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Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996
$27.95, 874 pp.
ISBN: 0-399-14218-5
A Thought Experiment
Oliver Stone persuaded me to
read this book. I had never read a Tom Clancy novel before. I had heard of
them, of course. They were all, obviously, very big, and I had the impression
that they dealt mostly with the design specifications of lethal instruments.
Neither of these are qualities that normally engage my interest. Oliver Stone’s
review of Executive Orders in The New York Times of September 22, however,
suggested to me that there might be something special about this book. Stone
patronized Clancy’s reactionary political opinions and the obdurate adherence
by Clancy’s main character to Catholicism of the most obscurantist sort. He
made light of the international perils that Clancy described as slightly
paranoid plot conventions. Finally, he explained Clancy’s world view in Jungian
terms: by describing an America beset by foreign enemies against which his
heroes had to defend her, Clancy was really describing his own attempts to come
to terms with his feminine “other.” The implication was that dramatic fiction
of this sort was no longer appropriate to a matriarchal era, when we can
approach our feminine selves in more direct and conscious ways. Since I was
unable to strangle Mr. Stone after reading his review, I decided that the least
I could do was read the book as an act of solidarity with the non-airheads of
the world.
Not being a regular Clancy
reader, I cannot say precisely how this work differs from his earlier books.
However, I am reliably informed that this one is far more political and even
chatty than his usual efforts. There cannot be more than 150 pages of actual
combat, terrorist raids and assassination attempts, apparently a small
percentage for a Clancy book. Furthermore, though we have one major and one
minor international conflict depicted here, the book’s focus is more on the
sorry state of American domestic politics than is usually the case.
The book, in fact, is an
unsubtle thought experiment. In the opening pages, we have Jack Ryan, the CIA
agent-history professor-former Marine long familiar to Clancy’s readers,
looking with great dismay at the burning wreck of the Capitol building. It
seems an irate Japanese pilot from the last novel had just crashed a commercial
airliner into the building during a joint session of Congress, thereby killing
the president, most members of both Houses, the entire Supreme Court and pretty
much the whole cabinet. Ryan’s particular problem was that the joint session in
question had just elected him vice president so that he could serve out the
term of the previous incumbent, who had been forced to resign for conduct
unbecoming a goat. The appointment was intended as a pro-forma honor for Ryan’s
many services to the Republic.Unfortunately for him, once the president and
Congress were blown to cinders, he became a president without a government, or
even a party. His mission this time is to rebuild the federal government of the
United States from the ground up to a degree unprecedented for any president
since Washington. This is a premise to give one pause.
In many ways, Executive Orders
was a pleasant surprise. I had read some techno-shoot-’em-ups by other authors,
and they were conspicuous for the wooden quality of their characters and the
didactic improbability of their dialogue. No one is ever going to confuse
Clancy with Dickens, but Clancy’s characters do look a bit like people,
certainly enough to excite the sympathy or antipathy of the reader. Some of
them even develop in the course of the story. Also, Clancy seems to have a gift
for imagining villainies truly villainous. For instance, the way in which the forces
of evil collect Ebola virus for a germ warfare attack on the United States is
so breathtakingly wicked that only the reticence customary in reviewing novels
of intrigue inhibits me from sharing the procedure with you now. (Oh, what the
hell: The Iranians kidnap an elderly nun infected with the virus from West
Africa and take her to a secret laboratory on the outskirts of Tehran. There
they deny her pain medication so as to prolong her life as she melts into a
puddle of infectious material. The bastards!) The chief stylistic drawback to
the book is that this novel alone is longer than the entire literatures of
certain minor languages. Also, though you cannot always have everything, when
you do it might be a good idea to have it in larger print.
The fact is that Executive
Orders really is not a techno-shot-’em-up at all. It is a novel of ideas. Some
of them are naive ideas. Some of them are bad ideas. Many of them are
commonplaces. Nevertheless, Executive Orders does ask questions that ought to
be part of the political landscape in the United States but are not. Someone as
variously well-informed as Tom Clancy would no doubt be offended if he were
told that his writings were examples of the popular mind at work. However, it
might be just to say that this book is a fair sample of the educated but
non-elite mind of America. It is neither ignorant nor unperceptive, and it is
reaching conclusions quite different from those enunciated by people who claim
to speak for it.
For one thing, Clancy
understands the shape of the world. The international element in this book is
provided by a conspiracy in which the Chinese instigate a crisis with Taiwan
just serious enough to draw American forces out of the Indian Ocean while the
Iranians are up to no good on the other side of Asia. While the particular
scenario Clancy paints is no more probable than any other, the basic
configuration of simultaneous threats of both sides of Eurasia is the primary
fact of life for the United States today. There is no escaping the reality that
US security is threatened if something goes seriously wrong in Europe, the
Middle East or East Asia. The worldwide military capability that the US
developed during the Cold War is a permanent fact of life, because there is no
alternative to a US military that is capable of fighting two major wars at
once.
The most informative
technically oriented passages of the book deal with the Iranian germ-warfare
attack on the United States itself. Clancy is to be forgiven for presenting us
with one more rendition of the ghastly effects of the Ebola virus (an innocent
nun, the absolute bastards!), and he does in fact perform some service by
demoting this and other superdiseases from the status of apocalyptic agents to
just more nasty bugs. Unlike what films like “The Hot Zone” would have you
believe, epidemics really do not spread all over the world like a quart of fuel
oil spilled on a map. Diseases that are both highly contagious and rapidly
fatal also usually burn themselves out quickly. Most serious infections, including
Ebola and AIDS, actually are not highly contagious at all, and can be
controlled through their means of transmission. That is why germ warfare is
really a terror weapon.
The constitutional crisis that
Clancy describes arising from the president’s restriction of the right to
travel is chimerical, however. The police powers of government in times of
emergency have very few restrictions, and certainly closing down the airports
and highways would be well within them. One minor disappointment to me, in fact,
was how little use Clancy makes of the “executive orders” of the title. I once
worked for the publishing company that has the contract to codify federal law,
and one of the things I did was figure out where permanent presidential
executive orders would go in the United States Code. I was astonished at just
how much of the administrative activity of the federal government is governed
by this kind of “legislation,” some of it based on rather general but perfectly
valid statutory authority. The practical reach of this authority would of
course be much greater if Congress were not around to object.
Not all of Clancy’s ideas are
happy. The notion of staffing the CIA with former policemen instead of drunken
fraternity brothers is misguided. Spies are not cops, just as cops are not
soldiers. Spies, or at least the agents who control them, are essentially
social workers: they keep track of disgruntled people and give them money to
keep them cooperative. Cops can be taught to do this, of course, but there is
no reason to think they would be especially good at it.
President Ryan’s ideas about
the domestic reform of the federal government are expounded at great length,
often in interviews with untrustworthy journalists, but there are few
specifics. He wants budgets balanced. He wants taxes flat. He wants useless
bureaucrats cleaned out of the departments. He also wants all of this done
yesterday, which maybe you could do with Congress blown up, but I would not bet
on it. In any event, this agenda misses the point. The United States is not
overburdened with hordes of pestilential bureaucrats. Rather the opposite: when
the government malfunctions, it is usually because the staffs are too small to
carry out the duties Congress assigned. If you have ever had trouble with the IRS,
for instance, you know that half the problem is getting some harassed officer
worker to look at your file for a full ten minutes. The rising cost of
government is purely a function of the growth of entitlements. What the federal
government mostly does is write checks and send them to people who are sick or
old or disabled. Balancing the budget means writing smaller checks or
collecting more tax money. It is as simple as that.
One luminously sensible
domestic position that Ryan takes has almost disappeared from American
political discourse. He will enforce existing laws regarding abortion. However,
he opposes abortion, not just personally but as a matter of public policy, and
he believes that the Supreme Court decisions on this matter are wrong because the
Constitution simply does not address the issue. He will seek to have those
decisions overturned by appointing judges who believe likewise. Once the
Supreme Court gets it right, the whole subject would then be
de-constitutionalized and de-federalized. No phony support for a constitutional
amendment, and no pretense of agonized neutrality. This is a winning formula,
one that is neglected by allegedly “pro-life” politicians who are perhaps less
eager to actually change the law than they would have us believe.
In some ways, the book is most
interesting for the ideas that should be there but still are missing. There is
little sense here of government as a positive good. This is not to suggest that
the service of the state is the goal of life. The state is not even the master
of civil society. However, in the Thomistic political theory espoused by the
Catholic Church even today, politics is a worthy enterprise in its own sphere,
just as art and science are in theirs. It is the means by which we achieve
those goods that we cannot achieve as private persons. The people who make a
career of conducting government should not be assumed to be tyrants or crooks
waiting for the citizenry to relax their guard so they can steal the treasury.
They do not deserve to be blown up by a Japanese airliner, nor do they need to
be for government to work effectively. Clancy seems to be a visceral Catholic.
This means, among other things, that he understands that authority is a
necessary element in human life. It also means that he can distinguish
legitimate authority from authoritarianism. What he lacks, because the general
culture still lacks it, is a developed sense of how the state can be more than
a mere utility.
You should not read too much
into popular novels, especially not into popular novels by one author.
Nevertheless, the very fact that a successful novelist thought his readers
would be interested in the sort of examination of the political system Clancy
presents here does show that a lot of things that formerly were taken for
granted are now open to question. If Clancy’s feel for his readership is right,
they do not want a revolution, Republican or otherwise. They don’t want a
dictator, and they don’t want a country that is run like an army. What they do
want is a change of regime, something far deeper than a change of parties. To
paraphrase Justice Anthony Scalia, they want a government suited to a country
they can recognize.
Well, at the end of the novel
President Ryan was announcing his bid for reelection. No doubt he will have an
eventful second term.
This article originally appeared in the December 1996 issue of Culture Wars magazine. Please click on the following line for more information:
Copyright © 1996 by John J.
Reilly