John Patrick "Jack" Ryan, Sr. is a fictional character created by Tom Clancy who appears in many of his novels.

Born in 1950, Ryan's background is established in Patriot Games and Red Rabbit. His father was Emmet William Ryan (1922–1974), a police homicide lieutenant in Baltimore, and World War II veteran. The elder Ryan had served with the U.S. Army's 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge. His mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, (1923–1974) was a nurse.

After graduating from Loyola High School in Towson, Maryland, Ryan attended Boston College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics (with a strong minor in history) and a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps (via NROTC). While waiting for the Marine Corps to assign him somewhere, he passed the Certified Public Accountant exam.^[1]

After officer training at Quantico, he eventually went on to serve as a platoon leader. However, his military career was cut short at the age of 23 when his platoon's helicopter, a CH-46 Sea Knight, crashed during a NATO exercise over the Greek island of Crete. Ryan's back was badly injured in the crash. Navy surgeons at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda made inadequate repairs to his back. This led to a lengthy recovery process (during which he nearly became addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, he left the Marine Corps. He passed his stockbroker's exam and took a position with the Baltimore office of the Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch.

(The movie adaptation of The Hunt for Red October tells Ryan's story differently: Admiral Joshua Painter states that he attended the United States Naval Academy and that in the "summer of his third year, he went down in a chopper accident in the Med. Bad. Pilot and crew killed. That kid spent 10 months in traction and another year learning to walk again. He did his fourth year from the hospital." The film is inconsistent with the novels, which are generally considered canonical, not least in their depiction of Ryan's first meeting with Admiral James Greer.)

His parents died in a plane crash at Chicago's Midway Airport only 19 months after his crash in Crete. He developed a fear of flying that persisted for years.

Ryan's story starts in Patriot Games and continues in Red Rabbit. While managing clients' portfolios, he began to invest his own money, banking on a tip he had received from an uncle about the workers' takeover of the Chicago and North Western Railroad, making approximately $6 million off his $100,000 initial investment. He did so well that a senior VP of Merrill Lynch, Joe Muller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with him, with the objective of inviting him to the New York City headquarters. Also present is Muller's daughter Caroline, nicknamed Cathy, then a senior medical student at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. They immediately fall in love and get engaged. One night, while having dinner with his fiancée, Ryan throws out his back. Cathy takes him directly to Doctor Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins, to be evaluated. Rabinowitz later operates on Ryan's back and cures his chronic pain in relatively short order. Ryan subsequently persuades the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a Professor of Surgery at Johns Hopkins.

After establishing a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left the firm after four years and enrolled at Georgetown University for his doctorate courses in history. He does a brief stint at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, then accepts a position at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland as a civilian professor of history.

Following a recommendation from Father Tim O'Riley, a Jesuit priest and Georgetown University professor, to a CIA contact, Ryan is asked to work as an outside consultant for the Agency, although officially employed by MITRE Corporation. He agrees and spends several months at Langley, Virginia, where he writes a paper entitled "Agents and Agencies", in which he maintains that state-sponsored terrorism is an act of war. He also invents the canary trap, a method for exposing an information leak, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document 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 the identity of the informant.

Both of these accomplishments come to the attention of U.S. Navy Vice Admiral James Greer, the Deputy Director (Intelligence) at the CIA. The expertise of Ryan's report, plus the application, persuades Admiral Greer to offer him a permanent job in the CIA, but Ryan turns it down.

While Ryan is still teaching at the Naval Academy, he and his family (wife and daughter Sally) take a trip to London for research and vacationing. After spending the day sifting through Royal Navy archives doing research for a book on the British naval war in the Indian Ocean during World War II, Ryan walks to meet his family at a London park. As he joins them, members of the Ulster Liberation Army, an ultra-violent Maoist offshoot of the Marxist IRA, headed by a man named Kevin O'Donnell, attack a car containing the Prince of Wales and his family right in front of Ryan and his wife and daughter. Ryan is wounded while intervening in the attack and foils their plan, killing one of the gunmen and capturing another.

Sean Miller, the man he captured, vows revenge on Ryan and his family. But since he is going to Albany Prison on the Isle of Wight, the threat doesn't seem serious. After being invested as an honourary Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order by the Queen, Ryan returns to the U.S. and the Academy. When O'Donnell and the ULA spring Miller on his way to Albany Prison (killing both police officers and civilians in the process), Ryan and his family become the target of their revenge—particularly Miller's.

In Patriot Games, Greer comes to Ryan and asks him to return to join the CIA permanently as an analyst to help track down the terrorists. He declines initially, only to accept it later after a failed attack on himself and his family by the ULA severely injures his wife and daughter. Later, while Ryan hosts the Prince and Princess of Wales at his home in Maryland, the ULA make a second attack on the Ryans, which is foiled by Jack, the Prince, and Commander Robert Jackson, USN. Following the incident and arrest of the ULA members and Miller (whom Ryan nearly executes with his Browning Hi Power), Ryan is re-assigned to London as a member of a liaison group to the British Secret Intelligence Service.

In Red Rabbit, Ryan's assignment to London focuses 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 assassination attempt on Pope John Paul II. Although Ryan and a small team of British agents helps the "Rabbit" and his family get to the West, they fail to prevent the attack on the Pope. Nevertheless, "Rabbit's" defection proves to be a major coup for both American and British intelligence. Ryan soon afterward suggests a non-military strategy to help hasten the USSR's collapse.

In The Hunt for Red October, Captain First Rank Marko Ramius, the Soviet Navy's top submarine commander, takes command of the Красный Октябрь (Red October), the newest Typhoon class submarine, with which he plans to defect. Ryan recognizes this and works to welcome him to the United States, eventually succeeding.

In The Cardinal of the Kremlin, Ryan is reassigned to Langley. He becomes Greer's assistant with the official title of Special Assistant to the Deputy Director for Intelligence. Greer is grooming the rising analyst for bigger and better positions, maybe even his own job when the veteran spy finally retires. Ryan is dispatched to Moscow as part of the American strategic nuclear weapons reduction negotiation team. There he meets Sergey Golovko, a rising star in the KGB hierarchy, and eventually becomes entangled in a complex web related to both the race to develop "Star Wars" space-based defensive technology and engineer another defection, this time compromising the KGB director to save the CIA's highest informant in the USSR, Agent CARDINAL, better known as Colonel Misha Filitov. Although they initially meet as adversaries—literally at gunpoint—Golovko respects him as a worthy adversary and in later books becomes friends with Ryan, whom he calls "Ivan Emmetovich," giving him a Russian-style patronymic based on his father's name, Emmet.

In Clear and Present Danger, Ryan is promoted to acting DDI when Greer is hospitalized with cancer. Despite this he is kept out of the loop on a highly covert and illegal CIA operation approved by corrupt National Security Advisor Admiral Cutter. This operation targets Colombian drug lords using military assets, in what is usually considered a law enforcement area. Ryan eventually works with the FBI to rescue a small group of American soldiers cut off in the Colombian wilderness, which forces him to miss Greer's funeral. Around this time Ryan also runs afoul of Elizabeth Elliott, international affairs advisor to then presidential candidate Governor of Ohio J. Robert Fowler, and a former professor of Cathy Ryan's.

In The Sum of All Fears, Ryan reaches his highest post at the CIA; Deputy Director of Central Intelligence. His career is placed in jeopardy when Fowler becomes President and Elizabeth Elliott becomes both National Security Advisor and Fowler's lover/manipulator. They not only deny Ryan any credit for an innovative Middle East peace plan, but also panic when terrorists detonate a nuclear bomb in Denver during the Super Bowl and nearly plunge the world into a Soviet-American nuclear war. Ryan defuses the nuclear crisis by commandeering the Washington-Moscow hot line and convincing the Soviet premier (through his friend Golovko) that the crisis is a setup. He then refuses to confirm Fowler's order to launch a nuclear missile at Qom (thus preventing the attack), where the Iranian Ayatollah lived. The crisis effectively ends Fowler's administration and, on this note, Ryan retires from the CIA. (The movie version again departs from the printed version, by presenting a younger, unmarried Ryan and a Greer-like Cabot.)

In Debt of Honor, Ryan returns to government service to deal with a second war between Japan and the United States. For a brief time Ryan is the National Security Advisor, but when Vice President Ed Kealty is forced to resign after a sex scandal, President Roger Durling taps him for the job. Ryan accepts the Office of Vice President on the condition that it is only until the end of Durling's current term. He sees this as a way of ending his public life. Moments after he is confirmed by Congress, while waiting in a tunnel beneath the building to come up after the vote, a Japanese airline pilot deliberately crashes his 747 into the Capitol during the joint session of Congress, killing most of the people inside, decapitating the U.S. government and elevating Ryan to the Presidency.

The reluctant yet determined Ryan Administration emerges in Executive Orders as Ryan slowly rebuilds the government. He is faced with political trickery by Ed Kealty, and a deadly plague initiated by the newly formed United Islamic Republic, resulting in two major military conflicts far from American shores.

In The Bear and the Dragon, it is established that Ryan has completed Durling's term as President and has campaigned for—and won—the next Presidential election. He retains most of his emergency Cabinet and has Robby Jackson as Vice President.

Ryan has to deal with the attempted assassination of Golovko, head of the SVR (formerly the KGB). This turns out to be an attempt to sow confusion in the Russian government because of China's designs to annex Eastern Siberia, where geologists had recently discovered a large amount of oil and gold. These events eventually lead to the inclusion of Russia into NATO and the assistance of US forces in the Sino-Russian War. When the Chinese begin losing the war, U.S. forces begin to target their strategic assets. A SSN sinks a Chinese SSBN, which causes the Chinese Politburo to panic and to increase the readiness of their 12 land-based ICBMs. US forces do not have the ability to destroy the silos, as they could only use deep penetrating bombs, which had all been used to destroy Chinese bridges to disrupt the PLA's logistical support. This causes the U.S. and Russia to send a joint RAINBOW and Spetsnaz team to destroy the silos. They destroy 11 of the 12 ICBMs but one of them manages to launch. The warhead heads towards Washington, DC; and with Ryan taking a command initiative at an Aegis missile cruiser, the ICBM is intercepted by ABMs from the USS Gettysburg. With the looming defeat of the PLA in Siberia, which they were about to learn about via live UAV broadcasts from the CIA through the Internet, student demonstrators in Beijing raid the Politburo, which causes a conservative minister to take control and arrest the perpetrators of the war in Siberia and surrender to the US and Russia.

Following this, Ryan apparently completes his term as president and refuses to run for a second elected term. Robby Jackson thus campaigns to become the first African American president, but is assassinated on a trip to the South, which enables Ed Kealty to become the next President. (It is also possible from what Jack Ryan Jr. says in Teeth of the Tiger that Jack Sr. resigned, feeling he has done what he needed to as President, and encouraged Robby Jackson to run for the presidency.) Before Ryan actually leaves office, he creates "The Campus," a secret counter-terrorism organization that fronts as Hendley Associates, a financial trading company. He also writes presidential pardons out to all of its members, with the assistance of his Attorney General Pat Martin.

In his retirement, Ryan is living easy with a comfortable net worth of over $80 million. He is currently working on two versions of his memoirs, one for immediate release, and another detailing his career at CIA, to be published posthumously.

However, in Dead or Alive, he becomes increasingly frustrated with the direction in which President Kealty is taking the country, although he is initially publicly silent. Ultimately, he announces that he will run for a second full term as President as a Republican candidate.

Ryan campaigned against Kealty in Locked On, facing off against him in various televised debates. Despite the efforts of Kealty, various members of his administration and Pavel Laska, Kealty's kingmaker and a devout enemy of Ryan who sought to bring Ryan's administration down by connecting him to a then-fugitive John Clark, Ryan wins the election by a narrow margin; overcoming all of Kealty's efforts to harm him. The president-elect now prepares to undo all of the damage the Kealty administration has done.

At the end of Executive Orders, Ryan, in the tradition of Presidents Monroe, Truman, Carter and Reagan, issues a foreign policy doctrine which largely defines his administration's international perspective. The Ryan Doctrine states that the United States will no longer tolerate attacks on "our territory, our possessions, or our citizens," and adds that whoever orders such an attack will be held accountable by the United States.

This statement comes soon after the Ebola attack on the United States ordered by Mahmoud Haji Daryaei, the dictator of the new United Islamic Republic. Ryan announces the new doctrine on the same day that Daryaei is killed by two F-117s, on Ryan's orders. Therefore, the Ryan Doctrine supersedes the executive order put in place by President Ford, which forbids the assassination of foreign heads of state. Ryan, however, believes it is a more ethical alternative than all-out war, since it punishes the person responsible for the attack instead of the people he rules.

Within the books the Ryan Doctrine is not officially invoked after Daryaei's death (although Ryan threatens to use it on the Chinese leadership in The Bear and the Dragon, should anything happen to American citizens living in the People's Republic of China as a consequence of the Siberian War).

The first published book to feature Jack Ryan was The Hunt for Red October. Although the book was published years before Patriot Games, there are repeated references to it, which strongly suggests that The Hunt for Red October was in fact written after the Patriot Games manuscript (or at least the first draft of the novel) was completed.

• The Hunt for Red October (1984)
• Patriot Games (1987)
• The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1988)
• Clear and Present Danger (1989)
• The Sum of All Fears (1991)
• Debt of Honor (1994)
• Executive Orders (1996)
• Red Rabbit (2002)

• Without Remorse (1993)
• Rainbow Six (1998)
• The Bear and the Dragon (2000)

• The Teeth of the Tiger (2003)
• Dead or Alive (2010)
• Locked On (2011)

In the order in which they occur in the storyline (and when they occur):

• Without Remorse (1969-70, 1973 - Starts late 1969, in the aftermath of Hurricane Camille. Continues the following spring (1970) Epilogue is titled "February 12, 1973") Ryan appears for only a brief time in this novel.
• Patriot Games (1981, based on a reference to Ryan's age, which is 31 at the beginning of the novel. This roughly fits with a reference to the Princess of Wales expecting a baby - in reality, Prince William was born in summer 1982. Similarly, there is a specific reference to both 1985 and 1986 in the past tense, suggesting the events of the novel took place after these dates.)
• Red Rabbit (1982, summer, the KGB operation reference is 15 8 1982 - 666 and it is mentioned that this is the date the first message was sent about killing the Pope, also there is an inconsistency since Suslov is alive in the book, but he died in January 1982)
• The Hunt for Red October (1984)
• The Cardinal of the Kremlin (1986) - "The first chapter is set in January and states that Ryan is 35 years old. It also has references to the other books set earlier. For example the Foleys have been in Moscow for almost four years. The book must begin (not including prologue which was set end of previous year) in January 1986.

Starting with the following novel, the series becomes distinctly different from real history as noted below.

• Clear and Present Danger (1988) - This novel, like all previous novels, refers to POTUS as "the President" instead of giving a name, allowing the materials in the novel to be "inserted" into history. But, by the end of the novel, the nameless president has been replaced by someone with a name: Governor Bob Fowler of Ohio.
• The Sum of All Fears (1990–91) – Israel partially cedes sovereignty over Jerusalem to the Vatican and Saudi Arabia, and the city becomes a UN protectorate policed by Swiss Guards. Residents of Jerusalem can choose between either Vatican, Israeli or Islamic judicial law. Denver is devastated by a terrorist nuclear explosion. The book occurs after the Persian Gulf War and before the dissolution of the Soviet Union. While it is implied that both events occur at the same time in the Ryanverse as in actual history, 1991. In the earlier chapters it states that it had almost been two Novembers since President Fowler had been elected, making the beginning set in 1990.
• Debt of Honor (1995–96) – The U.S. and Russia destroy all of their ballistic missiles. After crippling the US economy and becoming a nuclear power, Japan invades and takes the Marianas Islands; the US and Japan fight a brief war, which the Japanese lose (they are subsequently denuclearized); an embittered Japanese pilot and proponent of the war crashes a 747 into the US Capitol Building immediately after Ryan's confirmation as Vice President, killing most of the House and Senate, the President, all nine Supreme Court justices, the senior military establishment (including the JCS), and most of the Cabinet. Ryan is left in charge of a gutted government. The end of the book occurs eleven months before the 1997 presidential inauguration. Of interest, but not crucial to the plot of this or further books, is that North and South Korea were said to be unified at some point between The Sum of All Fears and this book. However, a major inconsistency is that Domingo "Ding" Chavez is expressly stated to be 31 years old in this book, and also that he was in fifth grade during the Iranian Hostage Crisis of 1979. Assuming Chavez was approximately 10 years old in 1979, that places the events of Debt of Honor to be in or near 2000, although the overall technology presented in the novel and its successive novels Executive Orders and Rainbow Six (especially in regards to the sophistication of internet technology) are more consistent with the mid-1990's.
• Executive Orders (1996) – Saddam Hussein is assassinated; Iran and Iraq merge forming the United Islamic Republic; the UIR launches a biological attack on the U.S. using the Ebola virus; the US launches the Second Persian Gulf War against the UIR and defeats them; the Ayatollah is killed in a smart-bomb attack by the US. (Contradiction: In The Bear and the Dragon it states Ryan has been President for 15 months and that book occurs after Rainbow Six which must occur 1999-2000 due to the Olympics in Sydney. This makes Executive Orders (and Debt of Honor) around 1999 but this makes the gap with the previous books too large).
• Rainbow Six (1999–2000) - events are based on the Sydney Olympics held in 2000, RAINBOW - an elite counter-terrorist force - is created and engages terrorists across Europe. Ecoterrorists plan to create a genetically-enhanced virus based on Ebola and cancer cells, which they plan to use to wipe out much of the world's population.
• The Bear and the Dragon (2000) – Russia is admitted to NATO; China and Russia fight a major war, in which the US intervenes on its NATO ally's side. It implies that the British Prime Minister is Tony Blair.
• The Teeth of the Tiger (Late Spring 2006, based on the age of Jack Ryan Jr., and summer approaching at one point) The U.S. is now engaged in a global war on terrorism, in response to the September 11th attacks which occurred in the Ryanverse as they did in the real world. It is mentioned that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq occurred in the Ryanverse continuity, and that the Jerusalem Treaty signed in The Sum of All Fears has failed as Israelis and Palestinians went back to fighting each other.
• Dead or Alive (2010, A character also explicitly refers to the date as May 2010, in the process of decoding encrypted messages).
• Locked On (2011)

Four movies have been produced based on Clancy novels featuring Jack Ryan, starring three different actors as Ryan:

In the novels, Patriot Games occurs before The Hunt for Red October, though the order was reversed in the film versions.

The Sum of All Fears is not part of the Baldwin/Ford series, but rather an intended reboot of the franchise, and therefore departs significantly from the chronology of the novels. It takes place in 2002 whereas the novel takes place in 1991/1992.

On March 18, 2008, Variety reported that Sam Raimi and Paramount Pictures were in negotiations to have Raimi direct the (second) franchise reboot, with intentions of having him spearheading multiple sequels. At the time, Tom Clancy was writing a new novel. Paramount had not decided to use this new story, or create an original story for the Jack Ryan reboot.^{[citation needed]}

It was reported in October 2009, by the Hollywood.com official website and cinemablend.com, that Chris Pine was in talks to play Jack Ryan in a new reboot of the franchise.^[2][3]

Paramount has hired David Koepp to rewrite the and Kenneth Branagh to direct the film and also cast as the movie's villain. ^{[4] [5]}

The studio has cast Keira Knightley for the role of Carloline Ryan after beating out Felicity Jones and Evangeline Lilly for the female lead. Total Recall stars Kate Beckinsale and Jessica Biel had tried out fot the part as well. ^{[6] [7] [8]}

Many video games based on the series have been made, some based on the novels, some on the films, some on the spin-offs.

• The Hunt for Red October (1987)

The 1987 video game is based on the book

• The Hunt for Red October (1990)

The 1990 video game is based on the film

• The Sum of All Fears (2002)

The 2002 video game is based on the film

In addition there is the Rainbow Six video game universe, see Tom Clancy's Rainbow Six

• John Clark
• Domingo Chavez
• Jack Ryan Jr.
• List of fictional U.S. Presidents

• Clancy, Tom (1984). Hunt for Red October, The. Naval Institute Press. ISBN 0-87021-285-0.
• Clancy, Tom (1987). Patriot Games. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13241-4.
• Clancy, Tom (1988). Cardinal of the Kremlin, The. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13345-3.
• Clancy, Tom (1989). Clear and Present Danger. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13440-9.
• Clancy, Tom (1991). Sum of All Fears, The. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13615-0.
• Clancy, Tom (1993). Without Remorse. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13825-0.
• Clancy, Tom (1994). Debt of Honor. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-13954-0.
• Clancy, Tom (1996). Executive Orders. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-14218-5.
• Clancy, Tom (1998). Rainbow Six. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-14390-4.
• Clancy, Tom (2000). Bear and the Dragon, The. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-14563-X.
• Clancy, Tom (2002). Red Rabbit. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-14870-1.
• Clancy, Tom (2003). Teeth of the Tiger, The. G.P. Putnam & Son. ISBN 0-399-15079-X.