Executive Orders re-read

Executive Orders
by Tom Clancy
Rating: ★★★★½
isbn: 0399142185
Series: Jack Ryan #9
Publication Date: July 1, 1996
Pages: 875
Genre: Political Fiction, Thriller
Publisher: Putnam

Given my current country of residence’s complete incompetence and the news that my native land is trying to be the world leader in everything including incompetence, I needed to escape to a world where real problems are met and dealt with by leaders with integrity and the skills to think through issues rationally with a view towards the long-term.

In other words, a fantasy.

I have always been and will always be, an unapologetic fan of Clancy’s works – the ones he wrote himself – so falling back into Jack Ryan’s world was, if not a comfort, at least familiar and comfortable.  It’s been 2 decades since I last read this, and it generally holds up perfectly.  The first half of the book is a bit overly idealistic, but what struck me about it is that Tom Clancy showed a startling degree of prescience not just in some of his major plot lines, but in his story arc.

Executive Orders is the story about a non-politician ending up as President of the United States, vowing to eject the political riff-raff out of Washington, and appointing business sector executives to the cabinet to get things done.

Sound familiar?  Of course, Jack Ryan wasn’t a paranoid narcissist and he was highly educated and qualified regardless of his lack of political savvy.  He also had more integrity than your garden variety black widow spider.  But Clancy imagined the world we live in today twenty years ago, with startling accuracy, albeit in the most idealistic light.

His idealism extended to America’s response (and only America because his plot extended no further) to the epidemic that grips the country in Executive Orders; his national lockdown works flawlessly; almost nobody ignores the mandate, there are no rushes on grocery stores, and there’s no general panic.  Of course, I’d like to think that any country’s population would react to an epidemic of ebola exponentially better than they’re reacting (or not) to the corona pandemic, so maybe my faith in humanity hasn’t been completely snuffed out.

Either way, it was good to revisit a world that works, even when everything is pear-shaped.