President Ronald Reagan was a big fan of Tom Clancy's military thriller novels, and even helped the author get on the New York Times best-seller list for the first time in the 1980s.
Clancy, who penned technical espionage and military crime books,
died Tuesday at a hospital in Baltimore. He was 66.
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Reagan was so taken with Clancy's first novel — 1984's "The Hunt for Red October" — that he once joked that he was losing sleep because he
couldn’t put it down, according to The Associated Press. Clancy has said Reagan's endorsement was a key to his early success and helped him achieve best-seller status.
Clancy reportedly regularly referred to Reagan as "my president."
Some of Clancy's other best-sellers include "Patriot Games," "Clear and Present Danger," and "The Sum of All Fears" — all of which were later turned into major motion pictures.
His next book, "Command Authority," is scheduled to be published in December.
Clancy, a longtime National Rifle Association member, was a steadfast Republican, and
Clancy often discussed his political ideology outspokenly in interviews.
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"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," he said during a 2001 interview with Bill O'Reilly. "And conservatives are indeed conservative because if the bridge falls down then people die, whereas the liberals figure, we can always build a nice memorial and make people forget it ever happened and was our fault. They're very good at making people forget it was their fault."
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