Red Rabbit - Tom Clancy [60]
"Oh, yeah. I know a few of the pshrinks. Mainly in my directorate, but some in S and T, too. We're not as good at that as we ought to be."
"How so, Jack?"
Ryan stretched in his chair. "A couple of months ago, I was talking to one of Cathy's pals at Hopkins, his name's Solomon, neuropsychiatrist. You'd have to understand Sol. He's real smart—department chairman and all that. He doesn't believe much in putting his patients on the couch and talking to them. He thinks most mental illness comes from chemical imbalances in the brain. They nearly chopped him out of the profession for that but, twenty years later, they all realized that he was right. Anyway, Sol told me that most politicians are like movie stars. They surround themselves with sycophants and yes-men and people to whisper nice shit into their ears—and a lot of them start believing it, because they want to believe it. It's all a great big game to them, but a game where everything is process and damned little of it is product. They're not like real people. They don't do any real work, but they appear to. There's a line in Advise and Consent: Washington is a town where you deal with people not as they are, but as they are reputed to be. If that's true in Washington, then how much more must it be in Moscow? There, everything is politics. It's all symbols, right? So the infighting and backstabbing must really be wild there. I figure that has to affect us in two ways. First, it means that a lot of the data we get is skewed, because the sources of the data either don't know reality even when it jumps up and bites them on the ass, or they twist the data for their own ends as they process it and pass it on—whether consciously or unconsciously. Second, it means that even the people on the other side who need the data don't know good from bad, so even if we can figure it out, we can't predict what it means because they can't decide for themselves what the hell to do with it—even if they know what the hell it is in the first place. We here have to analyze faulty information that will probably be incorrectly implemented by the people to whom it's supposed to go. So, how the hell do we predict what they will do when they themselves don't know the right thing to do?"
That was worth a grin around the pipe stem. "Very good, Jack. You're starting to catch on. Very little they do makes any bloody sense, objectively speaking. However, it isn't all that hard to predict their behavior. You decide for yourself what the intelligent action is, and then reverse it. Works every time," Harding laughed.
"But the other thing Sol said that worries me is that people like that who have power in their hands can be dangerous sons-of-bitches. They don't know when to stop, and they don't know how to use their power intelligently. I guess that's how Afghanistan got started."
"Correct." Simon nodded seriously. "They are captured by their own ideological illusions, and they can't see their way clear of it. And the real problem is, they do control a bloody great lot of power."
"I'm missing something in the equation," Ryan said.
"We all are, Jack. That's part of the job."
It was time to change subjects: "Anything new on the Pope?"
"Nothing yet today. If Basil has anything, I ought to hear about it before lunch. Worried about that?"
Jack nodded soberly. "Yeah. The problem is, if we do see a real threat, what the hell can we do about it? It's not like we can put a company of Marines around him, is it? Exposed as he is—I mean, he's in public so much that you can't protect him."
"And people like him don't shrink from danger, do they?"
"I remember when Martin Luther King got whacked. Hell, he knew—he must have known—there were guns out there with his name on them. But he never backed away. It just wasn't part of his ethos to run and hide. Won't be any different in Rome, buddy, and every other place he goes."
"Moving targets are supposed to be harder to hit," Simon observed