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John Patrick Ryan Sr. (Hon.) is a fictional character created by author Tom Clancy and featured in his Ryanverse novels, which have consistently topped the New York Times bestseller list over 30 years. Since Clancy's death in 2013, five other authors, Mark Greaney, Grant Blackwood, Mike Maden, Marc Cameron and Don Bentley, have continued writing new novels for the franchise and its other connecting series with the approval of the Clancy family estate. The son of a Baltimore police detective and a nurse, Ryan is a former U.S. Marine and stockbroker who becomes a civilian history professor at the United States Naval Academy (USNA). Ryan works with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) initially as a MITRE contractor before becoming an analyst and occasional field officer, eventually leading it as Deputy Director. After retiring from the CIA, Ryan later served as National Security Advisor and Vice President before suddenly becoming President of the United States following a terrorist attack on the United States Capitol. Ryan went on to serve two non-consecutive terms and mostly dealt with international crises in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Clancy told Robert Gates that "You know, for the first several novels, I pretty much modeled Ryan’s career on yours." Jack 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. The Amazon Prime web series ran from 2018 to 2023. Fictional biography Early life Ryan was born in 1950 to an Irish Catholic family in Baltimore, Maryland. His father, Emmet William Ryan, was a Baltimore Police Department homicide lieutenant and World War II veteran. The elder Ryan had served with Easy Company, 506th Infantry Regiment, 101st Airborne Division at the Battle of the Bulge. His mother, Catherine Burke Ryan, was a nurse. Patriot Games mentioned that he had a sister, who lived in Seattle. Without Remorse mentioned that his sister is younger than he, and that he wanted to join the Marines to get a scholarship so the family would have more money for her education. After graduating from Loyola High School, a Catholic Jesuit prep school in Towson, Maryland in suburban Baltimore County, Ryan attended Boston College, graduating with a Bachelor of Arts degree in economics (with a strong minor in history) and was a rower. He commissioned as a second lieutenant in the United States Marine Corps via the USMC Officer Candidates School. While waiting for the Corps to assign him, he passed the Certified Public Accountant exam. After officer training at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Quantico, Virginia, Ryan went on to serve briefly as a Marine infantry 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. The crash badly injured Ryan's back. Surgeons at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland inadequately repaired his back. This led to a lengthy recovery process (during which he became addicted to pain medications) after which, complete with a permanent disability and wearing a back brace, he was discharged from the Marine Corps. He passed his stockbroker's exam and took a position with Wall Street investment firm Merrill Lynch's 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. The film version of The Hunt for Red October changed Ryan's educational background to being a 1972 graduate of the United States Naval Academy. As Red October is sailing into the Penobscot River in Maine, Ryan says he grew up in that area. In the film it is also said the helicopter crash happened in his third year at the Academy and he finished his senior year from his hospital bed. The film version of Patriot Games also implies that he is a graduate of Annapolis by briefly showing a certificate on the wall of their home. In the Amazon Prime television series, Jack Ryan, Ryan has earned a Ph.D. in Economics, rather than simply an B.A. Civilian career While managing clients' portfolios, Ryan 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 Railway, making about $6 million off his $100,000 initial investment. He did so well that one of Merrill Lynch's senior vice presidents, Joe Mueller, came to Baltimore to have dinner with him, with the objective of inviting him to the firm's New York City headquarters near Wall Street. Also present is Mueller'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 Dr. Stanley Rabinowitz, professor of neurosurgery at famed Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, to be evaluated. Rabinowitz later operates on Ryan's back and cures his chronic pain in relatively short order. (In a later novel, the surgeon is credited as Sam Rosen, a doctor introduced in Without Remorse.) Ryan subsequently persuades the government to terminate his disability checks. Cathy later becomes an ophthalmic surgeon at the Wilmer Eye Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and a professor of surgery at Johns Hopkins. After creating a net worth of $8 million, Ryan left the firm after four years and enrolled at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. for six doctoral 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 as a civilian professor of history. In addition, he has also written books on naval history: Options and Decisions, Doomed Eagles, and Fighting Sailor, a biography of World War II Admiral William "Bull" Halsey, in which he justifies Halsey's actions during the Battle of Leyte Gulf. First CIA work and career Following a recommendation from Father Tim O'Riley, a Jesuit priest and professor at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., to a Central Intelligence Agency contact, Ryan was asked to work as a consultant for the agency, although officially employed by the MITRE Corporation. He agreed and spent several months at agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where he wrote a paper entitled "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, which involves giving different versions of a sensitive document to each of a group of suspects and seeing which version is leaked. By ensuring that each copy of the document differs sl.... Discover the Ryan Steck popular books. Find the top 100 most popular Ryan Steck books.