SOURCE: "Jack Ryan's New Gizmos Save Another Day," in The Wall Street Journal, September 2, 1994, p. A7.

In the following review, Lehman offers a favorable assessment of Debt of Honor.

After The Hunt for Red October established Tom Clancy as the Pentagon's Boswell, he found himself accorded the honors and access of a field marshall. A former Marine and lifelong military buff, Mr. Clancy used this access to soak up even more of the technical detail and the cultural attitudes of the politico-military world. Thusly armed, he produced a new class of literature—techno-thriller.

So what if his prose reads like a government manual. What, I often wonder, do his critics think bureaucrats talk like? Billy Crystal? The very woodenness of the dialogue highlights the real stars, who are not the two-dimensional people but the three-dimensional weapons. Mr. Clancy's gift is in crafting a plausible story, full of thrills...