Leland Vittert Talks About His Autism Struggles and NYT Best-Selling ‘Love Letter’ To His Father On Morning Joe

NewsNation’s Leland Vittert hopped over to MSNBC’s Morning Joe on Thursday, where he and Joe Scarborough discussed his New York Times best-selling “love letter” to his father.

Vittert joined Morning Joe to promote his new book Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism, the story of his father helping him cope with his autism struggles growing up. Vittert told Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski that his father gave up his job to help his son “adapt” to the world. Vittert and Scarborough bonded as Scarborough has a son with Asperger’s.

Vittert broke down how his father helped to smooth out some of his social skills, and it turned out to be similar to Scarborough’s experience.

Vittert said:

We would go out to a lunch, obviously I didn’t have anything to do because I didn’t have any friends on the weekend. So he would take me to lunch with somebody like you, Joe, I would have loved it. I love talking about current events and the like. And if I would start talking too much, he would tap his watch. And that was my cue to stop talking, number one, but to bookmark it, and then we would go back and say, okay, when Mr. Scarborough was talking about his weekend plans, why did you bug him about how many questions he gets to ask in every guest segment?

Vittert said his struggles were so great in school that his father would need to “put him back together” for hours afterwards.

“Joe, I’m sure you remember this as well, after he would leave my room having put me back together, and offloaded all the anger I had, he would go downstairs into the living room by himself and cry to 10, 11, midnight every night, and then get up the next morning and help put together and take me back to school. So this was a love letter to my father,” he said.

Scarborough shared about his own son, Andrew:

What I learned also with Andrew, it’s so funny, you’re talking about your dad talking through things. I remember when I’d pick my son up in middle school, he’d walk in, he would get into the car, and he’d just blurt out the first thing on his mind. Maybe it was, hey, they’re bagpipes on Blink-182’s new album and da-da-da. And I’d be like, okay, so this is what you do. You get in the car. I say, hey, how was your day? Tell me, think about the one thing that you like the most about the day. Tell me that and then ask me, like, how is my day? And I’m sure that sounds very familiar to you, but what shocked me was the next day he asked the question. This is doable.

Vittert said he convinced his father to get behind the book by asking him how much such material would have helped him when his son was diagnosed, and he was simply told there wasn’t much he could do.

“I asked my dad right before we turned in the manuscript, when he was really worried about sharing some of this, if when I had diagnosed that woman had said, ‘hey, I’ve got this book for,’ you rather than saying, ‘there’s not much we can do,’ how would you have felt?” Vittert shared. “And my dad said, ‘It would have changed my world. I would have read it every single week.'”

Watch above via MSNBC.