Tom Clancy: "By God, I'm going to do it." - change of career

Nation's Business, Dec, 1987 by William Hoffer

Tom Clancy: "By God, I'm going to do it."

Is there more than one rainbow to chase? Having become successful at one enterprise, is the business person locked into it for the rest of his or her life?

Tom Clancy, 40-year-old father of four, does not believe so. "There are two kinds of people in the world," declares the small-town insurance agent who became a best-selling author of military thrillers and a favorite spokesman for the proponents of a hard-line defense strategy. "There are people who go for the dream and either succeed or fail. Even if they fail they succeed, because at least they tried.

"But if you're the other kind of person, afraid to go for the dream, then about the time you retire, you'll have the condo down in Florida, and you'll be down there in the elephant graveyard waiting to die, and you'll think, 'God, what if when I was 30 I had gone ahead and sailed around the world or bought that airplane I always wanted to buy?'"

That type of "what if" question arises, Clancy says, because of what he sees as a paradox in the entrepreneurial spirit: Men and women who start their own businesses have the courage to assume great risks, but, once they succeed, many lose the spirit of adventure and concentrate on consolidating their gains.

In 1982, Clancy, then 35, had fallen into the latter pattern. Business was humming along in the offices of the O.F. Bowen Agency in Owings, Md., writers of auto, fire and casualty insurance. Clancy had bought the business from his wife's grandmother for about $125,000 and found that he could handle the daily routine in a matter of hours.

This gave Clancy time to reflect.

"I was in that contemplative mood that comes to us all at least once a day," he recalls. "You're sitting down when it comes. I asked myself for about the hundred thousandth time, 'What are you going to be when you grow up?' and all of a sudden it hit me: 'You are grown up, and you're stuck! You're comfortable, but you're stuck in a boring job.' I didn't have anybody to blame but myself. I'd made my own trap, I had kids I had to support, mortgage payments and a business to pay off."

Clancy had always been a dreamer. Fascinated with the military, he had longed for a career as an officer, but had been thwarted by severe myopia. Instead, he became an avid reader of military journals. He had yet another fantasy--to become a writer. His one effort in that direction had not been successful. While a student at Baltimore's Loyola College, he had written a science-fiction story about a tiger that turned out to be more intelligent than a hunter suspected. He sent the story to Analog magazine, but it was rejected.

As the years passed, Clancy's dream of being a writer languished. He graduated with a degree in English, but the responsibilities of marriage prodded him toward the workaday world. He worked for the Hartford Insurance Company for several years and, after taking over the O.F. Bowen Agency, found it exciting to be running his own business. Still, his dream persisted.

In his circle of friends and clients, Clancy numbered many military personnel who were, or had been, stationed at a naval installation near Owings. Through them, he met additional service people.

Combining his interest in military affairs with his writing ambitions, he wrote an article detailing an alternate basing plan for the MX missible system. The article was published in one of the most prestigious military publications, the U.S. Naval Institute's Proceedings. As it is for many individuals, the sight of his byline in print was a powerful catalyst to further efforts.

He had been thinking for many years that there was a literary possibility in the real-life attempt of a Soviet frigate crew to defect to Sweden. In Clancy's still-to-be-written version, an entire Russian submarine would attempt to defect to the United States.

The project moved a major step closer to reality through a chance lunch in 1982 with a naval officer whose conversation turned at one point to stories about the personalities of submariners.

"What I didn't know is what kind of person goes to sea in a ship that's supposed to sink," Clancy recalls. "I found out that they're pretty much the same as fighter pilots, insofar as they have the same indecent sense of personal invincibility, the same kind of confidence, the 'scarf and goggles' effect. I never realized that. When I found it out I said, 'Well, gee, I know test pilots. I've met an astronaut. If they're just like that, I can write the story.'"

Returning to his office, Clancy made a decision that would rock the publishing world: "I decided, by God, I always wanted to write a book. I've got the time. I'm my own boss. I'm going to do it. And I did it."

Working without an outline, stealing time from his insurance business, Clancy plunged into the project. He found it relatively easy to research technical details concerning modern submarine operations. The information was readily available in military publications such as Combat Fleets of the World and A Guide to the Soviet Navy, and he supplemented it with insights gained from studying popular war games. Throughout his labors, friends nodded politely and said, "That's nice."