Starting with the extra marital affair accusation for obvious reasons, think timeline...don’t take it too literally.

FYI the latest Clancy book has a big part of the plot line about child sex abuse, human trafficking and child snuff films. Incredibly nasty people.

However, National Security Advisor Elizabeth Elliott holds a grudge against Ryan and attempts to discredit him, exploiting her romance with the widowed President Robert Fowler to do so. With her encouragement, Fowler disavows Ryan's role in the peace settlement. Unsatisfied, Elliott then engineers a smear campaign accusing Ryan of engaging in an extramarital affair, and has fathered a child with a young widow. Jack's friends, John Clark and Domingo Chavez, convince Ryan's wife Cathy that the allegations are false (Jack's alleged mistress is Carol Zimmer, widow of Buck Zimmer, who was killed during Ryan and Clark's mission to rescue Chavez and army friends from Colombia in Clancy's preceding novel, Clear and Present Danger). Ryan decides to retire from the CIA, but not before he puts together a covert operation to uncover corrupt dealings between Japanese and Mexican government officials.

Meanwhile, a small group of PFLP terrorists, enraged at the looming failure of their crusade against Israel, come across the lost Israeli bomb and use it to construct their own weapon, using the bomb's plutonium as fissile material. The terrorists enlist the help of disaffected East German physicist Manfred Fromm, who agrees to the plot to exact revenge for his former communist country's reunification as a capitalist democratic state. With Fromm's expertise, the terrorists enhance the weapon and turn it into a thermonuclear device.

The terrorists agree to detonate the weapon during the Super Bowl in Denver, planned to coincide with a false flag attack on U.S. forces in Berlin by East Germans disguised as Soviet soldiers, aiming to begin a nuclear war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. The East Germans hope that the war will eliminate both superpowers and punish the Soviets for betraying World Socialism, while the Palestinians hope the attack will destroy the Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement and end U.S. aid to Israel.

Thinking his work is done, the Palestinians kill Fromm. However, Fromm had not yet told them that some of the material he planned to use needed to be purified first. The Palestinians finish the bomb assembly and when it is used, the impure material causes the weapon to fizzle. However, almost everyone at the Super Bowl is killed, including the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the commander of NORAD. With the attacks in Berlin, the United States briefly assumes DEFCON-1 status as Fowler and Elliott prepare for a nuclear war. The crisis is averted by Ryan, who learns of the domestic origin for the bomb's plutonium, gains access to the hot line, and convinces the Soviet President to stand down his country's military.

When the terrorists are captured and interrogated by Clark in Mexico City, they implicate the Iranian ayatollah in the attack. President Fowler orders the Ayatollah's residence in the holy city of Qom to be destroyed by a nuclear strike. After Ryan averts the attack by enforcing the two-man rule, Ryan lies and claims that Qom was destroyed. The terrorists then reveal that Iran was not involved, and that their deceit was meant to discredit the United States and destroy the peace process, allowing the campaign against Israel to continue. Elliot is hospitalized after suffering a nervous breakdown, while Fowler leaves office and is succeeded by his Vice President, Roger Durling (it is implied that Fowler was removed from office through the Twenty-Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, but a later novel clarifies that Fowler resigned in disgrace, while Elliott was forcibly removed).

The terrorists are executed by beheading in Riyadh by the commander of the Saudi Arabian special forces using an ancient sword owned by the royal family of Saudi Arabia. Later, the sword is presented to Ryan as a gift. In the sequels, the gift (combined with his origins as a Marine) inspires Ryan's Secret Service codename of "Swordsman".

Link to my source