Back in the days of the Reagan presidency, when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter assigned to the White House beat, I scheduled a lunch interview with Nancy Reynolds, a close friend of Ronald and Nancy Reagan and a true administration insider. We met at a high-toned restaurant called Maison Blanche on F Street, hardly more than a block west of the executive mansion that bears the same name, only in English. I wanted her to feed me all manner of information on the White House scene, with plenty of inside gossip on personality clashes and stealthy maneuverings on the part of top staff officials. But all she wanted to talk about was a new novel called The Hunt for Red October, by an obscure rural Maryland insurance salesman named Tom Clancy.
It seems that Michael Deaver, Reagan’s all-purpose image maestro and trusted confidante of both the president and first lady, had discovered the book and liked it so much he had distributed copies to people throughout the West Wing and beyond. The recipients had included the president himself, who read it and revealed publicly that he could hardly put it down. Reynolds, it turned out, brought the book to my attention just as it was about to make a hearty splash-down into the American literary consciousness, in the process rendering Mr. Clancy both rich and famous.
After lunch Nancy Reynolds lured me to a bookstore across the street, where I promptly bought a copy of the Clancy book. I read it aboard Air Force One as I was flying west to Santa Barbara as part of the White House journalistic “pool” that always stayed close to the presidential entourage.
I found myself musing about that literary discovery after reports hit the news that Tom Clancy had died at age sixty-six after a brief illness of undisclosed description. Since the time of his discovery twenty-eight years ago, he ran out a string of literary and cultural feats of rare dimension, producing military thrillers at a dizzying pace and squeezing abundant success also from cinematic and video-game versions of his stirring tales.
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