Jack Ryan (fictional character)
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- This page is about the fictional character; for other uses, see Jack Ryan
Jack Ryan (full name John Patrick Ryan, Lt. USMC (Ret.), KCVO) is a fictional character created by Tom Clancy and appearing in most of his novels.
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Brief Biographical Information
According to information found in the books, films, and extra canon information from Tom Clancy himself, a brief biography of Jack Ryan can be assembled. Ryan was born in Baltimore, Maryland, the son of a Baltimore police detective. After attending high school, Jack earned a degree in Economics from Boston College and was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps via the Naval Reserve Officer Training Corps (NROTC). (This differs from the film Hunt for Red October, which states he is a 1973 graduate of the Naval Academy.)
Ryan left the Marines after being seriously injured in a helicopter accident off the coast of Crete. He then briefly worked as a stockbroker for Merrill Lynch. He was very successful earning approximately US$6 million, but Jack found the work unsatisfying. While there, he met his future wife Cathy Muller, a medical student and daughter of a senior company executive.
Ryan left Merrill Lynch and earned a Ph.D. in history from Georgetown University. While at Georgetown, he briefly worked at the university's Center for Strategic and International Studies there he caught the attention of Father Tim Riley, who passed his name on to an acquaintance at the CIA. He chose to become an author and accepted a position as a history teacher at the United States Naval Academy.
He also began working as a CIA analyst in the early 1980s (depicted in the chronologically early book of the series, Red Rabbit) as an expert on the Soviet political bureau (Politburo). During his tenure at the CIA, Ryan helped a Soviet missile submarine captain defect (The Hunt for Red October). Eventually, Ryan earned the trust of high Administration officials and progressed to Deputy Director of the CIA, and thence to the position of National Security Advisor. In Debt of Honor, Ryan was named as Vice President of the United States after the incumbent resigned. He later became President after a terrorist attack.
Ryan married Caroline (Cathy) Muller, a prominent surgeon. The couple have four children: Olivia (Sally), John (Jack Junior), Katie, and Kyle Daniel. Ryan was invested as a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by Queen Elizabeth II for his role in preventing the abduction and assassination of the Prince and Princess of Wales (Charles and Diana, although never actually named as such in the novels). The abduction was related to IRA terrorist attacks during the Irish Troubles in the late 1980s (Patriot Games).
Jack Junior has become one of the leading characters in the newest Clancy novels. In The Teeth of the Tiger, he appears as an analyst for a private anti-terrorist organization along with his cousins, Brian and Dominick Caruso. Brian is a United States Marine and Dominick is an FBI agent. The three are recruited separately for the organization. This provides Clancy with a way of prolonging the Jack Ryan franchise without promoting him further, although by this time the only promotion left was, as critics liked to jokingly point out, the Pope. Though, considering Ryan's dedication to public service and his penchant for breaking with tradition, he could become the first American U.N. secretary-general!
Character analysis
The character embodies the workings of the intelligence and counter-intelligence societies of the modern world in literature. Some people have seen Ryan as a wish fulfillment figure for Clancy, who has expressed interest in intelligence work and politics. Others consider Ryan a fictional spokesman for Clancy's conservative political and religious views. Like Clancy, Ryan is a descendent of Irish migrants and a Roman Catholic. Ryan is living the American dream.
In movies
In film, Ryan has been portrayed by Alec Baldwin in The Hunt for Red October, Harrison Ford in Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and Ben Affleck in The Sum of All Fears.
Detailed Biography
John Patrick Ryan was born the son of Emmet William Ryan, a police homicide lieutenant and World War II veteran. The elder Ryan had served with the 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge. His mother Catherine Burke Ryan was a nurse.
After graduating from Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, Jack attended Boston College, graduating with a bachelor's degree in economics (strong minor in history) and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps (via NROTC). While waiting for the Corps to assign him somewhere, he passed the CPA (Certified Public Accountant) exam.
After finishing the Basic Officers' Course at Quantico, Virginia, Jack was deployed to a line unit as a platoon commander on the USS Guam. Three months later his military career was cut short at the age of 23 when as part of the Atlantic Fleet Marine Force (FMF) his platoon's helicopter, a CH-46, crashed during a NATO exercise over the island of Crete. Ryan's back was badly injured in the crash. Unfortunately, the Navy surgeons at Bethesda Naval Medical Center made inadequate repairs to his back.
This occasioned a lengthy recovery process (he was nearly addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, Jack left the USMC, passed his stock broker's exam and took a position with the Baltimore office of the Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch. Jack's parents died in a plane crash at Chicago's O'Hare International Airport only 19 months after his crash in Crete. He has hated flying ever since.
Jack did so well at Merrill Lynch (also investing his own money and making about $6M) that a senior VP of the firm, Joe Muller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with Jack, with the objective of inviting Jack to the New York City headquarters. Also present was Joe's daughter, Caroline Muller, then a senior medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. Jack and Caroline (nickname Cathy) immediately fell in love and became engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancée, Jack had his back blow out. Cathy took him directly to Doctor Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, to be evaluated. Dr. Rabinowitz later operated on Jack's back and cured his back pain in relatively short order. Jack subsequently persuaded the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later went on to become an ophthalmological surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.
Having made all the money he wanted, Jack left the firm after 4 years and enrolled at Georgetown University for his doctorate courses in history. Jack did a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then accepted a position at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland as a history teacher.
Following a recommendation of Father Tim Riley, S.J. to a CIA contact, Jack was asked to work as an outside consultant for the Agency though employed by Mitre Corporation. Jack agreed and spent several months at Langley, where wrote a paper called "Agents and Agencies," in which he maintained that state-sponsored terrorism is an act of war. He also invented the Canary trap, a method for exposing an information leak, that involves giving different versions of sensitive information to each of a group of suspects and seeing which version gets leaked. By making sure that each copy of the document differs slightly in its wording, if any copy is leaked then it is possible to determine who "sang." Both of these things came to the attention of Admiral James Greer, the Deputy Director of Intelligence at the CIA.
Agents and Agencies had four sections, each with a summary paragraph. Each summary paragraph had six different versions and the mixture of those paragraphs was unique in each numbered copy of the document. The expertness of the report, plus the adaptation, provided by Jack caused Admiral Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, which he turned down.
When Jack was invited to give a speech at the British Royal Naval Academy in London, his wife and daughter went along to make it a vacation. After the speech, Ryan walked to meet his family at a London park. As he joined them, members of the Ulster Liberation Army, an ultra-violent Maoist offshoot of the IRA, headed by a man named Kevin O'Donnell, attacked a car containing members of the Royal Family right in front of Ryan and his wife and daughter. Jack intervened in the attack and foiled their plan, killing two and capturing one of them.
One of the two killed was the younger brother of Sean Miller, the man he captured. Miller vowed revenge on Ryan and his family. But since he was going to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, the worst prison in Britain, the threat didn’t seem serious. After being invested as a Knight Commander of the Victorian Order by the Queen, Ryan returned to the US and the Academy and his adventure seemed like a distant dream. But when O'Donnell and the ULA rescued Miller on his way to Albany Prison, the dream turned into a nightmare.
When Admiral Greer came to Ryan and asked him to return to join the CIA permanently to help track down the terrorists, he accepted. After Jack was able to find the ULA terrorists before Sean Miller and the ULA could attack him and his family, he joined the Agency as an analyst and was assigned to London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service.
Ryan's assignment to London focused on a daring mission to assist the defection of a KGB communications center officer who has discovered that KGB director Yuri Andropov had ordered the murder of Pope John Paul II before the man's spiritual leadership and personal charisma manages to create unrest in communist-ruled Eastern Europe. Although Ryan and a small team of British agents managed to help "Rabbit" and his family get to the West, they failed to prevent the shooting of the Pope. Nevertheless, "Rabbit's" defection proved to be a major coup to both American and British intelligence, and Ryan suggested a non-military strategy to help hasten the USSR's collapse.
A little while later Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, the Soviet Navy's top submarine commander, took control of the Krazny Oktyabr (Red October), the newest Typhoon-class missile submarine. Ramius’s mission was to test the sub's new silent "caterpillar" drive, but Ramius and a select group of his officers were actually planning to drive the submarine to the coast of the United States and defect.
When Soviet officials in Moscow received a letter from Captain Ramius informing them of this, they sent out most of the Soviet seaforce with orders to find and destroy the Red October.
Then secret photographs of the Red October were delivered to Jack. He showed them to several naval officers familiar with missile submarines. From there he went to the Pentagon and finally to the White House. With the President's approval, a plan was created whereby, when the Red October approached the American coastline, it would be captured and hidden. At the same time, an older U.S. submarine would be intentionally destroyed and sunk in that vicinity. Then the Soviets would be informed it was the Red October. This began a week of intense search efforts, where Soviet, American and British surface ships, submarines, and helicopters were all deployed in what became a hide-and-go-seek operation.
When Jack and Captain Mancuso from the submarine USS Dallas finally boarded the Red October, more problems began. It was Ryan who heard a gun shot in another part of the Red October, and even though he had never been on a submarine before, he found his way through many complex passageways, with Captain Ramius tagging behind, to shoot and kill a crew member who claimed to be a patriot with the intention of blowing-up the submarine.
After being hit by a torpedo from another Soviet submarine, the crippled Red October, after destroying its opponent, was still able to advance unseen into a U.S. Naval Shipyard. There the defectors were lodged at CIA quarters, and Jack flew back home in time for Christmas. Although he was not a field agent in the Operations Directorate, Ryan using his pluck and Marine training to save the day gave his career a real boost.
After this major coup, Ryan was reassigned to Langley, home of the Central Intelligence Agency. Now he had become Admiral Greer's assistant with the official title of Special Assistant to the Deputy Director of Intelligence. DDI Greer was grooming the rising analyst for bigger and better positions, maybe even his own job when the veteran spook finally retired. So Ryan traveled to Moscow as part of the American strategic nuclear weapons reduction negotiation team. There he met Sergei Golovko, also a rising star in the KGB hierarchy, and eventually became entangled in a complex web related to both the race to develop "Star Wars" space-based defensive technology and set-up another defection, this time compromising a senior Soviet official to save a CIA informant known as "Cardinal".
After that Jack Ryan took a break from U.S.-Soviet confrontations to the pressing issue of the war on drugs and the use of military assets in what is a law-enforcement issue. Jack had to rescue a small group of isolated American soldiers from a Colombian wilderness and then uncover a highly covert and illegal operation approved by a corrupt National Security Officer. Sadly, too, Jack lost his boss and surrogate father, Admiral Greer, when the older man died of cancer. Around this time Jack ran afoul of Elizabeth Elliott, international affairs adviser to then-candidate J. Robert Fowler.
As Jack reached his highest post at the CIA—Deputy Director, Central Intelligence—his career was placed in jeopardy when J. Robert Fowler became President and Elizabeth Elliott became both National Security Advisor and Fowler's paramour. They not only denied Ryan any credit for an innovative Middle East peace plan, they also panicked when a mixed bunch of terrorists detonated a nuclear bomb in Denver and nearly plunged the world into a Soviet-American nuclear war. Once again, Ryan defused the nuclear crisis by convincing the Soviet leader that this was a setup. He then stepped up to the plate and stopped Fowler from launching a nuclear missile at the hometown of the nuclear plot's true mastermind, effectively ending President Fowler's administration and his own career at the CIA.
After a two-year semiretirement, Ryan returned to government service to deal with a second Pacific War between Japan and the U.S. For a brief time Ryan was the National Security Advisor, but when the Vice President was forced to resign after a sex scandal, President Roger Durling tapped him for the job ... a job he was barely confirmed for in Congress when a Japanese airline pilot dove his 747 onto the Capitol, killing most of the people inside and elevating Jack to the Presidency.
The reluctant yet determined Ryan Administration emerges as Jack slowly rebuilds the government. But Jack is faced with political trickery by President Ryan's enemies (chiefly Durling's ex-Vice President), and a deadly plague initaited by the newly formed United Islamic Republic, resulting in two major military conflicts far from American shores.
See also
External links
- Jack Ryan bio at clancyfaq.com (http://www.clancyfaq.com/john.htm)de:Jack Ryan