Tom Clancy’s Ghost
The author’s popular and patriotic Jack Ryan novels are now the basis of a movie in which America is the villain.
By Tevi Troy
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Fans of Tom Clancy’s bestselling thriller novels will unfortunately find little of Jack Ryan’s moral clarity in the latest film inspired by the series. “Jack Ryan: Ghost War,” one of the Top Five movies on Amazon Prime, follows CIA agent Jack Ryan as he tries to stop an MI6/CIA team created to fight Islamist terrorists. A pro-America version would make the team fighting the terrorists the heroes, but that isn’t the case in “Ghost War.” Instead, the villain appears to be the head of the post-9/11 antiterror task force, while the protagonists (led by Ryan) are people who want to shut the task force down.
Noticeably absent from the film is much, if any, evidence that the supposed bad guys acted inappropriately. As for Ryan’s allies, they spend far more time arguing among themselves about what is right and wrong than trying to protect Americans from truly dangerous threats—whether from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, the Chinese Communist Party or Islamist terrorists. This is a moral universe that Clancy wouldn’t recognize.
As someone who grew up reading and loving Clancy’s novels, I was mortified by the film’s take on right and wrong. Clancy’s books were beloved—and touted by Ronald Reagan—because of their clear moral framework in which the U.S. was the good guy and the Soviets and other nefarious global actors were the bad guys.
Clancy, who started as a frustrated insurance salesman, gained fame with his first novel, “The Hunt for Red October.” The Cold War geopolitical thriller told the story of Ryan, a smart and patriotic CIA analyst, who discovers a Soviet officer’s plot to defect—along with a stealth Soviet submarine—to the U.S.
Clancy’s books were action-packed and filled with details about the latest military technologies. One of Clancy’s secret weapons was his impressive knowledge of weapons systems, which prompted officials to wonder about his sources. As Clancy said in 1986, “When I met Navy Secretary John Lehman last year, the first thing he asked me about the book was, ‘Who the hell cleared it?’ ”
Clancy’s other, perhaps more important, secret weapon was a clearly defined moral framework. In his first few books, he laid out good (the U.S.) and evil (the Soviet Union). It was this moral clarity that appealed to Reagan, who received a copy of “The Hunt for Red October” as a gift and loved it. Reagan aide Ken Adelman recalled a tired Reagan saying that he got little sleep because he “was up until four o’clock in the morning reading this book. . . . It was a great story. You’d like it.”
Reagan not only recommended the book to staff. He called it “a perfect yarn,” elevating the book to bestseller status. The book ultimately sold more than 300,000 hardcover copies, and an additional two million in paperback. Clancy followed up with a host of bestsellers featuring Ryan, including “Patriot Games” (1987), “The Cardinal of the Kremlin” (1988), “Clear and Present Danger” (1989), “The Sum of All Fears” (1991) and “Debt of Honor” (1994).
Clancy died in 2013 at 66. But the Jack Ryan character lives on in TV and film. He has been played over the years by many actors, including Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck, Chris Pine and now John Krasinski.
Even in the 1980s, some on the left sniffed at Clancy’s patriotism. “All the Americans are paragons of courage, endurance and devotion to service and country,” wrote Robert Leckachman wrote in the New York Times in 1986. “Their officers are uniformly competent and occasionally inspired. Men of all ranks are faithful husbands and devoted fathers.” On the other side, Lekachman noted, “The bad Russians are the Politburo Stalinists and the K.G.B. political officers who shadow and sabotage military commanders.” True, but what’s wrong with that? A hundred million purchasers of Clancy’s books were certainly fine with it.
Unfortunately, it’s Clancy’s detractors who appear to control Hollywood today. Current action movies typically highlight America as the bad guy, represented by corrupt operatives in law enforcement, national security and big business. One can search far and wide for Iranian-sponsored terrorists or agents of the Chinese security state as villains.
Clancy was popular because he offered an alternative to a culture of jaded self-loathing. His success was based on strong moral principles and the understanding that America was on the side of the angels in a global struggle against tyranny. Without that moral sense, we may still have a thriller with gadgets and the name Jack Ryan, but we don’t have the Clancy vision that made his work so successful—and gave Americans a clear sense of the good and bad guys in a dangerous world.
Mr. Troy is a senior fellow at the Ronald Reagan Institute, a senior scholar at Yeshiva University’s Straus Center and the author of “The Power and the Money: The Epic Clashes Between Commanders in Chief and Titans of Industry.”
It helps to understand that Krazinskis wife is Emily Blunt who has smeared America and he's one of the executive producers. I watched it. It was okay but the Jack Ryan portrayed in Ghost War was not the Jack Ryan we've seen in every other Jack Ryan movie. This Jack Ryan really just wanted to make money and stay home.
It was so offensive when they made the character of James Greer a muslim. That was toned down in the 3rd and 4th seasons of the series.