Debt of Honor Critical Essay | Critical Review by Christopher Hitchens

SOURCE: "Something for the Boys," in New York Review of Books, November 14, 1996, pp. 34-6.

In the following review, Hitchens provides critical analysis of Debt of Honor and Marine.

The dedication page of this Behemoth carries a lapidary, capitalized inscription, "To Ronald Wilson Reagan, Fortieth President of the United States: The Man Who Won The War." And this is only fair. In 1984, the Naval Institute Press paid Tom Clancy an advance of $5,000 for The Hunt for Red October. It was the first fiction that the Naval Institute had knowingly or admittedly published. There matters might have rested, except that someone handed a copy to the Fortieth President, who (then at the zenith of his great parabola) gave it an unoriginal but unequivocal blurb. "The perfect yarn," he said, and the Baltimore insurance agent was on his way to blockbuster authorship. Putnam this past August issued a first...
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