Red Rabbit is Rich: Tom Clancy's latest
Henry, Lawrence
Book Review - "Red Rabbit is Rich: Tom Clancy's latest" Red Rabbit Is Rich not seem to understand that only natural distinction and genuine good-heartedness are what truly matter. Snobs cannot see through the artificialities of social rank nor through...
...Red Rabbit BY TOM CLANCY G.P...
...That is vintage Clancy and vintage Ryan...
...Beyond and above it is the hay barn and stable...
...Epstein does not pursue this fruitful line of inquiry am further, preferring instead to condemn his own "harsh, essentially snobbish judgments...
...Although the Reagans did not refer to it as "The Western White House," they did enter into the spirit of the idea by naming the main road into the ranch "Pennsylvania Avenue" One sign near the ranch house even reads "1600 Pennsylvania Avenue...
...Ostensibly working in the CIAs Directorate of Intelligence, Ryan, an analyst, once again finds himself moved into field operations, covering the defection of a signals officer from the Moscow Centre office of the KGB...
...Ed and Mary Pat Foley, in their first plum posting with Ed as chief of station in Moscow, come off a little better...
...It was the U.S...
...He tends to overshoot the mark...
...The three big intelligence guys Lawrence Henry is a writer in North Andover, Massachusetts...
...Dismayed at his inability to divest himself fully of snobbism, he asks: When shown by an acquaintance a wretched new painting for which he has paid $6,000, why do I think, One of a man's first obligations is not to be duped, and you, friend, haven't met it...
...We have seen all these people grow and develop over two decades...
...The answer, of course, is not that Epstein is a snob but that he has a very keen sense of morality...
...Crossing the Atlantic on his helicopter landing ship . . . on Sunday, they'd held church services, and at that moment the church pennant had been run up to the truck...
...Think of the truly brilliant set pieces of the Clancy oeuvre—the 100-plus-page description of the final battle and helicopter evacuation of U.S...
...Rancho del Cielo consists of 688 acres—pasture, coastal oaks, madrone, dense chaparral and other scrub, and riding trails...
...Beyond it is the ranch foreman's cottage...
...Snobs cannot see through the artificialities of social rank nor through the world's silly habit of offering prestige to many people who are utterly unworthy of it...
...72 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 TATOR AUTHOR TOP OF THE WORLD The Reagan Ranch, 1981-1989 Admiral Greer, Bob Ritter (Deputy Director, Operations) and Judge Arthur Moore (Director of Central Intelligence)—never really emerge as characters at all...
...It flew over the national ensign...
...Jack Ryan, even in The Hunt for Red October, was never quite this naive or so slap-dash working-class in his conversation...
...In Red Rabbit, Clancy must cast back to an earlier fictional time and show us these people in younger, less realized form—a daunting task for any novelist...
...They do talk a lot...
...BY PETER HANNAFORD onald and Nancy Reagan purchased Tip Top Ranch in Santa Barbara County, California on November 13, 1974...
...His newest novel, Red Rabbit, puts all his weaknesses on display, at his usual daunting length...
...SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER 2002 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 73...
...We know where they are now...
...You wind down the road, emerging from a grove of oak trees to see the ranch house, its guest house and guest-room trailer just below you...
...The actions he describes here are asinine and should be condemned, gently but firmly, lest their perpetrators continue in their folly and others emulate them...
...Jack could feel it, here and now, carrying a gun . . . Ryan had sworn as a Marine to fight his country's enemies...
...On the other hand, confronted with the ordinary challenges and tasks of fiction—convincing dialogue, introspection, the elementary positioning and manipulation of characters in a scene—his prose technique is so crude as to make your teeth ache...
...Then, near the end, Jack Ryan, together with a woefully small team of British agents, straps on a gun and a radio and pushes into the crowd in St...
...Why, when I read a young director of commercials say, in a newspaper interview, that the three words that describe him best are `creative, compassionate and consider-ate,' do I feel the need to add that he seems to have left out `smug...
...But here and now he swore to himself to fight against God's own enemies...
...quite the contrary...
...That loyalty was to God Himself—the one power higher than that of the United States of America, and his country acknowledged that...
...It's a long time in coming, in Red Rabbit...
...Next to it an expanse of lawn leads to Lake Lucky and a tree-covered hill beyond...
...Waiting for the pope to appear before the multitudes, Ryan thinks: Jack reminded himself of his time in the Marine Corps...
...There is no need whatsoever to feel guilty about such thoughts...
...and so forth...
...This review first ran on TheAmericanProwler.org...
...The president is Ronald Reagan, not one of Clancy's fictional constructs...
...Navy's way of acknowledging that there was one higher loyalty than the one a man had for his country...
...the CIA superstar husband-and-wife team Ed and Mary Pat Foley...
...The attempt on the pope's life was, of course, real...
...Peter's Square to try to intercept the man they have identified as the likely assassin of the pope...
...Margaret Thatcher similarly appears only peripherally...
...Most remarkably for a Clancy novel, there is, until the very end, no action at all...
...To the right is a large open pasture with a mountain rising beyond it, covered with trees on its lower slopes, then chaparral and other native shrubs above...
...The whole repertory company of Clancy characters is known to us: Ryan and his wife, Catherine...
...Special Forces from Colombia in Clear and Present Danger, the terrorist attack on the day care center in Executive Orders—and realize that there is nothing like that at all in Red Rabbit...
...Deputy Director of Intelligence and Ryan mentor Admiral James Greer...
...You do get there and you do want to get there...
...Why, when I learn of a colleague who is teaching Jack Kerouac, do I think about inciting his students to begin a malpractice suit against him...
...He sings the hymns of patriotic heroism better and more believably than almost any other writer and sets those paeans against fully complex renderings of government, the military, the intelligence establishment and world affairs...
...They renamed it Rancho del Cielo—Ranch in the Sky, or Sky Ranch...
...But all told, Red Rabbit is not a likely introduction to Clancy's world for a new reader...
...Rancho del Cielo lies 27 miles north of Santa Barbara, up a narrow, steep road that snakes its way through Refugio Canyon from the Pacific Coast Highway...
...For the novel, that poses a fundamental problem: Clancy has already thoroughly and masterfully created the whole Jack Ryan world for us...
...In the process, Ryan, and the rest of the CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service, uncover a plot to assassinate Pope John Paul II...
...On the flat, the road passes lemon and avocado groves...
...Excerpted from Ronald Reagan and His Ranch: TheWestern White House, 1981-1989 by Peter Hannaford...
...Ryan, in current Clancy time, is president of the United States, and he got there convincingly...
...But Yuri Andropov, just on the verge of assuming the premiership of the Soviet Union, plays a central role, indeed sets the whole plot in motion by ordering the assassination of the pope...
...The core of the main house is an adobe cottagewhich dates from the 1870s...
...To the left, the road rises on a hill to reach the tack barn, above and about one hundred feet beyond the houses...
...As it rises, it fords several creeks (usually dry, but sometimes full), crosses two cattle guards and passes by several dwellings under a canopy of oaks...
...If you pass the ranch gate, the road will take you all the way over the mountain and down to the Santa Ynez Valley...
...Moral judgments are about important things, matters that reveal the state of a person's soul, and when delivered in a loving manner and taken seriously by the recipient, they benefit both the individual thus judged and the rest of society...
...Once above the woods, it twists and curves its way up the mountain-side...
...their best friends, Robbie and Sissie Jackson...
...RP_\'IE\\'E[> BY Lawrence Henry Those of us who love Tom Clancy love him for his spectacular virtues as a writer and acknowledge at the same time that he has spectacular faults...
...Published in August by Images From the Past, Bennington, Vermont, including 32 pages of color photographs...
...as a result, we never see him directly...
...He can handle accounts of violence and battle and intrigue as capably as anyone...
...Clancy also betrays some awkwardness in having to deal with more real history than ever before...
...Snobbery is about superficial things, and the snob delights in exploiting them for his own pleasure...
...Putnam's Sons/ 618 page/$28.95...
...There is a huge difference between snobbery and moral discrimination...
...The novel, set back in Clancy time between Patriot Games and The Cardinal of the Kremlin, finds hero Jack Ryan, then age 32, on CIA assignment with his wife and daughter in England...
...To the left and further up the hill is the building that once housed the Secret Service command center...
...And veteran Clancy readers, glad enough to read the book, will likely not reread it nearly as happily or frequently as they reread many of the others...
Vol. 35 • September 2002 • No. 5
