Wry Martinis by Christopher Buckley Page A

Chernenko was buried.” (So
that’s
why he declined to attend.) “Henry Kissinger was there. We had lunch in the Roosevelt Room with some relatively important folks: Secretary Lehman, Senator [Mark] Hatfield, General Brent Scowcroft, Nancy Reynolds, of course. The president told me he liked the book and asked me what the next one was about, and I told him. He asked me, ‘Who wins?’ And I said, ‘The good guys.’
    “It was a great experience,” Clancy says with a smile, “and the next week we were back for the welcoming ceremony and the state dinner for the president of Argentina. So that was quite a week.” He adds, “I’m glad I voted for the guy.”
    Clancy shakes his head. “If I had his charm, I’d be the richest insurance hustler in the world. I’d just stand there on the corner and say, ‘Bring me your insurance.’ And they would!
    “It’s like walking into a spotlight. The only thing that’s missing in the Oval Office is a burning bush.”
    Though it’s not a political book,
Red October
has a strong anti-Communist point of view that’s somewhat atypical of the genre, where normally there isn’t much moral difference between the Soviet Union and America.
    The anticommunism was not part of any thought-out marketing strategy. The NIP’s editorial board didn’t sit around a table wondering what political tone the book should have. At the same time, the NIP, by its nature, isn’t the sort of outfit that would set out to make the boys in the Kremlin seem to be honest guys who are just trying to keep their heads above water.
    Red October
hit because it
is
a darn good yarn. But it is a fair guess that Jimmy Carter might not have found it so, and that the book might not have fallen on such a sympathetic audience in Jimmy Carter’s America.
    Clancy looks surprised when he’s asked what influences his view of the Soviet Union. “The truth,” he says. He is skeptical about people who get arrested while demonstrating outside the South African embassy when, as he sees it, no one seems to care that the Soviets are committing genocide in Afghanistan, doing things like dropping mines specifically designed to kill and maim children.
    “Everything in the book is drawn from a real incident, one way or another,” he says. The commander of
Red October
decides to defect after his wife dies while being operated on for a burst appendix by a drunken physician. Clancy got the appendix idea from hearing an American doctor talk on a radio show about an incident in which an American tourist in Russia died from the same thing.
    “In the real world, that just doesn’t happen. But it did there. Soviet medicine is a joke. The Soviet Union is the only industrialized country in the world where life expectancy is decreasing. Very few things in that book are completely made up.”
    Clancy went on to do the things best-selling authors do—although live television made him nervous: “It’s actually the nearest thing to death.” He preferred Larry King’s late-night radio call-in show.
    He sold the paperback rights to
Red October
for $50,000. Putnam signed him to write another novel for an advance of $325,000. (His advance for
Red October
was $5,000.) The producer of the movie The
Omen
optioned
Red October.
    Clancy became a free-lance expert, giving speeches “at every place you can shake a stick at.” Now when high-ranking KGB officers defect, CBS calls him to appear on morning television. On one trip to the studio, he was relieved to find someone there who knew more about defecting Soviets than himself—William Stevenson, the author of
The Man Called Intrepid.
    “Success,” Clancy says as if he was talking about an amusing nuisance, “has complicated my life enormously.” Yes, we can see that.
    He seems surprised to find himself in such demand. “The transition from insurance agent to best-seller author is kind of like being cured of leprosy,” he says. “All of a sudden everybody wants to meet you and talk