[In the following review, Beschloss offers a favorable assessment of Executive Orders.]

As Executive Orders opens, Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan, has just been confirmed as vice president after his predecessor, Edward Kealty, is caught in a sex scandal. After an abortive war between the United States and Japan, terrorists fly a Japan Airlines 747 into the Capitol, killing the president, hundreds of representatives and senators, the joint chiefs of staff, most of the cabinet and all nine justices of the Supreme Court. Ryan cries, "You're telling me I'm the whole government right now?" He must not only recompose the government and fend off hostile foreign powers but resolve a domestic crisis touched off when the venomous Kealty insists that he never actually resigned: "I've known Jack Ryan for ten years … He is, unfortunately, not the man to lead our country."

Clancy's publisher has announced a first printing of 2 million copies for this latest gripping example of his highly popular thrillers. By the time the hardcover, paperback, film and other incarnations of Executive Orders are out, conceivably a fifth of all Americans could wind up absorbed in the story related in this 874-page book. For the historian, mass entertainment reveals much about the passions and curiosities of a people at a particular moment. Subjects and plots that appear plausible and fascinating in the literature of one period can look bizarre or dated in another. What will the main narrative lines of Executive Orders tell scholars working in, say, 2096 about the Americans of our time?

Published in the wake of the World Trade Center and Oklahoma City bombings and during the same summer as the White House is blown up in "Independence Day," Clancy's new book shows that the current-day American is alert as never before to the possibility that no American landmark is safe from catastrophe. For most of our history, we have comforted ourselves with the exceptionalist notion that terrorism was a phenomenon generally practiced elsewhere. Had the Capitol or White House been exploded in a novel or motion picture of 50 years ago, the plot would probably have been dismissed as far-fetched, the author denounced as demented or un-American. Clancy anticipates the headlines of the past month by enlisting Ryan and Kealty in a conflict over anti-terrorism legislation that threatens encroachment upon Americans' civil liberties.

Especially considering that its author brandishes his 1980s-style sense of patriotism (the book is dedicated to the 40th president as "The Man Who Won the War," an odd locution for an author normally so aware of the contributions ordinary soldiers made to the defeat of the Soviet Union), Clancy's novel reflects surprising cynicism about our domestic political system. The author plays to Americans' current suspicions about their leaders' motives in his tale of the power grab by the elected vice president. Earlier in our history, a reader would have had a hard time accepting that, at a moment of unprecedented trauma, one of our leaders would shake the country further by selfishly challenging the presumed president's right to rule. In 1939, many Americans boycotted Frank Capra's "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" to protest the portrayal of Jimmy Stewart's Senate colleagues as corrupt. Nowadays we do not blink at the notion that one of our leaders might turn a national tragedy into a great career move.

Executive Orders also opens a window on the American post-Cold War psyche. Dwight Eisenhower (another Clancy hero, who, as the author says in his narrative, "exercised power so skillfully that hardly anyone had noticed his doing anything at all") believed that when the confrontation with a Soviet empire ended, Americans would resume their essential benign composure; while retaining our world leadership, we would concentrate on education, farming, medicine and otherwise improving our society. Unlike his old colleague Gen. George Patton, Ike scoffed at the idea that there was something in the American psychology that required an enemy.

Clancy is of the Patton school. He has an old Russian friend tell Ryan, "What a superb enemy you were." Had this book been written during the Cold War, Clancy almost certainly would have used his Capitol bombing to usher is some kind of conflagration with Moscow. But like the screenwriters of this decade's James Bond films, Clancy has to find his foe somewhere else. Looking to the Middle East, he invents a war-making "United Islamic Republic" of Iran and Iraq.

Germ warfare fought by Ebola virus is another large element of Clancy's book that is very much of this place and time. For most of the Cold War, the weapon of mass destruction that most Americans thought about was nuclear. Life-threatening epidemics such as tuberculosis and polio seemed under control. Now we live in an age of AIDS and flirtation by Iraqis and others with chemical and biological weapons, raising the specter of sudden new war-plagues of biblical proportions.

Perhaps the deepest wellspring of Clancy's appeal when he published The Hunt for Red October in the early 1980s was his ability to expose the details of military and intelligence technology. This was not surprising. The Cold War was threatening to grow dangerous. No issue was more timely. Thinking of the 1920s, when a shriveling American peacetime army and an inward-looking society made military thrillers poor performers in American publishing, one looks for signs that Clancy is trying to change his act. But although domestic political crisis and domestic terrorism loom large in Executive Orders, the author has wisely chosen not to abandon what he does so well (although, in its publicity materials, the publisher plays up the domestic drama and soft-pedals the foreign).

The book derives much of its action and suspense from the author's talent in exposing the inner workings of endless unseen chambers of our own and other governments—for example, the presidential briefcase containing nuclear attack plans called "the football": "The first section, Jack saw, was labeled MAJOR ATTACK OPTION. It showed a map of Japan, many of whose cities were marked with multicolored dots meant in terms of delivered megatonnage; probably another page would quantify the predicted deaths. Ryan opened the binder rings and removed the whole section. 'I want these pages burned. I want this MAO eliminated immediately.' That merely meant that it would be filed away in some drawer in Pentagon War Plans, and also in Omaha. Things like this never died."

There is little evidence that Clancy has grown more interested than in previous volumes in exploring the depths and complexities of human personality. The thinking and motivations of his characters are not remotely as interesting as the dramatic situations in which he places them. The historian of 2096 would find little in this book to demonstrate the fascination that Americans of the 1990s have with deconstructing personal character and understanding the psychohistory of our leaders.

As compelling entertainment, Executive Orders shows that, despite the end of the Cold War and the temptation to coast that conventional success may bring, Clancy has lost none of his verve. As cultural artifact, the book suggests a domestic America that is perilous and grim.