Netflix. Then there was aaron hernandos did not and then i have the john lennon coming out later in the year which is really interesting. Actually, this is connected to the house john owned, the bridge between the two houses. Host who used to live in your house . Guest nobody famous, but its a disgustingly big house. They were here for a while and she held onto it a while after he was killed. Host and other famous florida family, the kennedys. Why did you choose to write about the kennedys . Guest it seemed to me that this was the Great American family story. They are our royal family such as it is. This is the crowd in my opinion. I wanted to write about the whole story. When theres plenty of stories about jfk and robert etc. , but in the same way that with the crown, they told the story of that whole era through Queen Elizabeth. I thought it was great to talk this through the Kennedy Family. These characters are a lot more interesting than Queen Elizabeth was. She is a great lady but not as interesting. The book starts to with the theme that sets the tone in my opinion and joe senior has had a stroke. He cant communicate very well come he cant speak. He finally gets the attention of one of his nieces and she goes rummaging around the bedroom and the first thing that she finds a she can cover him with is a flag so she covers him with this flag and the flag she covers him with is the flag that covered jfks coffin. So to me that is like a great scene and that is what this book is a scene after scene to tell the kennedy story. Host mr. Paterson, we often think of the Kennedy Family beginning with joe that begins with the grandfather. Guest patrick. One of the interesting things is that she died 105 years to the day jfk was assassinated. In my story, the story i tell pretty much begins with joe, joe senior and then it goes to the whole thing. People talk about the kennedy curse and that has to do with all of the tragedies in the family. But on some level, i found the curse, it was unintended and i think joe and rose to some extent created it and not they pushed all of these kids to be the best they could be, so they were all super motivated including poor rosemary who couldnt live up to that because she was slow and there was an accident when she was born. In trying to deal with that and sort of get her up to speed, they brought her in for an operation which was considered promising back in those days, it was lobotomy. After that, rosemary and institutionalized the rest of her life. But in terms of this curse, you have all of these people, incredibly motivated, but also joe was big on take a risk, claimed thaclaim that treat donf you fall out and break your arm, claim it again. And i think that is the real kind of kennedy legacy. Go out there, take the risk, be great. We have four president s in the family and that is how it should be. Host what was his motivation . Guest i think he was just driven. My grandmother used to always say the hungriest dog eats the best and you know, i think that he was a hungry dog and he wanted all the kids to be that way. Host was there any desire to rise above to the socalled guest shore, and he did. When he originally got involved with rose, that was the first halfstep because bruces father was more established in terms of society and still probably a half a step down because he was irish, but a higher station than what joe senior came from. Host where did the money come from . Guest a lot of it came from liquor sales at startup to have a guy like that running the internal revenue, and at one point and they ar fdr, this s pretty amazing, joe was sent over to the ambassador of england, this irish guy, and fbi was kind of breaking his chops. You want this job, right well i got to see your legs and he knew that was the thing in English Society would have to sort of show your legs with shorts and whatever but i think that he was really more than anything else just kind of having fun with joe. Host were those liquor sales where he made a lot of his money legal or illegal . Guest i think they were illegal for the most part, yeah. Host what did the boys bring from joe as far as motivation . Guest i think the same thing. Ironically once joe and john had gone into world war ii, he didnt want them in the war, he wanted to protect them, but they were both they had the fathers desire to go out there and take risks so they both wound up doing Dangerous Things and joe, several flights and he finally was shot down and i try to deal with each kennedy in the book in terms of there are three or four chapters on the younger joe and take you right to the point where he had the tragic accident and then meanwhile, john winds up on the famous so both of them put their lives at risk big time. Host was joe junior and jack different people . Guest yes, and pretty competitive. Joe was the one the family thought he was going to be the star. Jfk was very sickly as a kid and continued to the sickly one thing after another. He had a terrible bad back. But hed been hospitalized even as a student. Sort of like what kids were going through now and was homeschooled a lot because he was ill. Host James Patterson, what was the role of rose . Guest i wish id gotten more on roads and we are working with barbara was the show runner for the madame secretary and she wanted to do this big notion of the american crown and i think hes good to make more on roads. I just didnt get enough. I wanted to get more and more. We went through a lot of archives but couldnt get enough on rose. She was behind the scene. You know once again it was a different era but she was strong in her own way and influential in terms of the kids being driven to be as good as they could be. Host while you are working on the house o house of kennedye you simultaneously writing a thriller . Guest yes and a kids book. You cant see it and hear the longest wall there are stacks of manuscripts id say 20 manuscripts. There is a shelf along here and a shelf back here, im not making this up you have your books, these are the manuscripts of kids books all in process. There is another nonfiction thing im doing right now. Remember the movie black hawk down . Heap is the actual sergeant portrayed in the movie and then he went on to become a First Sergeant and we are doing a book now walk in my combat boots. Then i take the interviews and turned 30 page interviews into classic seven pages and our mission is if you went through combat, these guys got it right and if you didnt and they were one of these people who think they know what the soldiers are all about you will read it and say i had no idea. One of the things we all see again and again with our fathers and our loved ones, people will come back from th that war and h want to talk about it. In this book they talk about it. Host how many interviews for the . Guest is pretty much done you deleted a couple hundred interviews. And didnt use all of them obviously. Host when you talk about all those manuscripts sitting around, do you wake up with an idea . Guest yeah. This morning i did. I was here about quarter after five. My wife, where are you going . A while back, not too long ago, i thought the rights to you know the shadow, i had an idea about something to do with dot character that would make the character a lot more relevant and this morning i think i woke up at 4 00 or something and i was mulling over these couple of scenes that i thought were important and also this sense of new york in the era that the book would take place so i rushed into this room, this computer and started playing with that. Host is that computer offline . Guest yes. Host so nobody can access what you are doing . Guest i hope not. Probably they can. Host what is the difference between writing nonfiction and fiction . Guest heres the weird thing about nonfiction, bill bryson actually dealt with this. Wrote a book about shakespeare, short book for him especially, and in it he talks about the fact nobody knows anything about shakespeare. Nobody knows anything. We know the plays. There is one or two images that kind of there is one page out of the Court Proceeding and thats it. There are hundreds of books about shakespeare. Are you kidding, are the models, are they fiction, we dont know anything about shakespeare. Bizarre. So anyway the hard thing for me is i cant make things up. Early on one of the first things i wrote about kingdom tucked, i wanted him to live. [laughter] host one of the things i learned in the house of kennedy is the number of years they spent in new york. Guest and london. The family was in london for a year and a half or so. Host in several years in bronxville. Guest yes, exactly. Theres Little Details like one of my favorites is when jfk was president , he loved judy garland and they were friendly. He called her several times and asked her to sing over the rainbow over the phone. And who the heck was it a neat thing was when john junior, when he was pitching george magazine he had a magazine he put out before he died he would go around to these older investors and say the weird thing is you all knew jfk. I didnt. And thats an interesting thing about this book, too. A lot of people, people that lived through it with say i thought i knew everything about the kennedys. I had no idea there was so much i didnt know. For a lot of people, they dont know anything. Younger people that dont read history now, they dont know any of this stuff and its just an extraordinary story, and i hope a lot of younger people read it and when i see him during the number 40. Host what is it like to have a big book coming out in the middle of what we are going through . Guest well, you know, theres been nothing like this certainly in my lifetime. I have nothing to compare it to. I guess the closest, and this is before me would be what was going on in world war ii there were those in danger, more than 20,000 americans died in world war ii. But even that probably wasnt as extreme as whats going on now. Books are doing fairly well. My books are doing well because people remember my name so they go online and who do i remember the name, patterson. So we are doing fine. This book is doing great. One of the cool things, this goes to show you around the world this is the sunday times, the london times front page and the times, six pages inside. That is so interested in england they were in this book. It was just extraordinary to me. New york times, not so much. Host do you miss the book to her or do you not enjoy those any more . Guest you know, i did a big one with president clinton when i went around with the president and that was fun. Really big audiences. We might do other so we will probably do another big tour. I will do speeches now but its more like groups of librarians were teachers. I remember i did one right after President Trump was elected. You can imagine it would be a small number. You want to go into a bedroom like that at 8 00 the next morning its interesting. I miss things like that, but im sure we will be doing more. But now you come to my office and this is okay. Host we would love to to take a tour of your office sometime. Guest i wont do it right now but yeah. Host do you consider yourself a historian . Guest no. I consider myself a storyteller. But kennedy and john lennon to some extent, a lot of information is out there but it hasnt been put in one place. One of the things about nonfiction is an awful lot of it is written for academics or people who are worried about how i like the pages on this grand but for a lot of people but is more than they want. So this is more like a novel. People that know the story reminded me a lot of the stuff. Host how did you get into childrens books . Guest have dedicated, had a boy. When jack was an interesting little bit he went to la and are you going to miss me and he said not really. I was taken aback. He said love means you can never be a part. I told him right there if you Say Something in our house i now own that line. [laughter] i can use it in my books etc. He was always and still is that they. The interesting thing is he wasnt a big reader. Bright kid but not a big reader. When he was eight, my wife and i, sue, we said you are going to read, and people should be doing this now. It is important. We got him about called him abm libraries and local bookstores about a dozen that ranged from Percy Jackson and we said were going to read every day this summer and he said do i have to and i said yes unless you want to live in the garage. We really were careful to make sure to read books we thought would turn him onto it and by the end of the summer he made a dozen books and when he took his sats he got an 800 perfect score in reading. Not every kid that will happen but they are all going to get a lot better. Right now more than half the kids in this country do not read at grade level which is disgusting. That should be in every president ial debate. That should be dealt with every day people should be talking about it. Half the kids in this country dont read at grade level, and it is correctable. I work with the university of florida and we are trying to work with the governor right now. They have a program a number of into the mid80s they figured out some things that really if we can correct this. I dont know how to correct Global Warming or water problems or how to influence that as an individual, but we can actually solve a lot of this. People watching this, you can do it with your kids and grandkids and i guarantee i think my kids books are some of the best books by the way. Just doing one now, people came to me and said we want the kids around the world to know about Albert Einstein in his scientific theories. They are very smart and they said you have to make it entertaining though. I said all i have to do is write about Albert Einstein in his theories and make it entertaining for kids and he said that it. So i did a series of einstein books and they are very entertaining and i guaranteed to anybody watching if your kids read one of those, by the end he will be entertained, they will love the book and they will know more about einstein didnt you do which is a pretty cool promise. But because of that, they said we would like you to do a book about gaseous clay meaning when mohamed ali was a little kid in louisville. I went out and of course alexander, a friend of mine, we did a book together which will be a rethink in november about conscious clay, remembering her becoming mohamed ali is the name of the book. Its a combination i write the pros and he writes poetry. Its very accessible poetry. And we tell the story of gaseous clay and how she became mohamed ali. So its a lot of stuff and its fun and exciting. Host is that one of the guest it keeps me going during business you guest host is that one of the goals of your site . Guest absolutely. Its to make it easier for parents and teachers to find books that will turn their kids on which is important. A lot of times, when i got into the Hardware Store i dont want to look like a fool. I need males but i dont know what kind of nails and i dont want to be made fun of by the person at the counter. A lot of people feel that way about bookstores. They dont know what kids books to get into they dont want to look stupid so they dont go and they dont ask and thats terrible. Its not their fault. Although parents and grandparents need to understand it is your responsibility to give your kids reading. Its your responsibility. If you donyou dont let them tl over the floor, you make them sit at the table from you and you need to get them reading so if they are not reading at grade level you need to take that onto your shoulders because its a terrible burden for the kids if they go to school and are not reading or are not competent readers that makes school so hard. Host are you of the school where you see kids on their phones and shake your head . Guest i am not crazy about it, absolutely, sure. Im not crazy about it. I mean i dont get angry about it but you do a little but its like okay, new world. Same with adults. You will be at dinner and see people, three people at dinner and they are all on their phone like my god theres people there at your table. Of course who goes to dinner anymore but in the old days remember we used to go to dinner. Host i vaguely remember that. Well, during the current situation, mr. Patterson, youve also been active in helping independent bookstores. Guest i got involved with Reese Witherspoon who also was very concerned about authors and bookstores and books. We established the site and raised about 1. 7 million that will be distributed back to bookstores, no fees. We put in half a million, or i did. So thats a good thing. That helped. But if nothing else, bookstore owners photo its not going to solve their problems but they did some money and say okay people believe in us and others hope and that made my day a little better. Hopefully now as things start to open, hopefully in a lot of these places they will understand bookstores are essential as Liquor Stores and gun shops, that would be nice. And once again, there should be a reasonable way where we can take three or four people into a bookstore and everybody can wear their masks and state apart and pick out a book. Hopefully we can do it in a nice safe, smart way. But i would hope they start opening up again now and im sure that they will do it in a safe way. Host does a bookstore owner apply for a grant and are there Strings Attached . Guest we did it through a groove and i am so bad [inaudible] i think theres a couple thousand independent bookstores on our list. The money will go out within the next couple of weeks. Host and it is just purely a grant . Guest yes, here it is, god bless you and hopefully this will help and if you cant bring a couple of your employees back. But i do think we will have a fair number of bookstores opening in the next few weeks or months. Host are you a fan of amazon . Guest you know, what amazon does a lot of good things. I dont think that in the beginning they did great things for publishers or books or whatever. They do a lot of good things. I think they could do better. I have talked with them about it, especially for kids. They can really get kids reading. They could really do a number if they wanted to. That would be a useful terrific things for them. Host you have worked with bookstores not just during this crisis but in the past as well with smaller ones and it worked. Guest we have 400 some scholarships for teachers now in 30 some universities, so we do that. And i worked with scholastic about books, classroom libraries. My mother was a teacher and her library she bought all the books and they didnt have the money so it was a strain on the family. Im very aware of that. With scholastic we put out the call said we want to help. We are going to pay for your classroom libraries we got 82,000 pleas for help and help the team thousand, so scholastic i would throw the money in and scholastic would give them Half Price Book bonuses so they could buy the books were a lot less than they were buying them for. That is a good thing and it is helpful. Of course now the schools were closed but we have already committed to next year, so hopefully come september, october we will be starting up a bunch of classroom libraries for teachers. Host and i presume by we you mean you and mrs. Patterson . Guest no i mean the frog in my pocket. [laughter] host how many books do you have coming out this year . Guest i lose track. I really dont know. I just keep writing them. The publisher probably wishes i would slow down a little bit. Im actually working on an autobiography is now. I dont know if i will publish it but its interesting. Being walked in here i actually have a draft i dont know if its any good, but its been an interesting experience. Host how many hours today since we are taking this interview at about 3 30 in the afternoon. Guest ive been hitting delete the sitting here at 5 00, basically sue fox began from seven to seven. I dont know if shes going to let me out a little bit here since i was here at five. [laughter] host you made me lose my train of thought. I had one fina have one final q. Guest thats my job. Host if you were to write a James Patterson book as you said you walk into the Hardware Store, dont know what else to pick up, it guest i think nonfiction, black folk black books, for adults. Potty mouth and stupid, but kids books, it stops to bid in the title because it is about bullying and it is a funny book about bullies so thats a good one. So the black book and joseph kennedy. Host did you start your career as a writer . And i worked a lot of night shifts and most nights there wasnt a lot to do at night they are ray charles used to come in and it was a fascinating place to work and grow up but i was going to cambridge right outside of belmont started to read like a mad person it was all serious not the crap that i write but it turned me on then i went to grad school to vanderbilt phd program there. And vietnam got in the way. Host why do you thank you took off . I think i tell good stories. I was lucky. I tell good stories and alice frost made me take off and the publisher really believed in it. And along came a spider is a very very real book. Theres a lot of big fans out there. And we put out a call its amazing these kids now their older. They are like oh my god thats my favorite. That got me reading. They are crying. James patterson the house of kennedy available now when bookstores reopen order online. Thank you for spending a few minutes with a. It was a nice interview. Thank you very much. Welcome to this wonderful Book Discussion thank you for joining chris hughes and me you talk about the power of transfers to transform the lives of people. I know you came to the slowly but surely but every time i ask others about this idea they say why should we trust people . Does this make him dependent and lazy . First off thank you for having on this very important topic