SOURCE: "President Jack Ryan," in Book World—The Washington Post, August 18, 1996, pp. 1, 14.

In the following review, Beschloss offers a favorable assessment of Executive Orders.

As Executive Orders opens, Tom Clancy's hero, Jack Ryan, has just been confirmed as vice president after his predecessor, Edward Kealty, is caught in a sex scandal. After an abortive war between the United States and Japan, terrorists fly a Japan Airlines 747 into the Capitol, killing the president, hundreds of representatives and senators, the joint chiefs of staff, most of the cabinet and all nine justices of the Supreme Court. Ryan cries, "You're telling me I'm the whole government right now?" He must not only recompose the government and fend off hostile foreign powers but resolve a domestic crisis touched off when the venomous Kealty insists that he never actually resigned: "I've known Jack Ryan for ten years … He is, unfortunately, not the man...