Clancy's reputation as a bestselling author. Regarding the reception, Clancy remarked: “I was thunderstruck, dumbfounded, bowled over, amazed. But I wasn't surprised." Many members of the White House were fans of the book.The Hunt for Red October was also popular among the military. On a 1985 visit to the , Clancy discovered 26 copies of the novel among the crew. The Washington Post, in its original review, praised the novel as "the most satisfactory novel of a sea chase since C.S. Forester perfected the form." Commercial Due to an extensive marketing campaign by the Naval Institute Press for their first published work of fiction, which was initially aimed at the military, the book sold 45,000 copies by March 1985. Clancy said in a 1991 interview: “I thought we’d sell maybe five thousand or ten thousand hardcovers and that would be the end of it. I never really thought about making money.” After Reagan's endorsement, The Hunt for Red October topped the national bestseller lists, particularly The New York Times. It eventually sold more than 365,000 copies in hardcover. After securing the paperback rights to Berkley Books for $49,500, the novel sold another 4.3 million copies. Adaptations Film The novel was adapted as a feature film, which was released in the United States on March 2, 1990, months after the Cold War ended. Captain Marko Ramius was played by Sean Connery, while Alec Baldwin played Jack Ryan. It serves as the first entry in the Jack Ryan film series, which would later follow a chronological order differing from the novels. The movie is a nearly faithful depiction of the novel even though there are many deviations, including Red October traveling up the Penobscot River in Maine to dry dock, the omission of the Royal Navy task force including Ryan's time aboard , and the "caterpillar drive" being described as a magnetohydrodynamic drive system, essentially, "a jet engine for the water", rather than a drive powered by a series of mechanical impellers inside flow tunnels. Although in both the novel and movie, the caterpillar drive was supposed to be undetectably silent. The film received mainly positive reviews from critics, holding an 88% rating from Rotten Tomatoes based on 74 reviews. It was the sixth top-grossing film of the year, generating $122 million in North America and more than $200 million worldwide in box office. In a 1991 interview, Clancy remarked of the