I thought and continue to think early Clancy is excellent — basically everything that became a movie with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, plus “Red Storm Rising”

I thought and continue to think early Clancy is excellent — basically everything that became a movie with Harrison Ford or Alec Baldwin, plus “Red Storm Rising” — but even before he brought in the ghost authors, his reactionary politics started to get in the way of the stories. Yeah yeah, I can stand a feckless Democratic pol who just cares about getting elected as a dramatic fool/foil, but as I recall his last solo works went way beyond that and just got kind of tediously offensive for anyone who didn’t share his particular politics (even accounting for the typical politics of the average writer of military fiction). It was actually kind of a surprising turn, because Tom Clancy on TV on the day of 9/11 was one of the most level-headed commentators about the vast majority of Muslims (i.e., not terrorists). And there’s a video of him presenting at the NSA in the mid ‘80s that shows him to be a very bright, very funny, very personable guy. Got the sense that in his later years, American politics just started to make him angry, and in my view it adversely affected his work. But at his peak, he was damn fine at his craft.