On its 30th anniversary, it also feels remarkably relevant in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercising “core” executive powers. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that Trump v. United States allows a US president to be “a king above the law.” As he wages extralegal war and lies to Congress and the American people, the president in Clear and Present Danger never considers for a moment that he is anything but.
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Clear and Present Danger, released in theaters 30 years ago this week, was a solid hit for Harrison Ford, playing author Tom Clancy’s enduring CIA analyst, Jack Ryan. Despite being well-reviewed, the movie has been more or less forgotten as the character has been rebooted for new eras. But it has plenty to say about American policies and politics of the time, including criticism of the War on Drugs, which by then had been ongoing (and failing) for almost a quarter of a century. On its 30th anniversary, it also feels remarkably relevant in the wake of the recent Supreme Court ruling that presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for exercising “core” executive powers. Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote in her dissent that Trump v. United States allows a US president to be “a king above the law.” As he wages extralegal war and lies to Congress and the American people, the president in Clear and Present Danger never considers for a moment that he is anything but.
After tangling with rogue IRA agents in Patriot Games a few years earlier, Clear and Present Danger sees Ryan taking on Colombian drug dealers and a cabal of US officials that goes all the way to the top. It was adapted from the fourth novel in Clancy’s “Ryan-verse” and published in an era when the American media was aiding the War on Drugs by regularly depicting Hispanic people as drug dealers. In this movie, they include Ernesto Escobedo (Miguel Sandoval), a Pablo Escobar stand-in who runs a Colombian cocaine empire, and his sinister associate Felix Cortez (Joaquim de Almeida). Escobedo’s ruthless tactics are on display in the first scene when the Coast Guard discovers his gruesome massacre of an American businessman and his family. Yet unlike many of its contemporaries, Clear and Present Danger isn’t content with a one-sided depiction of villainy. As consequences from the incident unfurl, the movie shows US intelligence agents and politicians to be as self-serving, merciless, and corrupt as the drug kingpins.
Joaquim de Almeida as Felix Cortez in Clear and Present Danger
It turns out that the slain businessman was a close personal friend of US President Bennett (an imperious Donald Moffat), who orders immediate payback. Of course, revenge can’t go on the books, so the president’s close advisor cooks up a scheme in which he gets Ryan to go before Congress and ask for more money for the drug war. Unbeknownst to Ryan – who is mocked as a “boy scout” for his virtuous nature – the money is then illicitly funneled to a special forces unit whose mission is to slip into the Colombian jungle and destroy Escobedo’s operation in secret. This scenario somewhat parallels historical events. After Escobar blew up a Colombian airliner in 1989, killing 110 people, President George H. W. Bush used the death of two Americans on the flight as a pretext to send covert ops after Escobar in Colombia (Escobar was killed by Colombian police in 1993).
After Trump v. United States, future presidents may need no pretext whatsoever. As Foreign Policy recently asserted, “The president may therefore be able to do whatever he wants internationally, even if it is blatantly illegal, without being prosecuted. He could, for example, use the military to take personal revenge, line his pockets, or commit war crimes.” This could play out in scary ways in, say, the war between Russia and Ukraine. President Trump already attempted to blackmail Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky once before. The subsequent congressional impeachment efforts to remove him for abuse of power failed, but at least the apparatus was in place. There may be no legal grounds for future impeachments at all.
Even after the scandals Americans had been enduring for decades, US presidents – and more, importantly, the office of POTUS – still commanded great reverence in Hollywood movies of the ’90s. Think of Michael Douglas in Rob Reiner and Aaron Sorkin’s liberal fantasy The American President (1995); Bill Pullman making inspirational speeches in the face of alien invasion in Independence Day (1996); Ford as the president in Air Force One (1997), taking out terrorist hijackers himself; and, of course, Oliver Stone’s hagiographic JFK (1991), in which a tearful Kevin Costner compares President Kennedy to “a dying king.”
Michael Douglas as President Andrew Shepherd in The American President (1995)
Clear and Present Danger was an outlier in this regard, as it features neither affection nor nostalgia for the presidency. Clancy was a proud Reagan Republican who firmly believed in American intuitions, and he had liked an earlier version of the script by John Milius, who had directed and co-written the famously right-wing Red Dawn. But he was not happy with the final adaptation, which reflects how Americans’ view of the office of POTUS – and the US government in general – had long been diminishing. Reagan’s “morning in America” sentiments, and his rallying of the nation against “the Evil Empire” of the Soviet Union, had briefly reinflated national pride after Vietnam, Watergate, and other indignities of the era. But only a few years later, the Iran-Contra affair tarnished Reagan’s legacy as well. When President Bennett, justifying his cover-up, tells Ryan, “The American people can’t tolerate another scandal that goes all the way to the top,” he likely means Iran-Contra, but he could just as well be referencing the cumulative effect of all of them.
It’s a quaint line now, given how many scandals Americans have not only tolerated, but encouraged. After the Iraq War – another war, like Vietnam, waged for dubious purposes on false pretenses that led to a quagmire – Guantanamo, Abu-Ghraib, domestic wiretapping, and all the rest, our remaining faith in institutions crumbled to dust, allowing the idea of “the deep state” to seem that much more credible to some. Many Americans now openly root for their preferred president to break as many laws as he wants.
Donald Moffat as President Bennett in Clear and Present Danger
Clancy also developed a reputation for celebrating, even fetishizing, military culture and weapons technology. But in Clear and Present Danger, that weapons fetishism is condemned. This is most evident in a sequence in which the camera follows a missile fired from a US jet fighter, sleek and gleaming, as it sails toward its target. The POV flight of the missile over Colombia’s stunning topography is thrilling right up until the instant it rips apart the bodies of children.
When the bombing is made public and denounced internationally, President Bennett and his henchmen pull the plug on their illegal op, cutting all communications and leaving the US team at the mercy of Colombian paramilitary forces. Ryan goes to Colombia to help their CIA handler (Willem Dafoe) pull out the few survivors. Ryan, of course, has not ordered them abandoned, but because he requested the funding from Congress, he feels responsible for the MIAs still in the jungle. Like so many other once-hallowed notions, the idea of “personal responsibility” has become little more than empty rhetoric, but to rescue the men, Ryan puts this value into practice at significant personal risk.
Willem Dafoe in Clear and Present Danger
In these sequences and others, Clear and Present Danger demonstrates the moral and practical consequences of a president exercising unchecked power at his leisure – here characterized by Bennett, whose every line drips with cold arrogance. The movie’s success at dramatizing this is helped by the fact that it was directed by an Australian, Phillip Noyce, whose cultural distance gave him the required dispassion to savage the “Imperial Presidency” Clancy had criticized Noyce (who also directed Patriot Games, which Clancy also hated), but despite the movie’s troubled production, the director was clearly the right person to illuminate these particular themes.
As though to confirm it, Noyce later made a scathing version of Graham Greene’s The Quiet American (2002). Greene’s novel condemns Western colonialism in the lead-up to the Vietnam War, particularly the extralegal maneuverings of American intelligence agencies, but Noyce used the story allegorically, to criticize George W. Bush’s administration’s executive overreach after 9/11. Just as Brendan Fraser’s CIA agent in The Quiet American is untroubled by the shock and awe of a bombing that tears through a Saigon public square, Bennett cares nothing about collateral damage as long as those who dare to threaten American hegemony are thoroughly vanquished.
Brendan Fraser and Michael Caine in The Quiet American (2002)
Clear and Present Danger was prescient about how much more powerful the president might become even after decades of largely unchecked growth after WWII – not to mention how much more morally complicit. Ryan’s climactic showdown comes not in the Colombian jungle with a machine gun (where he’s generally inept), but in an Oval Office face-off when he refuses to cover for the president’s crimes at an upcoming Congressional hearing. Bennett, incensed, says, “How dare you come in here and bark at me like some junkyard dog. I am the President of the United States.” When he instructs Ryan to do the “ol’ Potomac two-step” and get in line, Ryan counters, “Mr. President, I don’t dance.”
It’s a corny line, one that perhaps only Ford could get away with delivering so earnestly. And indeed some critics did take issue with Ryan’s flawless virtue in this film, while Clancy himself didn’t like this ending, believing that Ryan would never willfully expose a conspiracy that would hurt the US. But in the wake of Trump v. United States – and whatever follows – we are in dire need of nonpartisan “boy scouts” like Ryan who are willing to honor their oaths to preserve our once widely held ideals before tyrants squash them out of existence forever.
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All images are screenshots from the film.
