Tom Clancy 1991 Interview (Academy of Achievement)

on the whole I would say that all the success nonsense has not really had a grave effect on my life for the simple reason I haven't allowed it to and and well maybe more importantly than that that none of this happened until I was well into my 30s my character for better or worse was fully formed one of the problems with with success is that you run the risk of believing all the crap that people tell you about how wonderful you are and gee mr. Clancy you're the best writer in the world right now and which of course is not true in my case I was pretty grown-up when it happened to me the people I feel sorry for people like me as an example John McEnroe who had people telling him that when he was 19 and probably not old enough to have the defences against hearing nonsense like that when you're 19 and people tell you things like that you probably start believing it because you don't know any better and that can be very very destructive when you gamble you you run the chance of losing that's why it's called gambling you also run the chance of succeeding of winning if there can be and philosophically speaking there is no success without failure I mean if everybody succeeded we wouldn't have the there be nothing to measure success against but if you fail you learn from what you learn from the experience you learn what you did wrong and you do better the next time any coach will tell you you learn more from games you lose and from games you win and life is so full of opportunities that if you don't if you don't reach out and grab at them then you're just watching Life go by any serious study of history would conclude that that military operations and the way wars are fought and resolved are probably the most important determining factor in human social evolution that the you know the fact that there is a place called the United States of America results from a work we call the Revolutionary War the fact that that you know the Jews were not exterminated worldwide results from the fact that or two we defeated that off Hitler the fact that we live in a free country today stems from the fact that we were not overturned by by communism in fact we defeated communism therefore you'd have to an objective observer would have to say that conflict has essentially shaped the world that we have today for better or worse the good news I think is that the forces of light ultimately defeat the forces of darkness because the forces of light are ultimately stronger than the forces of darkness and and successful societies tend to be stronger than unsuccessful ones the reason the United States essentially defeated the Soviet Union is because freedom and democracy as a political and economic system is much more efficient than a totalitarian system the only way to avoid risk is not to do anything and that method of avoiding risk also carries the price that you also you're avoiding success as well now attempting to succeed necessarily means risking failure and all too many people do not do that because they're afraid to fail well failure is nothing to be afraid of not taking the chance not trying not going after your dream that's something to be afraid of that you know there's one thing in life that scares the hell out of me and that's turning 65 and looking at a mirror and telling myself you should have done that when you had the chance but you didn't have the guts to try and that's something I'm really afraid of afraid of as a result of which I do lots of foolish things because probably the only real failure a person can know is the failure to try you know why be afraid of what why be afraid of failing because even when you fail you're trying to do something and the world is as full of people who as adult there's a great quote from Teddy Roosevelt you know the poor unhappy souls who will know neither victory nor defeat because he never tried I don't want to be one of those initially the first time you get you get nasty criticism I mean some of the stuff I gets been pretty nasty me but it's true everyone it's it's like having someone tell you that you have an ugly child because you know a book is really the child of your mind and when somebody trashes your book it's like saying something you yeah that's the ugliest dumbest worth most worthless little girl I've ever seen in my life of course when somebody says that about one of your shoulder you just wanna you just want to rearrange his head with about you know given excedrin headache number three five seven but first of all you you try to discriminate the legitimate criticism from the illegitimate and every so often a critic says something intelligent and you you necessarily have to listen to it it's part of the process seeing something that is not yet real and trying to make it real that's what we do and that's what achievement is it's taking something that isn't there and and and and and making it be there and that's what we do and that's what we are and that's how we got here and as a result of that you know we all get together at the you know for the award Center we sit around with each other and talk while the kids you know the kids are listening to to somebody and and and we're all in a little there's a little knot of us off somewhere talking about stuff and we have much more fun with each other than the kids do because of course we also have the advantage of not being intimidated by one another which when you're when you're 20 years old you tend to be intimidated very easily but we all there's something there's something not not just similar there's something identical in all of us we all had an idea a dream that we wanted to make real and we all stuck with it till it was and although we're in all sorts of different fields I mean like like two of my to my friends and the Academy Marvin Minsky at head of the artificial intelligence lab at MIT and Susan butcher that crazy gal who takes sled dogs all the way across Alaska they're both dear friends that's about as different immune tom clancy's you know the writer that's three people about as if not as different as people can be and yet we're all the same so that what unifies us is is this image that we have of the of the way we want our lives to be and the fact that we were unwilling to give up on that dream I knew the odds were or against me I didn't know how bad the odds were if I had known how difficult it was statistically speaking to get a book published and become a best-seller I probably wouldn't have tried but since I was blissfully ignorant of reality I I just never let myself be concerned with that I never consciously thought about writing about selling book I just wanted to see my name on the cover of a book and my only objective was to turn out the best possible product I could and then just see what happened and if people liked it fine and if not you know I would have done that which I wanted to do I could get on with my life after fulfilling at least that one dream you succeed in the world not by wanting to succeed you succeed in the world by fulfilling a useful objective by providing people with a with a product or a service or an idea that they will find useful in one way or another whether it's entertaining whether it's you know something you can use in their day-to-day life irrelevant the only way to acquire wealth and notoriety in theirs in a in any society it certainly it the only way to do it legally is provide something that people want even if they don't quite know they wanted yet in the case of jobs and Wozniak an Apple Computer no but the people didn't know they wanted computers until they saw what they could do with them but really the only way to succeed in life is to serve others the only the only thing the only way to get rich in America or or any anyplace else in the world the only way to become famous the only way to be respected is to do something that serves other people in one way or another one of the problems with writing is that what you're writing is about people and you don't emerge from college with a universal knowledge of human nature it takes years to acquire so I things I also tell people if they who want to write is get into a business where you have a lot of contact with people particularly people of different walks of life in my case I was an insurance agent I had poor clients I had rich clients I didn't in between clients why it took so long as probably a comment on the nature of the writing process that it that it requires a lot of intellectual growth before you're ready to throw a book that really says something in other fields the it probably is not all that different but the applications are somewhat different if you're in architecture you have to do a lot of floor plans for a lot of houses if you want to be an engineer you have to try a lot of solutions to a lot of different problems before you develop a real talent for it persistence is probably the most important of the virtues because unless you stick with something long enough to learn how to do it you're just not going to accomplish anything there's a story about Napoleon he was going over candidates for promotion from general to marshal of France and somebody was extolling the qualities of one officer or another and finally Napoleon convulses yes yes I know he's brilliant but is he lucky what can be a decisive factor but as Darrell Royals used to say at the University of Texas luck doesn't go looking for a stumblebum you have to work for it and you have to be ready when when it arrives I did all the right things maybe not always in the right way but I did all the right things probably the most important message you can pass along is if you have a dream do not let go of it I tell people the most important talent in writing is persistence that's probably the most important talent in anything is persistence sticking with it seeing it through not giving up and if you do that in a society like ours chances are you're going to succeed don't matter I think was Ronald Reagan or maybe a national bestseller he President Reagan received the book for Christmas in 1984 thought for Red October and he read it and he liked it and he talked about it a lot and Time magazine caught wind of the fact that he was had this new book that he liked and so Time magazine did oh did a story about me in the book and the president and she was am I was a best-seller makes me awfully glad I voted for the man if you look at the history of various industries for individual companies it starts off with one or two crazy people with crazy ideas Apple Computer Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak these guys were totally out of their minds they they decided that ordinary working Americans would like to have personal computers when any sensible person would have told him you have to be a business or a university to need a personal computer and in the course of that they invented they these two guys created an industry that now has 25 20 million personal computers probably more than that by now in the United States of America alone they must have been a wacko but it also turns out they were right and they tried and they worked in a garage like good American inventors and they and and they made something conceptual into something very real and also very very remunerative so what else is there to say I got closely involved with a with a kid who died of cancer when August the first of this year he was eight years old and we I got to know him about and let's say April mark March or April of up 1990 and he died on August 1st of 1991 we got to be pretty friend we got to be real close we got we he was my friend and in a way that's kind of hard to express I went down to Disney World when make-a-wish name to Disney World I went down for four days to be his tour guide and I saw him in the hospital during the last American Academy meeting him in New York I I went over to see him and at sloan-kettering and I was there when when when they buried him I wish I'd gotten involved sooner and kid with kids like that because although it does hurt a great deal when you lose them and it was probably the most painful experience of my life the rewards you get for knowing them and for having fun with them and for trying to brighten their lives is probably the best thing I've ever known in my life I got to know the I got another kid because he liked one of my books so if it hadn't been for that in there I never would have gotten to knowing what I've learned from that is that there is probably nothing more important in life than your family and your children and while you may regret many things in life you will probably not regret spending time with your kids so one of the reasons I turned down another chance to run for public office quite simply is that they would we would have taken time away from the family and one of the things I've learned is you don't want to take time away from the family and you want to be as good a parent to your kids as you can because you just don't know how long you're gonna have them I wish I'd started writing sooner but I really don't think I was ready to do it until I until I actually started doing it what I would have done differently in a realistic sense nothing because it is impossible to know at 22 the things you know at 44 it life isn't as an evolutionary and an educational process you grow you learn and grow and learn and grow and you can't suppose that it would be possible to know at 25 would you know at 40 because it just takes time to acquire the entity the experience the information that the knowledge of human behavior that we all acquire as we get older I mean the only gratifying thing about getting getting older is that you do in fact get smarter today for the first time in all of recorded human history we live in a world without a likelihood of war between major powers this has never ever happened in all of human history never ever no precedent no guide no rulebook this is something completely new in the human experience the greatest challenge in all of human cultural evolution has been to put war behind us to eliminate war as an instrument of national policy we are within sight of achieving that goal completely unique that goal will probably be reached by the end of the century maybe sooner because the residual regional conflicts in the world historically have been driven for the most part by superpower conflict and in the absence of superpower conflict the driving force behind these things says has expired and in due course the regional wars will stop also the task for the next century is has it's going the Declaration of Independence to to give the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity to make sure the democracy takes root all over the world and that's really all we have to do because once you establish a democratic society the individual people in the individual nations start acting in their own individual best interest and in 20 years the country will be reasonably prosperous and then we can share the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity all over the world our challenges have got a lot smaller the reason for that is that we live in historically unique times the human condition today is radically different from anything that's existed in all of human history you can go all the way back to to the Trojan War the ickey and they weren't even Greek yet the Achaeans city-states duking it out with Troy over actually what they're fighting about was trading rights through the Hellespont into the black site was it wasn't about Helena Tory she was pretty but she wasn't that pretty carry history for Egypt fighting the Hittite Empire Rome fighting Carthage for three Punic Wars Spain versus England the Armada what that was really about was who was gonna run the new world France and England what they called the war of the Spanish Succession what we called the French and Indian War which was about who was gonna own North America France versus Germany it was gonna be king of the hill in Europe and the ultimate conflict was you know the West team led by the United States of America versus the east team led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics and what that war was about was political control of all of humanity who was going to dictate the way people think and vote and act all over the world well the good guys won that one and the forces of democracy won we have defeated Marxism once and for all I mean there's a few remaining infection centers like Cuba North Korea and South Yemen certainly not too many of them left as I said earlier the only way to succeed in the world is to do something for others so you have to take other people into account man we are social animals we do have a so we do have social responsibility but the responsibility is not absolute I am NOT if I build an airplane and somebody drives into a mountain then the airplane is not mechanically flawed it is responsibility of that person no matter how many lawyers he hires ok if if a doctor operates when someone and that person dies the fact that that person died does not necessarily mean it was the doctors fault maybe everybody just had a bad day maybe it was an unsavable situation but we're coming to the point in society where anything other than a perfect outcome is something that you sue about and the world is not that perfect that the absence of perfection is is grounds for legal action unfortunately that's precisely what's happening in society today you know the world is not so perfect that everyone will succeed the world is not so perfect that that you can do everything you want without having adverse consequences from it if you engage in in sexual activity sooner or later a pregnancy is going to result if you engage in too much sexual activity a disease is going to result if you drive a car too fast sooner or later you're going to rack the car up and be hurt we when you try to absolve people of responsibility all you end up with is more regular reckless behavior and we're seeing too much of that it's the simple fact that there is no free lunch and when you make a choice you have to measure between the chances of a good outcome and about bad outcome and if the outcome is bad you learn from it and you go on if someone protects you from the bad outcome what have you learned if you insulate people against failure nobody will try to succeed if you continuously give people money for not working why work I was at Yale in April talking to Yale political Union and all those people at Yale think they're smart because they go to Yale while I quickly disabuse them of that notion and I think I can't stand as a snotty kid oh boy uh so I stomp in Yale he's real fun yeah what do you think this college is so great hell yeah I've got a single Jesuit on the faculty you know but no there's this one snotty girl and one of the left one of the extreme left-wing parties at Yale and I really stomped on her and put such great satisfactorily was snotty I just I laid a line on her and said okay answer me and she didn't have an answer and I just kept coming back to her come on come on you got an answer yet you got an answer yet she had coming trust me American social policy in the last thirty years has had genocide affects one in the black population of America my proof in 1960 roughly one black child in five was born out of wedlock the rest of them were born into families that had a mom and a dad married living together today 30 years later after 25 years of the Great Society nearly 70 percent of black children are born out of wedlock somewhere along the line somebody exterminated the black family so I said young lady if this this outcome had resulted from something promulgated by the political right you would call a genocide wouldn't you she says he was dumb enough to say yes okay well the fact that it was done by the political left is to make it and he does it make it any less true to call it genocide you can't say that wait a minute genocide us we're the compassionate ones well look at the outcome that's what that's what that's what welfare has done it has had the Ku Klux Klan when their best day could not have come up with anything so wonderfully effective at hurting people I was done by Lyndon Johnson in the Great Society and it's probably it's continues to be promulgated by Ron Dellums and the whole black Congressional Black Caucus and all those kind gentle compassionate people and they've they've they've destroyed a subculture and it's gonna take a generation to build it back think America has drifted away from some fairly important principles today in American the only American political scene you have a a divergence of opinion that transcends ideology you know a Hamilton and Jefferson disagreed ideologically on just about everything but they respected each other and they were good friends because they shared the same fundamental principles and values that they there was a code of conduct back then that everyone adhered to and unfortunately I think we're getting away from that that there are there political elements in American society that apply one standard of behavior to to white males and another standard of behavior to black women another standard of behavior to any other group you care to name and that's not right I think we should apply the same standards of behavior and the same standards of responsibility to every individual regardless of age sex race or anything else and we've gotten away from that and that will ultimately be harmful to our society we've gotten away from the idea that people are responsible for their actions and what responsibility means is if you screw up you pay the price for screwing up we are trying to make America into a risk-free Society well Marx the Marxists tried that and it didn't work you can't live life without taking risks when you get into a car you take a risk when you step into the shower you take a risk when you go to a baseball game you take a risk trying to eliminate those risks in addition to taking much of the spice out of life takes a lot of the innovation out of people if you penalize people for having good ideas that may not quite be perfect then you're taking away the incentive for people to have new ideas that improve actually work better than better than I predicted it would I had quite a few reporters call me and yeah gee mr. Clancy you were right it all works so of course it works yeah this this is all hardware that I've used I mean this is these are all weapon systems and and equipment that I've that I've played with I mean I've driven tanks in the desert I fired the m1 tank and turn it around and done all that stuff of course it works yeah I wouldn't if if I didn't think it worked I wouldn't put it my books that way and of course quite a few critics clobbered me for having the audacity to say that I was writing all these defense experts were wrong well I say with all due smugness that I'm I was vindicated by that more importantly much more importantly I think the kids we had out there working the equipment were every bit as good as I said they were the people we have out there wearing our country's uniform are the very very best our country turns out and it was about time I thought that that those kids were were recognised for their talent for their intelligence for their devotion for their dedication and above all for their professionalism technology is just another word for tool there was a time when a nail was high tech Chicago was the first city built with with nails before then wooden houses were done with mortise and tenon they had there's a profession called joiners who who put beams together and stuff and buildings in and wall panels and self-reporting with little wooden pegs well then somebody came up with the idea of making nails out of a steel wire and the first houses built of those were called balloon frame houses in Chicago was the first city built of balloon frame houses so it was 120 years ago a nail was high-tech right well we don't think of a nail as being very high tech today we don't think of the automobile as being terribly high-tech today we don't think of the TV as being terribly high-tech today and yet within living memory both were so technology is just another word for tool and what it tells us about society is the better your tools the more things you can do we live today in times which are better in any measurable context better than any period in all of human history and technology is what allows us to live the lives that we when I screw up I screw up big league ok so what I'm not afraid to appear foolish once in a while it's not going to diminish the person that I am yeah I play the only as I said the only thing I'm afraid of is not trying and if it means looking dumb once in oil so what the people were gonna do the people are ooh tell me how stupid ever people who have never had the guts to try anyway people who achieve do not criticize other people who achieve people who try don't criticize those who try and fail we try to help them say hey you gave that one a nice shot but you made a couple mistakes and I don't know wall but this is one mistake and I hope you learned from it and we try to help each other along the writing business it's a very friendly Union one of the nice things about becoming a writer is that you get to meet all your heroes in my case I know Freddie Forsyth I know Jack Higgins I know Jerry Pournelle and Larry Niven and John Varley and and AJ quinelle and and and John Keegan and Bob Woodward a whole bunch of others and and although in us you know people think that we're competitors actually were not we all get along very very well and we all admire each other and for and both for the same reason for different reasons people who achieve do not ridicule other people who try the people who do ridicule are critics and of course critics are people who who wish they could do something and can't and hate those who can it's just it's just a form of envy in many cases the basic strength of any society in military terms stems from the from the country's economy the better the economy the more things can turn out the better are the things that can turn out econ the the strength of an economy comes from the the individual minds of the citizens of that country what we have demonstrated in the last 200 years in America is if you maximize the freedom for each individual mind you maximize that the choices a person can make you maximize the the the reward a person gets for for coming up and implementing a good idea the stronger the economy becomes I mean really the whole thing begins with a free individual making a free choice to live his or her life in whichever way the person chooses to live it everything else grows out of the Soudan economy was brought down because the the communist system of political government is so grossly inefficient that it just can't do anything right the Soviet Union cannot feed itself even though it has enormous resources more resources in fact than the United States of America what the Soviets proved in the last seventy years was that freedom works better than anything else and just about everything else has in fact been tried and the system of government and the the philosophical beliefs we hold in America are simply the the valid ones and and and then communism you know Marx's Leninism was invalid back in 1986 when I went to England for the first time the research patriot games I had had breakfast with Jack Higgins his real name's Harry Patterson he was a instructor in literature at Oxford University and he's pretty he's a heck of a nice guy and very smart guy and he he he liked Red October and so he wanted to meet me in half right and we have the same book we had the same publisher in England so in the course of breakfast he said you know kid you know I had one book under my belt then he was fused the old Protel youngster how to do things if I'm going to tell you something kid something happened to me and I hope you learn from it cuz it sure as hell gonna happen to you he was walking down either Piccadilly or the Strand a fashionable Street in London and this elderly lady bumps up to him and says you're Jack Higgins yes ma'am you saved my life excuse me and then the lady explained that she had been in the hospital she had cancer she was information surgical procedure she was of course not feeling terribly well she was quite depressed contemplating death and one of the nurses are somebody into some social worker or something someone in the hospital gave her a book to read and was one of Jack's Bucks Harrisburg's and she liked it and she read another one and another one and another one and reading those books allowed her to escape from where she was and to think about are things other than her own misery and as a result of that she said that she survived something she otherwise would not have survived and jack says I I just didn't know what the hell I was supposed to say to her except I'm glad that I was of service to you and Tom it's gonna happen to you and you'd better think about it ahead of time you better know what to say well he was right I've gotten letters like that I've had people come up to me and tell me that and that is what convinces me that I'm in an honourable profession that does useful things mentally I'm in the entertainment business my function in life for the most part is to take people out of their lives and put them somewhere else you know people who drive trucks or sell real estate or or transplant hearts or practice law or or do accounting or any profession you care to name my function is to take them out of their lives and put them and put them somewhere else where they can vicariously experience another life along the way I try to educate I try to enlighten I try to tell people about things they don't know about and do so in a factual and and and realistic way that's an honorable tradition William Shakespeare did it a lot of people did and I'm quite comfortable with that along the way I've done a little educating maybe I've helped people think a little bit more deeply about certain important issues President Bush was once kind enough to say I've had a positive effect on US national security that aside the fact that I entertained and enlightened a few people is sufficient to the moment you gotta believe in what you're doing the people I write about soldiers sailors airmen Marines cops special agents of the FBI field officers for CIA are very often people who are in the business of risking their lives for other people whom they do not know and the fact of the matter is that a person does not risk his life very often for things in which he or she does not believe you do not risk death for money very often you do not risk desk death for things in which you do not believe very often the reason you put it on the line is because you think you're making the world a better place for having done so probably the most useful people in the world are the romantics the people with them the mindset of a poet who see the world the way they wish it to be and try to make itself if you examine people who have the Medal of Honor you will find very often that what drove them was not courage as we understand it but rage they simply would not accept things as they were and did everything in their power to change it probably the people I most admire in the world are the docs and the nurses who take care of critically ill children that probably requires more courage than anything I have ever encountered I know sigh I have had the privilege of meeting 7 people with the Medal of Honor and there's a pretty special fellows but not one of them did something that required more than a few hours of great courageous effort I know Doc's who've been treating critically ill children for 20 years and they're not just risking their lives they're risking their souls they're risking their faith in God their sanity to do what they do and yet they press on because they have a very precise sense of mission their mission is to keep children alive and they enter into this employment in the knowledge that very often they will fail despite which they press on that's passion that's believing in what you're doing that's knowing that what you're doing is important that even if you just saved the life of one child you've done something worth doing maybe the best scene I ever wrote is in Patriot Games where you check Ryan's daughter is he's in the hospital and she's seriously injured in a murder attempt and Jack is downstairs waiting to see if she's going to survive or not so the scene shifts to the dock and he gets the printout from the blood gas analyzer checking one liver function to see if her livers gonna survive the trauma or not and he hands the the printout to the nurse practitioner and says you know you want to go tell the family the doc walks out of the critical care recovery unit to the stairwell trudges up the stairs to the roof of the Shock Trauma building in Baltimore and he pulls out a cigarette and then lights it he looks north and north of that Hospital in Baltimore is the home of Edgar Allan Poe and it turns out that this doctor is a tiny bit crazy he is in a high-stress profession where he deals with trauma patients on a daily basis and he has this little mental game he plays with himself that his enemy is embodied by Edgar Allan Poe who wrote about principally about untimely death and just about everything he put on paper and so he looks at the house where Poe lived and down at the street where Poe where he collapsed drunk in a gutter and ultimately got pneumonia from which he died and he looks at the house and he says you son of a you don't get this one this one goes home flips away the cigarette goes back downstairs get some sleep I've had more people call me particularly doctors to tell me they cry when they read that which is about the best compliment that anybody can give you because it is a fight between good and evil and I'm just one of the people who happens to believe that that good ultimately wins because good is ultimately stronger and if that were not true how come we're not living in caves

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Keywords: tom clancy, ghost recon, splinter cell, rainbow six, patriot games, hunt for red october, interview, academy of achievement, full interview, Tom Clancy (Author)

Id: oPIJvYzQiQM

Length: 41min 38sec (2498 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2015