And obviously that’s difficult, as Liz Cheney has just found out, to stand up for what you believe in. PATTERSON: One of the things about Keating in this book and Duncan in the past book, is they’re good human beings. And now, we have everybody looking at different pictures of tomorrow. People have got to be able to look at a picture of tomorrow and see themselves in it. I said that in West Virginia in the primary, and every place else I campaigned. We at least do want you to be part of our America. But he doesn’t want us to be part of his America. So my best effort, for example, in 2016, was to say the difference between Hillary and Trump is that it’s pretty clear that he is determined to maintain this divisive attitude because he thinks it helps politically. And so the only thing that matters is whose side you’re on. And the new Republican right is brilliant at making everything into an us versus them identity conflict. The second thing you have to realize is that somebody said, if the contest is between belonging and the facts, the facts will lose every time. Nobody’s right all the time and a broken clock’s right twice a day, and we live in the gray area between those two extremes. If somebody disagrees with you based on an agreed set of facts where they would read it different than you did, that’s human nature.
You write: “From Twitter mobs to focus groups, nothing can get done anymore.” How do we get back on track?ĬLINTON: First of all, you have to realize that you’re doing two things at once all the time if you’re somebody who wants to get back on track.
This book-like your first novel together-takes a rather dim view of modern politics. That’s what makes this a universal thing. PATTERSON: All parents worry about their kids. We try to explain here how Secret Service protection works for former presidents and people in the family, and how the kids lose it. President Clinton, did you ever fear that Chelsea might be kidnapped?ĬLINTON: Oh, sure. The main thrust of this plot is a former president going on a rogue mission to rescue his kidnapped daughter. That always bothered me, and one of the things with both of these books, and I couldn’t have even come close to this without President Clinton’s help, is how realistic these people are, how human they are.
PATTERSON: If you think about the movies and TV shows and books that you’ve read about presidents, most of them don’t ring very true and the presidents aren’t very realistic. So you have two cases of this in this book. And those people are people too, and they never get over it. PATTERSON: A lot about NATO, how NATO used to work and hopefully will work in the future.ĬLINTON: I wanted to make sure that people understand when you start killing people, whether you’ve got bullets up close or dropping bombs in the distance, there’s going to be some collateral damage.
We always want to be fluid with where the story is going.Īre there any examples of a detail about the presidency that President Clinton added or corrected that you found particularly surprising? PATTERSON: We probably went back and forth on the outline half a dozen times. You want them to come alive, and the trick of a really good thriller is to have a hell of a good plot and make it exciting. He’ll send me a draft of a couple chapters and then we go back over and over and over again, often trying to make sure that we fill these characters out. Then Jim says okay, your job is to make sure it’s authentic. So is it fair to assume you didn’t write this book in a shared Google Doc?ĬLINTON: The first thing we do is we agree on an outline. TIME: I’ve heard you both prefer writing longhand. The following interview has been edited for length and clarity. climate envoy John Kerry about “a deal on climate change in the Caribbean.”) (When he joined the call, Clinton said he had just finished talking with U.S. Clinton and Patterson spoke to TIME by phone on May 20.