Wry Martinis by Christopher Buckley

remember anyone calling it
King Lear
, but it is a fine sentiment.)
    Nonetheless, the navy was genuinely alarmed by the depth of Clancy’s knowledge of its top, top secrets. All of a sudden Clancy found himself being swarmed over by the Naval Investigative Service and a commander at the Pentagon who wanted to know how he had found out so much about the world of nuclear subs—and from whom.
    Clancy obliged the commander by telling him where he’d gotten it all, without mentioning the names of any of the active-duty naval officers who had talked to him. Not that they’d given him classified material, but Clancy didn’t trust the brass to believe that they hadn’t. Finally Clancy said, “Look, if you’ll tell me what sensitive stuff you want removed, I’ll remove it.”
    This put the commander in a bit of a pickle. “Well, I can’t tell you,” he answered. “Then I would be confirming some stuff that I can’t confirm.”
    “The thing that
really
bent ’em out of shape is I knew what ‘Crazy Ivan’ meant,” Clancy says, referring to the navy’s term for a maneuver used by Russian subs to detect if they’re being followed. “I picked that up from one of my clients. They were really torched that I knew what that meant.”
    When Clancy finally met John Lehman, the secretary of the navy, Lehman told him that his first reaction on reading the book had been to say, “Who the hell cleared this?”
    Red October
was published in October 1984 and sold twenty thousand copies in the first six weeks. “For a first novel, that’s not bad at all,” Clancy says in a classic bit of understatement; most first novels sell about one-tenth that number, total. By the end of the year it looked as if the book was going to top out at fifty thousand. “Which,” Clancy deadpans, “for a first novel is all right.”
    That might have been the end of it, but for a chance series of events.
    Jeremiah O’Leary, a
Washington Times
reporter who had served as the National Security Council’s spokesman under Reagan, gave a copy of the book to Nancy Reynolds, a friend of the Reagans and a partner inthe Washington lobbying firm Wexler Reynolds Harrison and Schule. Reynolds was on her way to Buenos Aires, and O’Leary wanted her to pass the book on to the U.S. ambassador there, who is a mutual friend of theirs. Reynolds read it on the plane and was so taken with it that she ordered a case of
Red Octobers
for Christmas presents. One of them ended up under the president’s tree.
    Not long afterward,
Time
printed a story on Reagan in which he mentioned that he’d read the book. He pronounced it “the perfect yarn.”
    The folks at the Naval Institute Press may have been new at publishing novels, but they weren’t dumb. They ran the presidential imprimatur in huge type in a
New York Times
ad. “That quote,” says Clancy, “put us on the national [best-seller] list. And we’ve been there ever since.”
    Red October
peaked at number two on the hardcover list. “It would have been number one if it hadn’t been for Stephen King, the dirty guy,” says Clancy, attempting a scowl. “If he’d waited one more week before bringing out
Skeleton Crew
, I would have been number one. Well, who ever said the world was fair?”
    The book was helped by the fact that it was a curiosity in the publishing world. That it came out of left field, from a company that publishes naval textbooks, “made people sit up and notice it,” says Daisy Maryles, the executive editor of the industry’s bible,
Publishers Weekly.
“It was unusual, and that made it easier to promote; there was an automatic angle. Obviously, it helped that behind all this there was a good book. But there was a serendipity to it all.”
    And so it was that in March 1985, the insurance agent from Owings found himself being invited to the White House—three times in two weeks.
    “The first [time] was meeting the president in the Oval Office,” Clancy says. “That was the day