Tom Clancy was born and raised in the Baltimore, Maryland area.
Clancy was raised a Catholic and attended Catholic schools as a kid.[1] Judging by his books and interviews, Clancy is clearly more concerned with secular matters than those of the spirit world. He does seem to still have a soft spot for Catholicism and expressed frustration with public sentiment toward the Catholic Church in the midst of their child molestation scandal, saying:
[I've been following developments with the church] with great sadness, yeah. You know, anti-Catholicism is the last respectable prejudice. You can't hate black people anymore, of course, and you can't hate homosexuals anymore, but you can hate all the Catholics you want.[2]
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that people weren't hating Catholics necessarily, just high-horse religious clergymen who were molesting little boys. Anyway…
A career in politics
Clancy's books indicate an obvious fascination with geopolitics, war and the institutional use of technology. His fame in this arena has made him some high-powered friends and Clancy has been invited to consult with the U.S. Secretary of Defense and apparently been asked to run for public office. He said:
They've asked me to run for the House and the Senate, but I've always managed to keep my virtue intact. I mean, who wants to hang out with those kind of people?[3]
Clancy continues his rail against government and politicians, saying:
What the government is good at is collecting taxes, taking away your freedoms and killing people. It's not good at much else.[4]
And maybe it's the Republican Party's more extreme, libertarian wing that attracts Clancy, because for not liking the government and politicians, he sure likes Republicans. Clancy's political contributions are the most I've ever seen, coming in at a whopping $237,050 to Republicans and Republican support organizations.[5]
And he saves the bulk of his bile for America's left wing, even blaming them, in a way, for 9/11. A week after the attacks, he said:
The political left, they deal in symbols rather than reality. The general difference between conservatives and liberals is that liberals like pretty pictures and conservatives like to build bridges that people can drive across… The CIA was gutted by people on the political left who don't like Intelligence operations… and as a result of that, as an indirect result of that, we lost 5,000 citizens last week.[6]
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