Jack Ryan (character)

John Patrick "Jack" Ryan is a character created by American author Tom Clancy in 1984. He is the main character of the Ryanverse series of novels, films, video games, and a TV series. Clancy wrote fourteen novels featuring Ryan, which have charted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
A former U.S. Marine lieutenant and stockbroker, Ryan worked as a civilian history professor at the United States Naval Academy. He became an analyst working for the Central Intelligence Agency during the Cold War. He goes up the ranks at the CIA, eventually becoming Deputy Director. After a brief retirement, Ryan served as National Security Advisor and Vice President before becoming President of the United States following a terrorist attack at the United States Capitol. He went on to serve two non-consecutive terms and mostly dealt with international crises in Europe, South America, and Asia.
Since Clancy's death in 2013, there have been other authorized writers of novels featuring Ryan, including Mark Greaney, Marc Cameron, and Andrews and Wilson. Additionally, a spin-off series featuring Ryan's son Jack Junior was written by Grant Blackwood, Mike Maden, Don Bentley, and M. P. Woodward.
Ryan has been portrayed in adaptations by actors Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine, and John Krasinski. The film series from 1990 to 2014 have an unadjusted worldwide gross revenue of $788.4 million to date, making it the 57th-highest-grossing film series. A television series from Amazon Prime Video ran from 2018 to 2023.

Concept and creation

Clancy developed the Jack Ryan character while working as an insurance agent in Maryland, drawing extensively from his early interests and personal background. Clancy, who grew up in an Irish-American family in Baltimore and was unable to serve in the military due to nearsightedness, developed a passion for military history and strategy from an early age. He was described as a "nerd" who enjoyed playing military board games and was an avid reader of military history books and science fiction.
The author's research methodology became central to his character and world-building process. Many of Clancy's insurance clients were former nuclear submariners, both officers and enlisted personnel, whose expertise he systematically gathered. He conducted extensive research using military publications such as Armed Forces Weekly and Jane's Defence Weekly, and collaborated with subject experts ranging from Soviet defectors to retired Air Force generals. Clancy based his first novel on the real-life attempted defection of the crew of the Soviet frigate Storozhevoy to Sweden.
According to character sketches discovered by the U.S. Naval Institute, Clancy originally envisioned Ryan as born in the 1950s, the son of a Baltimore police officer and hospital nurse. The character was designed to attend Clancy's own alma mater, Loyola High School, and earn an economics degree from Boston College before joining the United States Marine Corps. The detailed background included Ryan's career path from a helicopter crash injury during military service, through work at Merrill Lynch, to eventual recruitment by the CIA while working as an associate editor with the U.S. Naval Institute.
The character of Jack Ryan was modeled partly on former Director of Central Intelligence Robert Gates, with Clancy telling Gates that "You know, for the first several novels, I pretty much modeled Ryan's career on yours". This grounding in real-world intelligence careers helped establish the series' commitment to authenticity in depicting government operations and military technology.

Background

Early life

Ryan was born on May 17, 1950, to an Irish Catholic family in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Emmett William Ryan, was a homicide lieutenant for the Baltimore Police Department and World War II veteran, while his mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse. Ryan also had a younger sister who lived in Seattle.
After graduating from Boston College with a bachelor’s degree, Ryan became a lieutenant with the United States Marine Corps while also passing the Certified Public Accountant exam. However, his military career was cut short after three months when his platoon's helicopter crashed during a NATO exercise over Crete, which badly injured his back. After a lengthy recovery process where he became addicted to pain medications, Ryan was discharged from the Marine Corps. He later took a position with Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch at its Baltimore office.
Ryan's parents died in a plane crash at Chicago Midway International Airport 19 months after his crash in Crete. He developed a fear of flying that persisted for years.

Civilian career

As a stockbroker, Ryan began to invest his own money. He meets Caroline "Cathy" Muller, then a medical student at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, through her father Joe, a senior vice president at Merrill Lynch. They fall in love and get engaged. Cathy becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins. Jack and Cathy get married and give birth to a daughter Olivia, nicknamed Sally.
After creating a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left Merrill Lynch after four years and studied at Georgetown University, later graduating with a doctorate degree. After a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, he accepted a position at the U.S. Naval Academy as a civilian professor of history. As a history professor, Ryan wrote books on naval history, including a biography of World War II Admiral William "Bull" Halsey.

CIA career

Ryan was first asked to work as a consultant for the Central Intelligence Agency. He wrote a paper called Agents and Agencies and devised the canary trap, which come to the attention of U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer, the CIA's Deputy Director of Intelligence. Greer offers Ryan a job, which he initially declined.

''Patriot Games'' (1981)

While on a work trip in London with his family, Ryan thwarts a kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales by the Ulster Liberation Army, a splinter group of the Provisional Irish Republican Army. For his bravery, he is granted the honorary Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen Elizabeth II. One of the ULA attackers, Sean Miller, was captured and sentenced to life imprisonment, but is freed by his compatriots. Embittered over the failure of the kidnapping attempt, he exacts revenge by attacking his wife and daughter. After pleas by Greer, Ryan agrees to join the CIA as an analyst, originally to gather intelligence on the ULA. Later, Miller and his men stage another kidnapping attempt on the Prince and Princess of Wales, who are visiting the Ryan family in their Maryland home; however, they are overpowered by the combined efforts of Ryan, his friend Robert Jefferson "Robby" Jackson, and the Prince as well as law enforcement and naval officers. Shortly after, Ryan's second child Jack Ryan Jr. was born.

''[Red Rabbit]'' (1982)

Ryan's first CIA assignment is in London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service. Initially called in to assess the Soviet government and economy, Ryan is later tasked to assist in the defection of KGB communications officer Oleg Zaitzev, who had discovered that his boss Yuri Andropov had ordered the assassination of Pope John Paul II. Although Ryan and a small team of British SIS agents helps Zaitzev and his family get to the West, they fail to prevent the attack on the Pope. Nevertheless, the pope is wounded and his would-be assassin captured, while the British execute his Bulgarian handler. Zaitzev's defection proves to be a major coup for both the American and British intelligence agencies.

''[The Hunt for Red October]'' (1984)

Marko Ramius, the Soviet Navy's top submarine commander, takes command of the Красный Октябрь, the newest Typhoon-class ballistic missile submarine, with which he plans to defect with his officers. Having briefly met Ramius at an embassy function several years before, Ryan is asked by Admiral Greer to brief National Security Advisor Jeffrey Pelt and his staff on Ramius' background and the deadly new capabilities of Red October secret revolutionary silent jet propulsion drive system called the caterpillar drive. Ryan recognizes that the renegade ethnic Lithuanian captain may want to defect rather than attack the West. Ryan works to establish contact with Ramius and get him and his crew along with the submarine secretly into the U.S., eventually succeeding.

''[Red Winter]'' (1985)

Ryan is tasked with investigating a possible East German defector. Accompanied by CIA officer Mary Pat Foley, he meets the defector, a Stasi major named Kurt Pfeiffer, who had passed on intelligence about radar technology and identified a mole at the CIA station in West Berlin. After finding out that Pfeiffer had taken the intelligence from physicist Uwe Hauptman's research through his wife Elke, Ryan instead transports Hauptman and his family across the border to West Berlin, and arranges for Pfeiffer to be given back to Stasi in exchange for a U.S. Foreign Service officer who had been captured by Stasi after Pfeiffer had originally passed her the information.

''[The Cardinal of the Kremlin]'' (1986)

Ryan is reassigned to the CIA headquarters at Langley and becomes Admiral Greer's special assistant. He is sent to Moscow as part of the American nuclear weapons reduction team, and later engineers the extraction of CARDINAL, the CIA's highest agent-in-place, from the country. Ryan also forces KGB chairman Nikolay Gerasimov to defect due to his anti-American nature, which could jeopardize the arms reduction talks once he becomes General Secretary.

''[Clear and Present Danger]'' (1988)

Ryan is promoted to acting Deputy Director of Intelligence when Greer is hospitalized with cancer. He realizes he is being kept in the dark about covert CIA operations to disrupt the illegal drug trade in Colombia, which involves inserting light infantry troops of Hispanic descent, intercepting drug flights, and surveillance of drug cartel management. When the American troops are later betrayed to avoid the political fallout, Ryan works with the FBI to rescue them. He also meets CIA operative John Clark, with whom he would become friends.