(NewsNation) — “Born Lucky” is the story of a kid born with a serious, untreatable condition whose parents made a radical decision to give their son the support and tools to find his place in a tough world. 

Written by NewsNation chief Washington anchor Leland Vittert, the new book discusses how growing up with autism affected his life — and his family’s.

With Bill O’Reilly, Vittert explains his adolescence and his professional life with autism and how his dad helped him navigate an unforgiving world. 

The “On Balance” host called the book “the love story of a father” who helped him exceed far beyond any diagnosis.

Spurred by a desire to help his son prepare for the “real world,” Vittert’s father helped him gain some muscle to deter bullies and learn social cues over dinners.

A boy named ‘Lucky’

Born in St. Louis, when the doctors delivered Vittert, the umbilical cord was knotted and wrapped around his neck. 

“The doctor who delivered me came by with a Sharpie and crossed out Leland and said, ‘call him Lucky.’”

On the surface, Vittert’s childhood resembled any other American middle-class kid’s, but problems started to arise. 

“My dad could see it because when I would play with other kids and I was running into kids, I was hitting kids. Kids would try to joke with me or throw me the ball and I’d get angry. It was very clear,” Vittert said.

After he was tested, doctors revealed he had a learning disability, which would later become known as autism. Vittert said his father, Mark Vittert, was defiant. 

“So, Dad took it upon himself to say, ‘I’m not going to adapt the world to my kid, right?’ Because that’s what was very in vogue at the time,” Vittert said. 

O’Reilly asked, “Did the word autism arise at all, ever?”

“Not until I was out of college. Mom and Dad never wanted me to think I was different,” Vittert said. “They didn’t tell anyone. There was no special diagnosis, there was no special treatment in school, none.”

Vittert said his father became his best and only friend at the time. 

“When I was about 5 years old, there’s a big tree in my grandparents’ front yard, and the tree had a notch, so almost up where that picture is up there, and he put me up on the tree in the notch. I’m standing in the notch, look down. It might as well have been the Grand Canyon. And he says, ‘Do you trust me?’ And I said, ‘Of course I trust you, Dad.’ And I was a scared little boy. I was a fat little kid.

“I had no friends. I was not confident in any way. He said, ‘OK, jump into my arms,’” Vittert continued. “Obviously, he caught me, as any loving parent would. And he said, ‘You can always trust me.’ And that was the beginning. And that foundation of trust is what allowed this story to happen.”

Hard Lessons

When he was young, Vittert’s father taught him to set goals, pushing him while helping him understand he needed to do things on his own. 

“So then your father embarks on a program to toughen you up?” O’Reilly asked.

“Yep, 200 push-ups a day, five days a week,” Vittert said. 

That mindset led to Vittert’s goal to learn how to fly. 

“I had seen a story on the evening news about a little kid who had flown across the country at 10 years old. And I wanted to beat him,” he said. 

By 11, Vittert was flying across the Atlantic Ocean. 

“It was all about goals. Hey, how can you achieve and get out of feeling like you’re worthless? What can you do that’s going to be different, that is going to be exceptional?” Vittert said. 

“But there were expectations about hard work, and there were expectations about character. And those were the two things that my dad said will matter later in life, and that’s what the standard was,” he continued. 

O’Reilly, impressed by his piloting skills at a young age, asked Vittert about what school was like in those days. 

“I went to school every day, and I would come home, and in the words of my mother, it was like we had to put you back together every night because of how broken you were,” he said. 

He recalled a moment in middle school where a teacher humiliated him in front of the class. 

“He was just humiliating me because he was annoyed and wanted to put me in my place. But you imagine, if the teacher does that, what that allows the kids to do,” Vittert said. 

Then high school came, and things got tougher on Vittert. He says he would scream at his father every night, “How can you let them do this to me?”

Even though high school may not have been working out, his father kept him enrolled. 

“He didn’t pull me because I think he realized that no matter where I went, I was going to have an awful time. And I think that’s fair,” Vittert said. 

“When I graduated, the number two guy at the high school said to my dad, he said, ‘You know, we’ve had kids have it harder than Lucky. We’ve never had anybody who had it as hard as he did make it through.’”

Vittert left high school for college at Northwestern University. Like his father, Vittert didn’t get a single bid to any fraternities on campus. 

“I said, ‘Look, Dad, now I’m just like you. I don’t have a bid anywhere.’ And I said to him at that moment, ‘You’ve always told me it’s about everybody else who doesn’t see the good in me, but I need to realize it’s about me.’ And I need to figure out how to change. And I was old enough at that point to do it.”

A reporter’s notebook

Vittert, now an anchor and host of NewsNation’s “On Balance,” got his start in media as a disc jockey for a summer in northern Michigan. 

“This is my first thing. And this was the whole idea of, go practice your craft. Go find a way to get on air,” he said. 

After college, Vittert got a job as a reporter for a local news station in Little Rock, Arkansas. 

“My dad told me to set goals. So, this is 2002. Peter Jennings, Tom Brokaw, Nightly News, everything else. I was watching this guy named Bill O’Reilly on Fox News, and I looked up online, what was the youngest anyone who ever made it to the network? 30 years old. I want to be a network correspondent before I’m 30.”

O’Reilly pointed out that television newsrooms aren’t known for their sensitivity.

“I think I was at a point where the meanness stopped hurting me, and it became fuel,” Vittert said. 

Vittert got his chance to be a network correspondent, applying to Fox News. 

“And you get hired on skill, because I remember I was there. You applied. They looked at your tape. They said, we need a Middle Eastern correspondent, which is a dangerous job. There’s not a lot of people who want it. They hire you,” O’Reilly said. “Was FNC (Fox News Channel) aware of your autism?” 

“No. Nobody was. Until this has been written, I have never told anybody,” Vittert replied. 

He took the job and was sent to Jerusalem, a much different world than he was used to. 

“I don’t have anybody. Look, my dad, the first time I called my dad when I was heading to Egypt, you remember the Egyptian revolution? And I called my dad and he was crying, saying, please don’t go. Because he was so scared of what would happen to me,” Vittert said. 

But his father’s lessons carried him into this career, and Vittert told him he had a job to do. 

“But if I don’t go, I quit and I come home because I failed,” he said. 

After four years in the Middle East, Vittert came back stateside and worked in Washington, D.C. He covered the race riots in Baltimore (including a run-in with Al Sharpton), and then the buzzsaw of the 2020 election. 

“One of Trump’s spokespeople comes on the weekend show and starts mouthing off about how every vote needs to be counted and on and on and on, and I kept saying, ‘Show me the proof,’” Vittert said. “That would alienate Trump supporters, something Fox was concerned about, and they said, ‘Leland’s done.’”

So in his mid-30s, with no job, prospects, he turned again to his father for advice. 

“Every day you got beat up and beat down at high school. You got up, you went to school every day. You can get back up now,” he said. 

“If he had not forced me, if it had not been that hard when I was a kid, I wouldn’t have known I could do it now. And that was the lesson coming full circle.”

“And then, as it always happens with good people, you get a break,” O’Reilly said.

“I get a break. Sean Compton, the president of NewsNation, called me. He said, ‘Hey, we’re starting something new, and we want you to be a part of it.’”

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness

“My name is Liberty Vittert, Leland is my older brother… and somehow he’s convinced me to talk to Bill O’Reilly.”

Vittert’s sister, Liberty, recalled that when she was in kindergarten, she found her brother crying on the way home from school. 

“I’d hold his hand because I knew that’s what you were supposed to do when someone was sad. So I remember not understanding why he was so sad, but it was every single day for a whole year.”

She said it took her a while before she was ready to talk to her parents about it. 

“My mom told me that whenever Lucky comes home from school, we have to put him back together because he has a hard time at school and other people don’t. So, it’s our job as his family to put him back together every day,” she said. 

Vittert says he never realized the cost of Liberty being the younger sister of a brother who had issues. In one instance, Liberty said a teacher told her they hoped she wouldn’t “turn out like your brother.”

“You know, the people that did the things to him, I mean, these are some of the crummiest, really shameful people, what they did to him. And Lucky didn’t use one name in this book. And believe me, we all remember them,” Liberty said. 

Liberty said the family bond helped them never waver when the outside world tested them. 

“Lucky has always been my biggest protector. He’s always been loyal. It’s what our parents did, they didn’t instill values of, be good at academics or be good at athletics. It was love each other, be loyal to each other. Family means more than anything.”

Parenting puzzles

Vittert says there is a reckoning right now about parents and the role they play, especially fathers. 

“Fathers are told and have been told for a long time they don’t really matter. The village is going to raise your kid. The village didn’t raise me. The village crushed me, and it was my dad who championed me … saved me.”

He says that is a different story than what’s being told in America today. 

Dr. Drew Pinsky says a spectrum of parenting today doesn’t tolerate children being uncomfortable. 

“You can’t say anything against my neurodiverse child, because they’re neurodiverse, therefore, a protected class. And then you don’t do anything for that kid, except sort of defend them, rather than help them manage and grow with this particular biology.”

Pinsky notes that the task of parenting is to develop a flexible emotional regulatory system, and that requires exposure. 

“How do we build bodies? Expose it to physical stress.”

Dr. Matthew Lerner notes that while there are pieces of Vittert’s experience that other people can draw from, it’s not a blueprint for how to raise a child with autism. 

“Autistic people can have really significant challenges that impact their ability to communicate, or interact, or even be safe in their daily life. And those folks often require 24-7 care. Some even live in residential settings where they’re getting that care.”

Lerner says things have changed since Vittert’s childhood, and the view of autistic people was narrow and scary for parents. 

“Now, thanks to many people who are known in the media, now, including Leland in this book … that sets the bar for what future people can see and can do with that label.”

Belonging

This June, Vittert married his wife Rachel Putnam in Montecito, California, keeping it simple, inviting 65 of their “dear friends.”

Vittert says with his wife, he’s found a sense of belonging, something he felt he never had before. 

“In my marriage … I found a woman that’s good, that is willing to put up with me and understands me and that loves me. Belonging in work and career and in social settings, I still fight every day,” he said. 

He says in social interactions, he still thinks about things like making eye contact, focusing on listening and understanding how the other person feels at that moment. 

And to this day, he still looks to his father for advice. 

Vittert hopes his book and his story is a hopeful one, beyond autism. 

“Because the diagnosis culture in America is insane. It’s a huge business. ADHD, anxiety, social maladies, learning disabilities, physical disabilities, you name it. Almost every kid now has some kind of diagnosis,” he said. “They tell the parents, here’s medicine. They tell the parents, here’s a performance enhancement plan.

Here’s special accommodations. Here’s all these things. They never look at the parents and say, ‘You can make a difference.’”

He spoke about giving a child a diagnosis and what that can really mean for them. 

“Is it really better to give them a diagnosis? Is it better to sort of push away all the difficulties in their life? Or is it better to hold their hand as they fight through it? It depends on the kid.”

Vittert says there is hope, and parents can make an enormous difference. 

“The love of a child and pushing them to be more really matters, and I’m proof that that’s possible.”

Leland’s father Mark Vittert wrote the epilogue to the book “Born Lucky,” saying, “If you are in this fight, it will be a challenge that is the most worthwhile of your life. It will probably take years and years, but it will be worth it.”