Tom Clancy's Estate and the Clause That Overruledthe Will
Tom Clancy spent a career rendering submarine specifications and defense technology with a precision so exact that the Navy reportedly wondered how a novelist knew them. His own estate plan was not written with the same precision. One ambiguous provision about which trust should bear his federal tax bill sent his widow and his four adult children from an earlier marriage into litigation that lasted three years and reached Maryland's highest court before anyone knew how much each side would actually receive.
The most vivid account of how this actually played out is not a financial-press recap but Forbes contributor Peter J. Reilly's on-the-ground coverage of the ruling, published the same week the Court of Appeals of Maryland handed down its decision. Because Reilly covers estate and tax litigation as a beat rather than as a one-off human-interest story, he walks through the actual will language, the "Savings Clause" the court hung its ruling on, and exactly how the four adult children ended up absorbing an $11.8 million tax bill their father's own drafting could have spared them, in plain English rather than case-citation shorthand.
Clancy died on October 1, 2013, at sixty-six, leaving an estate reported at roughly eighty-six million dollars, built substantially on the Jack Ryan franchise and a stake in the Baltimore Orioles. His will contained a standard tax-apportionment clause directing that federal and state estate taxes be paid from his residuary estate, which funded trusts for both his second wife, Alexandra, and the four adult children from his first marriage. A second codicil, executed in 2010, restructured the marital trust to preserve the federal marital deduction for Alexandra's benefit, and included a "savings clause" — boilerplate in marital-deduction planning — instructing his executor never to exercise a power in any way that would jeopardize that deduction.
The problem was that the two provisions pointed in opposite directions once real numbers were involved. If taxes were apportioned from the residuary estate as the will's general clause required, some of that burden would fall on the marital trust, threatening the very deduction the codicil's savings clause existed to protect. The estate's total tax liability came to roughly $11.8 million. Alexandra argued the savings clause controlled, meaning her marital trust should bear none of it; the four children argued the original tax clause controlled, meaning the burden should be split across both trusts. Maryland's Orphans' Court in Baltimore County sided with Alexandra, and on August 24, 2016, a divided Court of Appeals affirmed, four to three, holding that the savings clause reflected Clancy's "predominant intent" and controlled over the general tax clause — leaving the children's trust to absorb the full $11.8 million on its own. The dissent argued the majority had let tax minimization override what it read as Clancy's broader intent to treat all five beneficiaries fairly.
The Clancy litigation is what happens when a codicil is layered onto an existing will without anyone asking, concretely and with real numbers, how the two documents would interact once both were triggered at once. Neither the original tax clause nor the codicil's savings clause was badly drafted in isolation; each is standard, sound language that estate planning attorneys use every day. The failure was that no one ran the arithmetic at the moment the codicil was signed to see what would actually happen the year Clancy died and several million dollars in tax came due.
Few families administer eighty-six-million-dollar estates, but any blended family with a will amended more than once carries the same underlying risk. A codicil, a trust amendment, or a beneficiary designation added years after the original plan can quietly contradict an earlier provision, whether the numbers at stake are in the millions or in the tens of thousands — and the people who find out are the beneficiaries, in court, after the person who could explain what was meant is no longer available to ask.
Any time a will is amended by codicil, the drafting attorney should read the original instrument and the amendment together, line by line, and specifically model how they would interact under the tax and distribution scenarios most likely to occur, rather than simply confirming that each provision, read alone, says what the client wants. Restating an entire estate plan periodically, instead of accumulating codicils over the years, reduces the odds that two individually well-drafted provisions will end up quietly fighting each other once the person who could reconcile them is gone.
Estate Planning Lesson: The clearest will still fails if its amendments were never asked to agree with each other.
