalist and novelist. For example, Vegas (1974) was an unflattering, candid account of a bad time in the author's life, an on-the-road book that played personal problems against the city that passes for Sodom, U.S.A...
What an exhausting five-year run it has been for backwater insurance agent turned blockbuster novelist Tom Clancy. Forget the four straight best sellers published since 1984 and the 20 million copies sold. Forget the movie version of his first novel, now in production. Forget the $4 million advance for his latest thriller, Clear and Present Danger. Forget such crass calculus of cash- register commerce...
...still negotiating the wording of the standard nondisclosure agreement so it does not impede future novels, his eagerness to serve is palpable. "They wouldn't have asked me in if they didn't think I'd be useful," he says, the hope almost audible in his voice. But the novelist can also sound like Ryan when he declares, "Somebody in my position has the unique ability to look an official in the eye and say, 'What you just said is garbage.' " But the Bush team has other ideas. "What we had in mind," says an Administration insider, "is tapping...
...veneer is vintage Clancy. "I don't think Tom believes there's anything on this planet that he can't do," says Carroll. But even if he never gets to test his talents in government, Clancy has already performed a national service of sorts: more than any recent popular novelist he has sought to explain the military and its moral code to civilians. Such a voice was needed, for Viet Nam had created a barrier of estrangement between America's warrior class and the nation it serves. Tom Clancy's novels may be romanticized, but they have helped bring down...