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< In April he was asked to serve as an unpaid consultant to the National Space Council, chaired by Vice President Dan Quayle. Although Clancy is still negotiating the wording of the standard nondisclosure agreement so it does not impede future novels, his eagerness to serve is palpable. "They wouldn't have asked me in if they didn't think I'd be useful," he says, the hope almost audible in his voice. But the novelist can also sound like Ryan when he declares, "Somebody in my position has the unique ability to look an official in the eye and say, 'What you just said is garbage.' " But the Bush team has other ideas. "What we had in mind," says an Administration insider, "is tapping his expertise in creating public enthusiasm for the space program."
Novelists can become captives of their own Walter Mitty fantasies (remember Norman Mailer's political career?). It may be Clancy's entree to the powerful that now encourages him to aspire to something beyond the National Space Council. For although he has no formal military or national-security credentials, what he privately covets is nothing less than Ryan's job as deputy director (intelligence) of the CIA. It may be only an armchair ambition, but at moments he seriously weighs whether he could handle the challenge. "I think I would be pretty good at it," he muses. "Maybe I could find out someday if I'm as smart as I say I am."
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 helped bring down this wall. Not bad for a small- town insurance man who thought he might try his hand at popular fiction.
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CREDIT: TIME Chart by Joe Lertola
CAPTION: MEGATHRILLERS