'Enemies' phenomenon makes for a good story
In an election year full of strange events -- including the meteoric rise and fall of Howard Dean and the resurrection of John F. Kerry -- the Richard A. Clarke phenomenon may be the most remarkable. Possibly not since Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" in 1852 has a book by an unknown writer so monopolized the nation's political attention. Even a national poll this week asked for reactions to the book.
Since "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror" was released on March 22, the book has been exploding out of bookstores nationwide. As of yesterday, it was the No. 1 seller at
Clarke's agent, Len Sherman, sees a bright future for his hottest client. "We're talking about two separate paths," he said, "one fiction and one nonfiction." Asked if the book has been sold to Hollywood, Sherman says, "Not yet."
Sherman insists that Clarke wrote the book -- including its Tom Clancy-esque first chapter, "Evacuate the White House" -- with no ghostwriting. "I was amazed," Sherman said. "Before doing it, I thought I might end up writing a good part of it -- I've done it before. But he didn't express an ounce of doubt that he could do it. It's absolutely his book." (Sherman said he could not arrange an interview with Clarke.)
Despite the book's notoriety, and the furious counterattack it has provoked from the White House, its ultimate political impact is unknowable. A Los Angeles Times poll released Thursday found that while almost three-fifths of respondents said they believe Clarke's allegations that President Bush was more interested in fighting Saddam Hussein than terrorism, similar majorities also voiced suspicion that Clarke has political motives and believed that Bush's policies have made the nation safer.
"I'm wondering whether the phenomenon is destined to be short-lived," says historian Richard Norton Smith, executive director of the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum, under construction in Springfield, Ill., and a speechwriter for the 1996 Republican presidential nominee, Bob Dole. "If you're talking about it as a contribution to the current debate, there's no doubt it has people talking and shouting. But people can only shout for so long."
The Clarke phenomenon does reinforce an enduring truth. Even in this multichannel age of electronic media and nonstop Internet political chatter, people are still eager to grasp their complicated world by means of a page-turning yarn by a gifted storyteller. And those for whom a book meets that need can push it to even greater heights.
"We sold 130 copies of Hillary Clinton's book ["Living History"] in the first month, and 60 copies of this book since it came out," says Larry Abramoff, owner of Tatnuck Bookseller in Worcester, who calls such buyers "early adopters." But soon the book's impact will depend on what those buyers say to others: "It's the same thing with a Stephen King novel," Abramoff says. "Either the hard-core buyers say nothing, or they tell everybody about the book and it takes off to multiple heights."
It is difficult to think of a previous book quite like "Against All Enemies." In addition to its extraordinary timing -- released amid Clarke's dramatic testimony before the 9/11 commission -- "Against All Enemies" is devastatingly critical of a sitting president in the forenoon of his reelection campaign, written by an insider (Sherman calls him "the longest-serving White House official in history") who presents himself as above politics.
While Ron Suskind's bestseller "The Price of Loyalty" is also critical of Bush and is told from the point of view of fired Treasury secretary Paul O'Neill, O'Neill didn't work for four presidents and didn't write his own book.
Sherman presents Clarke as a kind of reluctant hero. "He's a shy guy in a lot of ways," he says. "When we walk down the street, people come up to him and say, `Thank God you wrote this book'; they hug him and say `God bless you!' He's basically a reserved, nice man who believes in his country, and in his career, and was truly offended by what was going on."
Clarke told the 9/11 commission that he would not take a job with a Kerry administration and tried unsuccessfully this week to get MoveOn.com, the liberal advocacy group, to stop using his statements in anti-Bush ads, but some political veterans take that above-it-all posture with a grain of salt. "He doesn't need a job with Kerry," says Richard Norton Smith. "Why ask for a job in the administration when you can help bring it about?"
Despite its white-hot sales, "Against All Enemies" has a long way to go to equal the books that profoundly changed America. "The impact of `Uncle Tom's Cabin' was tremendous, around the world," says Robert Gottlieb, former editor in chief of Alfred A. Knopf and of The New Yorker. "Books like that change people, turn things around."
Less earth-shaking books include Rachel Carson's 1962 "Silent Spring," about the danger of pesticide use to the environment, and Jacob Riis's 1890 expose of New York tenement life, "How the Other Half Lives." Michael Harrington's 1962 "The Other America" was one of the theoretical texts of President Lyndon Johnson's War on Poverty, and Ralph Nader's 1965 "Unsafe at Any Speed" sparked a revolution in auto safety.
To some, it might seem odd that a lifelong bureaucrat like Clarke would think of writing fiction. Wouldn't that, after all, make him a less serious figure, more of an entertainer? But Sherman says Clarke is a fan of novelist John le Carre, whose experience in British intelligence allowed him to write revealing portraits of spies and the moral agonies of the Cold War. People still read Graham Greene's 1955 "The Quiet American" to understand Vietnam on the eve of America's involvement there.
While Richard A. Clarke may not be John le Carre or Graham Greene, "nobody knows what he knows," Sherman says, "how the White House really works. If that's your world, maybe you can write something good."
David Mehegan can be reached at mehegan@globe.com.
An excerpt
I resumed the video conference. "FAA, FAA, go. Status report. How many aircraft do you still carry as hijacked?" Garvey read from a list: "All aircraft have been ordered to land at the nearest field. Here's what we have as potential hijacks: Delta 1989 over West Virginia, United 93 over Pennsylvania. . . ."
Stafford slipped me a note. "Radar shows aircraft headed this way." Secret Service had a system that allowed them to see what FAA's radar was seeing. "I'm going to empty out the complex." He was ordering the evacuation of the White House.
Ralph Seigler stuck his head into the room, "There has been an explosion in the Pentagon parking lot, maybe a car bomb!" . . .
Roger Cressey stepped back in to the video conference and announced: "A plane just hit the Pentagon." I was still talking with FAA, taking down a list of possibly hijacked aircraft. "Did you hear me?" Cressey was on loan to the White House from the Pentagon. He had friends there, we all did. "I can still see Rumsfeld on the screen," I replied, "so the whole building didn't get hit. No emotion here. We are going to stay focused. Roger, find out where the fighter planes are. I want Combat Air Patrol over every major city in this country. Now."
From "Against All Enemies: Inside America's War on Terror,"by Richard A. Clarke
