Word: toms
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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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...
...compared with what Clancy pulled off in The Cardinal of the Kremlin. Not only did he virtually save the job of a reform-minded Soviet leader but he also spirited a defecting KGB chief onto Air Force One to fly to the land of freedom, opportunity and new Tom Clancy novels...
...such frenetic activity cannot dispel the persistent sense that Clancy is grappling with his own form of mid-life crisis: the dilemma posed by answered prayers. "Tom is doing what you and I would do when we achieve a goal," says Lieut. Commander Gerry Carroll, a Navy pilot who has been Clancy's close friend since high school. "He's asking himself, 'Now what should I try to do?' It's not the great American ennui in the sense of a mystified now-what. It's more of an earnestness to hitch up your wagon...
That self-confident 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...
...alternative is to ignore it. The Los Angeles Times, for example, sat on a potent article revealing conflict of interest settlements between a financial conglomerate and Mayor Tom Bradley. Bradley, who has been credited with calming racial tension in Los Angeles after the Watts riots in the late 1960s, has been backed by the Times' editors for decades. Finally, The L.A. Herald released its version of the story...