Wry Martinis Page 10

  All this would be more convincing were it not for the superseding macho that permeates each page like dried sweat. Ryan’s Secret Service code name is, I kid you not, “Swordsman.” And there’s something a bit gamey about this description of the CIA’s deputy director of operations: “Mary Pat entered the room, looking about normal for an American female on a Sunday morning.” His feminism, if it can be called that, is pretty smarmy, like a big guy getting a woman in a choke hold and giving her a knuckly noogie on the top of her head by way of showing her she’s “O.K.” (Preferable, I admit, to the entertainments offered by the officers and gentlemen of the Tailhook Association.) And there is this hilarious description of Ryan’s saintly wife saving someone’s sight with laser surgery: “She lined up the crosshairs as carefully as a man taking down a Rocky Mountain sheep from half a mile, and thumbed the control.” You’ve got to admire a man who can find the sheep-hunting metaphor in retinal surgery.

  Tom Clancy is the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say, the most successful bad writer of his generation. This is no mean feat, for there are many, many more rich bad writers today than there were in Cooper’s time. If Twain were alive now, he would surely be writing an essay entitled, “The Literary Crimes of Clancy.” He would have loved Debt of Honor, the culmination, thus far, of Mr. Clancy’s almost endearing Hardy Boys—Jane’s Fighting Ships prose style:

  “The Indians were indeed getting frisky.”

  “More surprisingly, people made way for him, especially women, and children positively shrank from his presence as though Godzilla had returned to crush their city.”

  “ ‘I will not become Prime Minister of my country,’ Hiroshi Goto announced in a manner worthy of a stage actor, ‘in order to become executor of its economic ruin.’ ”

  “The captain, Commander Tamaki Ugaki, was known as a stickler for readiness, and though he drilled his men hard, his was a happy ship because she was always a smart ship.”

  “ ‘This is better than the Concorde!’ Cathy gushed at the Air Force corporal who served dinner.”

  “Damn, how much crazier would this world get?”

  “But what kind of evil synergy was this?”

  “Night at sea is supposed to be a beautiful thing, but it was not so this time.”

  “But I’m not a symbol, Jack wanted to tell him. I’m a man, with doubts.”

  “The dawn came up like thunder in this part of the world, or so the poem went.”

  “ ‘I knew Goto was a fool, but I didn’t think him a madman.’ ”

  “ ‘Gentlemen: this will work. It’s just so damned outrageous, but maybe that works in our favor.’ ”

  “ ‘Bloody clever,’ the head of the Bank of England observed to his German counterpart. ‘Jawohl,’ was the whispered reply.”

  And finally, this: “The man knew how to think on his feet, and though often a guy at the bottom of the food chain, he tended to see the big picture very clearly from down there.”

  —The New York Times, 1994

  Fax

  Fire

  TOM CLANCY TAKES ON BUCKLEY

  OVER PAN OF BOOK

  By Stephanie Mansfield

  Special to The Washington Post

  Tom Clancy, former suburban Maryland car insurance salesman turned best-selling techno scribbler, learned this week that the pen may be mightier than a full squadron of F-14 Tomcats with AS-6 Kingfish missiles hanging under each wing.

  A sizzling review by Christopher Buckley of Clancy’s latest novel, Debt of Honor, which appeared in Sunday’s New York Times Book Review section apparently sent the author into orbit, sparking what passes for a literary feud these days. Conducted by fax no less.

  The wickedly funny review will long be remembered by anti-Clancy forces as a direct hit, concluding, among other gibes, that Clancy is “the James Fenimore Cooper of his day, which is to say the most successful bad writer of his generation.”

  Upon reading an advance copy, Clancy immediately fired off a fax to Buckley, a Washington writer and son of William F. Buckley, Jr., whose literary sparring partners have been more along the lines of Gore Vidal.

  On a letterhead inscribed with the name of Clancy’s hero and alter ego, “JACK RYAN ENT.,” the typed, single-spaced missive read:

  “DEAR CHRIS,

  Thanks for the review. You seem to have inherited your father’s hauteur, but, alas, not his talent or noblesse. Revealing a surprise ending for a novel is bad form, lad.

  For the body of your review, Dr. Johnson said it best:

  ‘A fly, sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other a horse still.’

  Regards, Tom Clancy.”

  “I don’t know how he got the fax number,” says Buckley. “He must have gotten it from the CIA.” He faxed back:

  “DEAR TOM,

  I may be the insect, but you’re still the horse’s arse.

  Regards, Christopher Buckley.”

  Clancy again:

  “Sonny, when your paperback sales begin to approach my hardcover sales in, say, England, do let me know.

  Until then, at least learn how to do a professional review.

  Your dad knows how. Ask him.

  TC.”

  But the younger Buckley had needed no help from daddy in crafting a withering notice.

  “I’ve always loved Chris’s writing,” says Book Review Editor Rich Nicholls. “And he approached this assignment with such zest.”

  The review opens by quoting Mark Twain, who once said of one of Henry James’s books, “Once you put it down you can’t pick it up.”

  Buckley, whose most recent novel, Thank You for Smoking, was well reviewed but not mega-selling, calls Clancy’s eighth novel, at 766 pages, “a herniating experience.” What’s more, its anti-Japanese theme is “racist” and “as subtle as a World War II anti-Japanese poster showing a mustachioed Tojo bayoneting Caucasian babies.”

  Referring to Clancy as a “fire-breathing right winger,” he describes the prose style as “superseding macho that permeates each page like dried sweat. [Hero Jack] Ryan’s Secret Service code name is, I kid you not, ‘Swordsman.’ ” And although Clancy took great pains to include more female characters, “his feminism is pretty smarmy,” observes Buckley, “like a big guy getting a woman in a choke hold and giving her a knuckly noogie on top of her head by way of showing her she’s ‘O.K.’ ”

  Of course, Debt of Honor is No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list and, like all of Clancy’s books, is likely to stay there awhile with or without Buckley’s review.

  Perhaps that’s why Clancy was playing meek yesterday when he said in a telephone interview that his faxes were meant as a joke. “I’m sorry he didn’t take it that way. I goofed. I’m sorry.”

  Sadly then, this skirmish seemed destined not to rise to the mythical level of, say, Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy, Stephen Spender and David Leavett or even Kitty Kelley and Barbara Howar. But it at least has the novelty of being fought with a modern communications tool. “This must be the first feud to be fought over faxes,” says Nicholls.

  But there was hope. As Buckley was preparing to make a train to New York yesterday, the familiar high-pitched whine of an incoming fax could be heard over the telephone.

  “Must dash,” Buckley laughed, in best faux hauteur voice. “More hate coming!”

  —The Washington Post, 1994;

  reprinted with permission of the

  author and the Washington Writers

  Group

  Spin Cycle

  How I Learned to

  (Almost) Love the

  Sín Lobbyísts

  A couple of years ago, while wondering with some desperation what to write about, I turned on the TV and there was a nice-looking talking-head lady from the Tobacco Institute, manfully (as it were) denying that there was any scientific link between smoking and cancer, heart disease, respiratory disease, or athlete’s foot. She was attractive, well-spoken, intelligent,
and as persuasive as she could be, given the deplorably disingenuous data she was pitching. I thought: What an interesting job that must be. Get up in the morning, brush your teeth, and go and sell death for a living.

  A few days later I was reading in the paper about some teenage kid who, to judge from his blood alcohol content, had drunk two kegs of beer single-handedly, then got in his pickup truck and careened over the yellow line into a minivan, annihilating an entire Boy Scout troop. And there at the bottom of the story was a quote from a spokesman for the beer-keg industry saying what an awful tragedy it was, but that no one was more concerned about teenage drunk driving than the beer-keg industry. I thought: Boy, I bet that guy trembles every time his beeper goes off.

  A few days after that, a “disgruntled postal worker” went bonkers and blew away his supervisor and a half dozen others with a gun with a name like Hamburger-Maker .44 Triple-Magnum. And sure enough, the National Rifle Association was right on the case, worrying out loud that if we start outlawing Hamburger-Maker .44s, how long before we outlaw the Swiss Army knife? I thought: There’s another interesting job.

  The idea formed of writing a major, thick, serious, nonfiction study of institutional hypocrisy in America. It would be grandiose and groundbreaking, but with an accessible title: I’m Shocked—Shocked! (said, of course, by Captain Renaud in Casablanca, on being handed his gambling winnings moments after closing down Rick’s Café for gambling). The book—no, the volume—would cover government, business, society. It would be comprehensive, exhaustive, thorough. And boring.

  But I kept coming back to these three yuppie Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Another title came to me: Thank You for Smoking. And then the mortgage bill arrived, so that settled it.

  I wrote to the Tobacco Institute, the various liquor lobbies, and to the National Rifle Association. These were artfully worded letters announcing that I had had enough of the neo-Puritanism that was sweeping America and was embarking on a book about it. True enough. They may now complain that they were deceived, but if they look at those letters, they’ll see that they really weren’t—and anyway, people who make their living pushing cigarettes, liquor, and guns ought not to claim the high moral ground. And they shouldn’t look a gift novel in the mouth: The trio of characters who make up the book’s Mod Squad—it’s an acronym for “Merchants of Death”—are sort of likable. Or at least sympathetic.

  Likable? Yuppie mass murderers? Or mass enablers? Sympathetic?

  I went to see the attractive lady from the Tobacco Institute. She was very nice and … tall. I don’t want to get into amateur psychology here, but my guess is that it’s not all that easy being a six-foot-one-inch-tall woman, especially as she had no doubt reached this height in her teens; and maybe, just possibly, there’s some anger inside that she’s still, uh, working out. (But it wasn’t my business, and I didn’t ask.) I was surprised, however, to learn that her previous job had been at the Department of Health and Human Services. “At my going-away party, they were going to give me signed copies of the Surgeon General’s report,” she said, smiling, “but thought better of it.”

  I wanted to know what it’s like, being a merchant of death. I didn’t use that exact phrase. Well, she said, it’s not easy. No, I said, I imagine it’s not. You get threats, she said. What do you do about them?, I said. You throw ’em away, she said.

  Once she was at a health symposium—that’s part of her job, attending health symposiums; what a warm welcome she must get—standing next to Everett Koop, the formidable former Surgeon General who looks like Captain Ahab. And someone mentioned that she used to work at HHS. And he said, “I wish she’d gone to be a prostitute on Fourteenth Street instead.” Don’t think that didn’t hurt.

  I said, How do you introduce yourself to strangers? “Well,” she said, “you never come straight out and say, ‘I work for the Tobacco Institute.’ ” First she’ll say, “I work in public relations.” If they press, she’ll say, “I work for a trade association.” If they still press, she says a trade association “for a major manufacturer.” She added, “You never know if this guy’s mother has just died of cancer.” By now I’m shaking my head in sympathy, thinking: Gosh, it must be just awful.

  But why, I fumbled diffidently, what’s—

  “A nice girl like me doing in a place like this?” she finished my sentence.

  “Yes!” I cry. “Why?”

  She exhales her smoke—like Lauren Bacall. “I’m paying the mortgage.”

  Of course: the Yuppie Nuremberg defense: I vas only paying ze mortgage! I admire this woman. In the kingdom of the morally blind, she has the echolocation of a bat. On the way out, she points to a booklet on her credenza. Next to it is a packet of “Death” brand cigarettes, an actual brand of cigarettes, no name on the front of the pack, just a white-on-black skull. As tchotchkes, the Tobacco Institute could do no better than a pack of Death cigarettes.

  But the booklet. It says, “Helping Youth to Say No to Tobacco.” She says, “That’s what I’m proudest of.”

  This was an impressive statement. My admiration for her faculties of cognitive dissonance, already large, swelled to even greater proportions. Goebbels might as well have produced a booklet entitled “The Führer and the Jews—A Love Story.”

  Oh dear. I promised that I wouldn’t moralize. It’s not my job as a novelist. It’s just that I have kids myself and … well, no, back to the story.

  Much in the news at the time was the controversy about Old Joe, Camel cigarettes’ famous dromedary with the nose that seems to remind some people of a penis. Camel started a new campaign with Old Joe at its center, wearing sunglasses and playing the saxophone, shooting pool, coolly eyeing the chicks. RJR Nabisco was putting out about seventy-five million dollars’ worth of Old Joe ads a year. The cigarette companies say that they are not—repeat, not—trying to get new business. They say they seek only to reinforce brand loyalty—and brand disloyalty, trying to get a teeny, tiny percentage of smokers to switch brands.

  In the wake of the Old Joe campaign, Camel’s share of the illegal children’s cigarette market climbed from .5 percent to 32 percent. Outraged mothers howled. Even Advertising Age, Mammon’s own trade journal, editorialized against the Old Joe campaign, to little avail. Old Joe is still among us, playing his saxophone.

  Meanwhile, overseas, the U.S. trade representative had begun to bully Pacific Rim countries—Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, and others—into opening their markets to U.S. tobacco. Up till then, those countries hadn’t allowed cigarette advertising. Then comes the U.S. trade rep threatening something called a 301 action, named for a section in the 1974 Trade Act that allows the president to slap retaliatory tariffs on foreign products if their country of origin is seen to be discriminating against Marlboro et al. by not allowing Marlboro et al. to advertise—never mind that no cigarette advertising has been allowed.

  Inevitably, the countries buckled to U.S. government pressure. The happy result? In just the first year that South Korea allowed U.S. tobacco advertising, the smoking rate for male teenagers rose from 18 percent to 30 percent. For female teenagers, it rose from 2 percent to 9. The trends were similar in the other countries. The World Health Organization estimates that between now and the end of the century, smoking will kill 250 million people in the industrialized world. That’s one in five, roughly the population of the United States.

  So it’s clear that the tobacco industry is doing its level best to help youth to say no to smoking. I left the Tobacco Institute lady’s office feeling warm and fuzzy.

  My next new friend works for the Beer Institute. The Beer Institute! I come to him straight from a visit with the head of the hard-liquor lobby: the Distilled Spirits Council of the United States. They hate each other, the beer and the booze people. Why? Because of a tax issue called “equivalency.” If one beer and one highball contain the same amount of ethanol, well then, say the DISCUS people to the government, you should tax beer at the same rate you tax us. This makes the beer people—Augi
e Coors, especially—very unhappy. So I do not tell my beer people that I am bellying up to the booze people.

  My beer guy—what a guy! Good-looking, jockly hail-fellow-well-met. He is calling me “guy” and we have only known each other for ten minutes. On his desk is a recent copy of Fatal Accident Reporting System, a Department of Transportation publication. On the bookshelf: beer steins, empty bottles of exotic beer. On the wall: his diploma from the Summer School of Alcohol Studies. I yearn to ask, Do they know how to party at the Summer School of Alcohol Studies, or what? There is also an autographed photo of him and his wife and President Bush.

  He works hard. And with a handicap. He hates to fly, and yet he used to have to fly one million miles a year. Once, he was on a plane that got struck by lightning. He drank fifteen drinks to calm down. After that he got so nervous that he had to get himself drunk to fly. “Which sometimes leads to trouble,” he allows.

  He gives me a tour d’horizon of the beer world. It is not a pretty picture. Sales have been basically flat for ten years: Neo-Prohibitionism is on the rise. Hypocrisy is rampant. Congressman Joe Kennedy II is demanding yet more warning labels on beer bottles. You know it’s bad when a Kennedy is staking out the moral high ground on alcohol.