![]() Tom Clancy liked the film, although he identified two errors. Jack Ryan was first portrayed by actor Alec Baldwin in the fine 1990 film adaptation of “The Hunt For Red October,” with the late, great Sean Connery as Marko Ramius. ![]() In Clancy’s novels, the CIA is a force for good. Tom Clancy‘s Jack Ryan is a dedicated CIA officer whose primary mission is protecting the American public from terrorists, international criminal organizations and foreign spies. Tom Clancy bucked the trend in most spy novels, films and TV shows that portrayed the CIA in a negative light, with duplicitous, corrupt and amoral men working for self-satisfaction and against the best interest of the American public. Circumstances forced Ryan to become a field operative and engage in close combat with America’s enemies. Unlike Bond, a sophisticated, debonair, womanizing bachelor, and a ruthless intelligence operative with a license to kill, Jack Ryan is more of an average, decent guy, a cerebral intelligence desk analyst who is happily married with a daughter. Jack Ryan is America’s answer to Britain’s James Bond. I was pleased to discover that Fleming’s Bond novels were darker and more complicated than the films, and I’ve been an Ian Fleming aficionado ever since. “The Hunt for Red October” launched Tom Clancy’s career, especially after President Ronald Reagan read the novel and publicly praised it, much like when President John Kennedy aided Ian Fleming’s sales in America after praising Fleming’s “From Russia with Love” in the early 1960s.Īs a young teenager in the 1960s, I was a huge fan of the James Bond films with Sean Connery as Bond, which led me to read the Ian Fleming novels. He had someone check it out, and he was told the communications device had been declassified.Īs Tom Clancy, a dedicated American patriot like his character Jack Ryan, said later, “If someone gave me classified information, I’d call the FBI.” Years later, I interviewed former Secretary of the Navy John Lehman, a Philadelphia native, who told me he too thought Tom Clancy had published classified information. I was aghast as I read the passage, as the communication device was Top Secret. I knew of the device, as the tugboat on which I served often went out into the Irish Sea and operated with submarines on classified missions, and we used the device during those operations. He even got the nickname the American sailors called the communication device right. Tom Clancy described the underwater telephone that surface boats and ships lowered into the ocean to communicate with submerged American submarines. ![]() I was enjoying the military “techno” thriller until one passage made me pause. ![]() After a bout of freediving in my mask and fins in the clear and warm water off Ocho Rios in Jamaica, I grabbed a drink and settled into a chair on the beach next to my wife and began to read the novel. I bought the novel but put off reading it, as I wanted to read it while on vacation in Jamaica with my wife. This was after I served two years on an aircraft carrier during the Vietnam War. ![]() nuclear submarine base at Holy Loch, Scotland in 19. I served two years on a Navy harbor tugboat at the U.S. I was especially interested in reading this submarine spy novel. Clancy, an insurance salesman who loved naval history but had no military experience (he had bad eyes and wore thick glasses), based his debut novel on extensive research and the stories he heard from his neighbor, a retired Navy submarine captain.Ĭlancy’s novel introduced Jack Ryan, a former Marine and CIA analyst who is an expert on Marko Ramius, the Soviet submarine commander who wished to defect to the United States, bringing along his submarine, the Red October, with him. ![]()
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