Talking About Tom Clancy's 'Ryanverse': Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat?

Harrison Ford starred in two Jack Ryan films. © 1992 Paramount Pictures

On Quora, member Maya Lachman asks:

Was Jack Ryan a Republican or a Democrat?

My reply:

If you’re talking about Tom Clancy’s iconic character John Patrick Ryan, Sr., he is depicted in the novels as being Republican, especially in most of the books that follow 1991’s The Sum of All Fears.

In the early Jack Ryan novels (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games, The Cardinal of the Cardinal, Clear and Present Danger, and The Sum of All Fears), Ryan works his way up the ranks in the Central Intelligence Agency, starting out as a recently-recruited analyst and rising all the way to Deputy Director (Intelligence), or DDI.

During his time at CIA, Ryan doesn’t have much to say about politics (except in the context of U.S.-Soviet relations, in which case he is obviously a Cold War Republican), but his pre-CIA resume includes a stint as a Marine Corps lieutenant, a successful stockbroker who, despite earning enough money as an investor, quits to become a professor of history at the U.S. Naval Academy. He’s also a respected author whose biography of Admiral William F. Halsey, Fighting Sailor, is even known in the Soviet Union. The fact that he is independently wealthy, married to a successful surgeon and professor at Johns Hopkins, and a former military man pegs him as an Eisenhower-style Republican, even though in the early novels his politics are only hinted at by his choice to serve his country as an intelligence analyst during the last phase of the Cold War.

Later on, when Ryan becomes - in a series of plot twists - an “accidental President,” we see that the protagonist of the series is an avatar for Clancy himself. For it is no secret that The “Master of the Technothriller” (a sobriquet the late author hated) was conservative, proudly a member of the Republican Party, and a consummate defender of American citizens’ right to own personal firearms.

At first, Ryan was portrayed as being unaffiliated with either of the major parties, although later on, it is clear that he is, in fact, a Reagan Republican. 

If you carefully analyze President Ryan’s domestic and foreign policies in most of the novels that take place after Executive Orders, you’ll note that they dovetail nicely with Clancy’s own conservative views. Fans and critics alike have noted that Ryan’s main political antagonist, Democratic politician Edward Kealty (a not-so-veiled allusion to the late Ted Kennedy) is almost a caricature of liberal politicians. Clancy apparently takes many of Bill Clinton’s character traits (both good and bad, but mostly the bad), tosses in a few grains of Ted Kennedy and Tip O’Neill, and ends up with Ed Kealty, a smart, well-meaning, but morally-suspect guy who thinks cutting military and intelligence agencies’ budgets is a moral imperative.

And many of Clancy’s American villains, starting with Congressional staffer Peter Henderson, are either disillusioned liberals who are recruited by the KGB or are craven opportunists who throw in their lot with socialist countries like Venezuela.

Ryan, on the other hand, is an idealized Chief Executive; he seems to be a cross of Ronald Reagan (Clancy’s Cold War hero) and John F. Kennedy (Ryan is a Roman Catholic). President Ryan’s foreign policies, and many of his domestic ones, are very Reaganesque, especially in their emphasis on a strong U.S. military, more support for the intelligence agencies that are America’s eyes and ears on the world, and a strong sense of caution when it comes to Russia, China, and North Korea.

So, unlike his movie and TV incarnations, which only focus on his CIA career (and then only as an action-adventure hero), the literary Jack Ryan is Republican.

Speaking as a liberal who nonetheless loves Tom Clancy’s books and has read Clancy’s essays on politics, history, and world affairs, it’s also fair to say that Jack Ryan is the late author’s literary alter ego. Or, in simpler terms, Ryan is Clancy’s idealized stand-in.