Former President Bill Clinton and author James Patterson discussed their new novel on CBS Sunday Morning.
Clinton and Patterson’s The First Gentleman was published Monday by Little, Brown and Knopf. The thriller tells the story of an NFL player whose wife is elected U.S. president, and who goes on trial for murder. It is the third collaboration between the two, following The President Is Missing in 2018 and The President’s Daughter in 2021.
Tracy Smith asked Patterson, “Is there a scenario that you wouldn’t have been able to write without President Clinton’s help?”
“Oh, I couldn’t have done any of it without him,” Patterson replied. “I would have been lost.…Look, he’s the expert on the first gentleman. He was almost a first gentleman.”
“Yeah, I thought about it for years,” Clinton added. “And it's the only political job I ever wanted and I couldn’t get, because I really thought Hillary should be president.”
Smith observed that there’s plenty of “real-life political drama” in the world now. “Do you think that there’s an appetite for…fictional political thrillers?” she asked the authors.
“I think so, 100%,” Patterson said. “One of the nice things here is you escape, but you don’t totally escape reality. It’s like, Yeah, I love this. I can't put it down, or I keep reading, or, in some cases, to me what’s even better, which is you don’t want it to end.”
“One reason I hope there’s an appetite…I hope that people will still believe in our democratic system enough to stick with it and keep pushing to make it work,” Clinton said.
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
