VITTERT My dad became my only friend, my protector, my therapist. All that mattered to him was that I had good values. You told the truth, worked hard, you were a kind person, and you had a good attitude. Talked to him every night after the show.

O'REILLY Does he tell you you're a pinhead like I do?

VITTERT Oh yeah, with you I can fight back. With him, okay, dad, you got anything else? Yeah, thanks.

O'REILLY Bill O'Reilly here. Welcome to We'll Do It Live. Leland Vittert, everyone. Here he is. You see him with me on Monday on News Nation. He was at Fox when I was there as a correspondent in the Middle East. And he wrote a bestselling book that got a lot of attention and hit the New York Times bestseller list- not an easy thing to do- called Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, a Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism. So it's Father's Day, and who better than Vittert? How are you doing? All right?

VITTERT Fantastic. And on Father's Day, we're re-airing the Bill O'Reilly Leland Vittert special.

O'REILLY Oh yeah? We have another one with the revolutionary war. Have you seen it yet?

VITTERT I have not seen it. I'm working on the script though. You were brilliant in it.

O’REILLY Thank you. I appreciate that. That's a fun one that people, it's going to run on July 2nd, Thursday. So Vittert and I, we kind of collaborate on this stuff and it's worthy. So you're not a dad yet. What do you think, since your father saved you? Which is what Born Lucky is all about. Lucky was Vittert's nickname when he was born because he shouldn't have been born. The book is fascinating, you know, a dedicated father, grateful son, my journey of the autism. But anyway, the nickname Lucky was tagged on Vittert because he had all kinds of complications being birthed. So what do you think the most important thing for a father to have?

VITTERT It's interesting you ask that because you're right, I'm not a dad, so I don't have that perspective. The part that I think is so interesting that I have learned now since Born Lucky came out is how many fathers feel so scared and alone. My dad, as I learned when writing Born Lucky, spent a lot of nights crying because he felt as though the world had turned against him and turned against his son. He was downstairs in our house in Missouri, sitting on a blue couch. There's some picture windows, so it was all dark, and he would just sit there and cry because he had come down from my bedroom, where I would have spent a couple of hours yelling at him and taking out the frustrations and the emotional hurt and cruelty that had been inflicted on me, emotional and physical. And I think what is so interesting is for fathers to know they're not alone in this struggle. And that's what Born Lucky is proof of is that there are so many fathers out there, going through these struggles where they don't know what to do. They're scared. And as my dad showed, it still means that they can be exceptional fathers.

O'REILLY Okay, so your father, to use the cliché, felt your pain.

VITTERT He did, he felt my pain, and at the same time, he said, you're gonna go back to school the next day.

O'REILLY Yeah, well, he was a motivator. I mean, he wasn't going to allow you to let this define your life. But when you are a father, and I have two urchins, and something bad happens to them, at least in my case, you know, number one, you try to stop it as soon as you can. And number two, you feel terrible, you really, you know, because it's, and I'm talking about the good fathers. Unfortunately, in America we got a lot of bad fathers.

VITTERT And fathers who aren't even there.

O'REILLY Yeah, fathers who split and fathers who don't care, and they do terrible things in front of their children and all that. But most fathers are good fathers. I put the number in about, oh, 65% are good, 35% are bad, but that's a lot of bad. So in your case, you had a dad who has basically understood your problem. I mean, the problem I have to define for people who haven't read the book, was when you have autism, as you did, you're different.

VITTERT Yeah, very.

O'REILLY And when you're in any school, whether you're overweight, whether you are perceived to be gay, whether you have a bad complexion, because I taught high school, I know, you're going to get it. You're going to get bullied, you're gonna get demeaned, you're getting get mocked, and it's brutal. And it's worse now than when you were in school, and I was in school, because of the phones.

VITTERT The social media thing. My dad wrote the afterword to Born Lucky. He said, I don't know what we would have done without social, you know, had there been social media. I'll give you something though. It was not just the kids. It was the teachers too. So eighth grade, I'd been through five or six different schools, and we're in art class. So there's art, you know, hanging on the walls and big tables you painted on. And this teacher, before class ended, said loud enough for everybody to hear. He goes, hey, Vittert. So everybody turns and looks at Vittert. If my dog was as ugly as you, I would shave its ass and make it walk backwards. So if-.

O'REILLY And that got a laugh, right?

VITTERT A roar. So if the teachers are doing that, you know what the kids feel like they can do.

O'REILLY You know, you can't do that now if you're a teacher. You really get hammered. But there's some really bad teachers.

VITTERT Just cruel in so many ways. The principal said to my dad, and you know what this would mean having taught school, the principal said when I graduated, they said, we've had kids who've had it worse than Lucky did, nobody who survived.

O'REILLY They, all the others recede, and the damage stays with you your whole life, there's no doubt about it. Now, your father didn't want to do press with you, because I tried to book him.

VITTERT I tried to book him.

O'REILLY And he didn't want any of that. Why?

VITTERT He doesn't think of himself as a hero, and obviously the book makes him out to be that way, I certainly think he is, but he will tell you over and over that I am just a dad who was scared and did whatever I could to help my son.

O'REILLY He'll say he was scared?

VITTERT Terrified. Every day. Because he couldn't protect me when I went to school. He knew that if I was slapped with a label, then all the standards would get lowered and I'd never figure out how to adapt and work in the real world. And he said, I never knew whether what I was doing was right. You know, I would come home every day broken and in tears and crushed, and he would make me go back to school the next day. He will tell you he was scared. The thing that I think is most remarkable is the thousands of families we have heard from since the book came out and we did the special and did your show. All of them do a tee, say, I don't feel alone anymore. This is proof of what great fathers can do. And you think about the reception, Bill, from your show and Steve Bannon on one side to Joe Scarborough on the other. Universally, from hosts who are tough interviewers like you, there's a feeling that this story is something that people need to hear.

O'REILLY Well, there's a whole variety of reasons why people need to hear certain things. Most people don't want to hear them, that's number one. Bullying is one of the big ones in the United States. But I understand your father's reticence, but it might have done some good for him to come on out.

VITTERT What would you have asked him?

O'REILLY About the fear. See, my father, William James O'Reilly, Sr. Never in a million years would he admit that he was afraid of anything, ever. Because my family was so, not aggressive, but tough. You know, it's a word, you know, these are tough. These were tough guys, okay? They came over in 1868 from Ireland, where their farm was seized by the Crown, the London Crown. My ancestors who arrived in America did so on a coffin ship where they had to throw bodies into the Atlantic Ocean to get passage to come to Brooklyn from Galway. And then the ethos in the house was, tough it out. You tough it out. Now your father did it differently. He toughed it out, you toughed it out, but my experience with my father was there's no way he would ever admit that vulnerability. I never saw him admit anything like that. Naval officer, he was on his way to Japan to invade when they dropped the atom bombs. My grandfather dwarfed them all. He was a New York City cop who was a hero in Meuse-Argonne in World War I, where there was 75% of his battalion killed or wounded. He didn't get a scratch. But can you imagine how tough you've got to be? He's 19 years old. He's in a trench.

VITTERT Gives you a different worldview.

O'REILLY Right. So I never had any of that, all right? It was like, okay, this is what we do, and you better do it. There was no sensitivity training in the O'Reilly... And in Levittown, almost everybody was like that. When I was 17, I was gone. That was it, all right? We raised you to 17, have a nice life. Now, they weren't that cold. I mean, I'd go back for holidays and stuff, but there was no dependence on it. Never an admission by my father, who's too tough, particularly on his older son. He was too tough. And so when your father went through all of this pain because you were getting hammered, I would have liked to have heard, okay, you didn't expect us because I'm sure he didn't. You rose to the occasion, your own son has deified you in a book. But you don't want to really be known for this. You don't wanna be the poster guy for this, why?

VITTERT I've never met anyone who was more humble than he is in my whole life, and now you could make the joke that we both work in television, a place not known for humility. Most humble person who I think all that mattered to him in life, we wrote about this so I'm not sharing anything out of school, he lost his dad when he was 16, a defining moment in his life. And all he ever wanted to do in life was make his dad proud. He wrote a column, he wrote a column every week for a newspaper that he started. And one of the columns he wrote was that he would give every cent he'd ever earned when he was an entrepreneur, start his life all over if he could just to spend 24 hours with his dad. And if at the end of the 24 hours-

O'REILLY Did they have a close relationship?

VITTERT His dad was probably a lot like your dad. His dad was tough. His dad hit him every once in a while. I don't think with a closed fist, but his dad was an old boxer, came up through the Jewish ghetto. It was a rough, tough life, very similar to the way folks from your heritage came over. And he loved his dad and his dad loved him, but it was a different relationship. And he said, you know, all that would mean to me is if my dad told me he was proud of me. And the only thing that my dad's dad judged a man by was his character. That's all that mattered. It wasn't success, monetary success, or achievement or accolades. And so I think my dad, all that mattered to him was that I had good values. And that was the one standard. You think about things that dads grade their kids on. Are you good at school? Do you have friends? Are you popular? Do you, are you good in athletics? He didn't care about any of that. The only thing he had for me was you have to have good values.

O'REILLY So good values is a pretty broad subject.

VITTERT You tell the truth, you tell the truth, or his dad was going to put him in an orphanage. His dad threatened to put him in an orphanage if he got caught him lying again.

O'REILLY OK. Orphanage threat number one.

VITTERT He took him to the orphanage and showed him.

O'REILLY Showed him, showed him.

VITTERT Oh yeah. Oh yeah.

O'REILLY The room, the accommodations.

VITTERT Yes. You told the truth. You worked hard. When I was five years old, he was having me do 200 push-ups a day, five days a week because he wanted me to learn what hard work meant. You were a kind person, and you had a good attitude. You didn't ever think of yourself as a victim. So, there were very tough standards.

O'REILLY And he would state those values to you? He'd say, hey, Leland, you're going to do 500 push-ups because I want you to know...

VITTERT You did 200 push-ups a day because there was something to achieve.

O'REILLY But he would say that.

VITTERT Yes.

O'REILLY Would he explain that?

VITTERT Yes.

O'REILLY Okay.

VITTERT You set goals, and then you achieve them through hard work.

O'REILLY There are all kinds of ways to be a good father and a bad father. All kinds of ways. So what I did was, I call it the program. All right. You either buy into the program, or you don't. And when my kids were younger, they had no choice. They had to buy into the program because there's a six-foot-four guy standing there, and they know, I'm not going to hit them. I never hit my kids ever. I very rarely raised my voice to them, but I would explain this is what we do. And that number one was, if you say you'll do something...

VITTERT You do it.

O'REILLY You have to do it, because if you don't, you're not a person of respect. You have to do that. And by drilling it in, it got there. Okay, now my son, who's going to be president of the United States someday, if the country's lucky enough to have him because he's unbelievably brilliant, he bought the program right away. I never in a million years had a problem with him. No alcohol, no drugs, and it wasn't we'll understand, we won't understand. You're not getting stoned and living in this house. And both kids don't drink, don't take drugs, they don't do anything. But I had to be me, which is, for any kid, I would actually give them bonuses, cash. I said, you survived another month with your father, here's 10 bucks, okay? Because it wasn't that I was a martinet, how about that, for a word of the day? I wasn't. But they knew there were lines they couldn't cross. They couldn't. And so it worked, but. Other fathers that I know killed them with kindness. They were, you know, they were a bunch of sitcom fathers.

VITTERT My dad was Leave It to Beaver.

O'REILLY Okay, Ward.

VITTERT Yeah.

O'REILLY All right.

VITTERT Ward Cleaver was sort of in Father Knows Best, but that's how he modeled his house.

O'REILLY The best sitcom father ever was Mr. C. Happy Days.

VITTERT Oh yeah.

O'REILLY He's the best. Because he just thought the whole thing was a joke. He just thought Fonz was a joke, that Ritty was a joke, and he brought this unbelievable, like, okay, I expect you guys to be morons. And that kind of attitude worked. You know, I mean, I know it was a sitcom and all that, but there's a lot of different ways to be a good father. And I'm not a guy who intrudes at all, but I have seen bad fathers.

VITTERT Yeah, for sure. It's interesting how pop culture has looked at fatherhood, because it was where you talk about Mr. C and Oz and Herod and father knows best. And then over the recent history, fathers have always been the dunces, and that's starting to change now in pop culture. But you think about it, Everybody Loves Raymond and others. The dad was always the guy screwing it up.

O'REILLY Right, but there's even a deeper change, is that the woman now becomes the dominant force in the home, which is true to some extent, because she, the wife, the mother, is, we gotta go to work, she can go to to work too, okay, which not a great thing. I'm sorry, I'm all you feminists out there, but.

VITTERT You're not really sorry.

O'REILLY I don't want to offend anybody who's doing what they believe is the right thing to do.

VITTERT Or they have to do it.

O'REILLY All right. Yeah, for money reasons. But it's so much better to have mom in the house when you come home from school.

VITTERT If you can't, for families that can, it is an enormous difference.

O'REILLY I didn't want dad in the house when I came home from school.

VITTERT Sounds like it. Yeah.

O'REILLY Right. You did, and you needed dad.

VITTERT I needed dad, yeah.

O'REILLY Right. But if dad were in the houses every day, I would have run away. There's no doubt about it. But mom was nurturing, nurturing. But now what's happened is, I had this last week, so I'm talking to a very famous guy. And I'm saying, the guy has five houses. I go, what do you need five houses for? You know, he's a money guy. So he goes, my wife wants them. I said, your wife wants five houses. She goes, happy wife, happy life.

VITTERT I've been, I've only been married for a year. I've learned that.  I got that. I got the drill.

O'REILLY BS.

VITTERT Oh!

O'REILLY BS.

VITTERT Okay.

O'REILLY If you're living your life because you want to make somebody else happy, and what makes her happy isn't good for the family, then you're an idiot.

VITTERT Well, that's a different story.

O'REILLY No, but this is like whatever they want...

VITTERT What if you marry the right woman with the right values?

O'REILLY Of course, then you don't have to deal with that.

VITTERT Right, then you don't have to deal with a woman who wants five houses.

O'REILLY I'll tell you, you mark down a happy wife, happy life. You're gonna find a ton of them because what they do is recede whatever she wants. Kids pick that up. Kids pick that up. They want dad to be not in charge so much but a presence. They don't want some whiny guy going, what color curtain should we have?

VITTERT My dad didn't pick out a lot of curtains. When my parents got married, the agreement was no house, no kids, because my dad wanted to live in a house. He didn't want to deal with it.

O'REILLY No house, no kids?

VITTERT He can't change a light bulb. Really, he can't. So he's just not inclined that way. His mind just doesn't work that way. Brilliant entrepreneur, built big businesses, but he cannot change the light bulb. So my mother, my dad, wanted a dog. So my mom said, if you get a dog, I get a house. And he said, great. He said, you let me know.

O'REILLY But that's not unreasonable. You should have a house!

VITTERT He said, you let me know when I need to come home from the office and go to the house rather than the apartment. She wanted to build a house, and one day she said, OK, honey, it's time to come to the-.

O'REILLY You can get the Beagle, but I get a house.

VITTERT It was a Newfoundland, but yes.

O'REILLY Okay.

VITTERT And then he got a Newfoundland.

O'REILLY Okay. Fathers in this country, in America, they don't get really the analysis that the moms get, or the single women, or it's the gender shift. I mean, we're all going to be trans in what, about 20 years?

VITTERT If you follow the chart, yeah.

VITTERT Everybody's going to be trans. But now, it used to be the man dominated, all right?  But now, it's not. It's the female that dominates. And that on a boy has an effect.

VITTERT It's a fair point. Being a father has changed for some over time, yeah. I think what's interesting about Born Lucky is how it has resonated with fathers today and how many I have heard from, both of kids who have really serious issues and just dads who are dealing with the vicissitudes of growing up with their kids, of how they see the world differently after reading it. They see what the power of a parent is, and my dad would have told you during my time growing up, he had no idea how it was going to work out. He said, there were a lot of times I thought it wasn't going to work out. I thought you were going to just never be able to function in the real world, but that he had to try. That I think is very empowering to a lot of fathers, and certainly that's what they've written.

O'REILLY How old were you when you kind of figured it out your dad was a hero?

VITTERT Well, he was the only friend I had starting from when I was four or five years old, because kids wouldn't play with me. I was so off-putting to them. You know, some people have magnetic attraction, you know, they just attract friends and people, and we've all known guys like that. I was the opposite. I repelled anybody my own age, just totally repelled.

O'REILLY And you were aware of that?

VITTERT Yeah. I mean, it's obvious. You walk over to kids because they were playing, you know, kickball or soccer or whatever, and they'd all laugh and walk away. It was pretty obvious, the rejection. Starting when I was four, five, six years old, and by the time I was seven or eight years old, it was very clear even to my parents who would see me interact with kids, like my dad said to my mom, we got a real problem here. We all went on vacation. There was a little pickup soccer game going on, and I tried to run around with the kids, and it just didn't work. I'd push kids down because they'd look at me and wouldn't pass me the ball, and I'd get angry, and they'd try to joke with me, and I didn't know, and it was terrible. So, my dad became my only friend. And really, starting when I was six or seven years old, he was my protector, all through having to move schools, getting pulled out of schools, getting accused of doing stuff I wasn't doing at schools, and my dad standing up for me. That was my only option. You know, he still remembers when I was in fifth grade telling me that I wouldn't have to go back to this one school. In the middle of the school year, he pulled me out. And he said, I'll never forget, that you heard me and you took about 15 or 20 seconds, and then you just started sobbing tears of joy because of how awful every day was for you.

O'REILLY So, about 10, 11, 12, you realize that your father was your protector.

VITTERT Yeah, before that, but that was sort of the moment that it-

O'REILLY Right, kicked in, because fifth grade is that age. And then, was that enough? Was your father's love, because that's what it was, enough to see you through?

VITTERT It was. It had to be, but it was one person who believed in me. And that, for me, was enough, because it was enough. It was hard. And in the book, I don't think you would have done this, O'Reilly, but in the books, we didn't name any of the people who were mean to me. We didn't name the principal who told my parents I was weird. We didn't name the people that tried to kick me out of a school and make up a bunch of stuff. We didn't name any people who are mean. We only named the people who were nice. And there were a couple, there were couple of teachers, there were a couple of coaches. And there were a couple of my dad's friends who understood that I needed an adult to believe in me and to teach me, and they did.

O'REILLY It's a shame that they were in the minority, though.

VITTERT Vast minority.

O'REILLY Right, you know, when I was teaching school, I was teaching high school kids, and the kids, as I mentioned earlier, who were different in any way, got hammered, bullied. Now, I put myself up as the protector of these kids. I didn't even know you at the time. This was way back. My first job out of college.

VITTERT You were down in what Miami?

O’REILLY Yeah. And in the ghetto. So there were no holds barred there, and the administration couldn't care less. He did not care. One of the kids wound up life in prison, killed somebody because he was so damaged by the treatment that the other kids gave him, and I'm sure at home too. But anyway, what I did was that I made it a moral issue and I said to my students, Look, we all know that there are all kinds of people here that you deal with every day. Some of them you like, some of them you don't. That's fine. I mean, you're not compelled to like everybody or whatever. But if you're hurting those people on purpose, you're a bad human being. And if I find out about it, you've got a problem. That's all I had to say. I didn't wipe that out entirely, but I de-intensified it. And, you know, when a teacher talks like that, the students, particularly when it's a former college football player who had a big ruler I carry around with me as a symbol of my authority.

O'REILLY You taught history, and you carried a ruler?

O'REILLY Everywhere I went, I carried this yardstick, this big ruler. And I did it on purpose, obviously. Because I wanted...it was like that movie, Walking Tall. Remember that movie with the guy? So I wanted-

VITTERT Did you ever use it?

O'REILLY I never hit anybody with it. But I hit walls with it, and I made a very loud sound. I wasn't married then, I had no interest in getting married when I was 22 years old. But I understood the mentality of what was happening. I absolutely understood everything that was happening among these teenagers only three years younger than me. All right? I wasn't going to let it happen. I wasn't going to let it happen. It wasn't going to happen. And I would say, you want to come up against me? Do you? They'd giggle, and they'd laugh, but they didn't want it.

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O'REILLY So, in the fathering, and a lot of American fathers don't know this, your father does, and you do because you went through it, you have to make a decision. What kind of father am I gonna be? Am I gonna split? Okay, because that's happening at record levels now. Am I going to walk away from the child? I don't know how you live with yourself. You're not a man. I don't know what you are, okay? I don't. But how am I gonna raise them? How am I going to interact with the mom who's going to be protective? Usually that's what the role is. And what do I want to accomplish here? Because it goes fast. Oh my God, it goes so fast. Boom, boom, boom. And I don't think that's emphasized in this society at all.

VITTERT Well, it's actually de-emphasized, right? For the past 15 or 20 years, strong fathers have been demonized and then said that they're not needed. They're too tough on kids. Celebrate the single mom, celebrate that your strong father isn't needed. And in fact, you go through it. The statistics, at least, it is the single biggest determining factor of whether a kid ends up in jail or not is whether they had a father at home.

O'REILLY That's right. And I write about that in my upcoming book, Confronting America, is that that is the key to all social problems. Not that you're going to have a perfect kid, even if you try very hard, but at least they got a shot at it. If you don't have any male in that home that cares about you.

VITTERT Makes it very hard.

O'REILLY Yeah, that emotional, you know, just a fact that this guy... You know how many kids, you know, want to love their fathers and want to have, and the father just blows them off. I'm just like, what are you doing? And again, I saw that because of my son and his crew, and there were fathers who never showed up. They couldn't care less. And, you know, I didn't like those guys, and I would show it. And they never figure out why. You know, I'd just look at them, walk away, you know, that kind of stuff. But I think you're right that we have to change in America back to not a system where it's the man rules. That's not a good system. Or you do what I say. Why? Because I said it. That's what I got. Because you do it. Well, why do I have to do it? Because I say it. Do I want to live in Adolf's house? Not really, you know. You can explain it a little bit, the kid's got a right to know. If you want him to climb up and kill the wasps, why is he being selected for that?

VITTERT Yeah, I would say my dad would always explain the why, but you still had to do it. 

O'REILLY No, yeah, I couldn't get out of it, even though I never got the why. It was like, hey, up there on the ladder. I said, all right. And I didn't get bribed either. I wasn't like, okay.

VITTERT Your kids had it easy. They got bribes.

O’’REILLY My kids got bribes because I wanted them to be happy.

VITTERT You were doing The Factor, and you only gave him ten bucks a month?

O'REILLY No, that was just a... I gave them a little bit more for surviving me in other ways. So they got first-class vacations. They got any game they wanted to go to, oh, I want to see the Mets, okay? They were in the second row. So they believe this was not the Dust Bowl. This was you're in the program, program has benefits.

VITTERT Understandable.

O'REILLY Right. But today, I think a lot of fathers get married too young.

VITTERT It's an interesting concept. You know, our buddy Geraldo gave me advice about that.

O'REILLY And Geraldo's married 80 times.

VITTERT I know, so you should take his advice.

O'REILLY He's got women from Tasmania.

VITTERT From however many...So the first time I came back from being overseas, I went around Fox News and met with everybody I could. I think you were too busy. Understandable. I was a little munchkin. But Geraldo saw me. It was a Friday afternoon. It was like 3 o'clock. I walked into his office. He had a corner office at Fox, and he had a bar in his office.

O'REILLY Of course. If you were Geraldo, you'd have one too.

VITTERT He said, You want something to drink? I said, sure. Just sat there and had a beer or something. And I said, you got any advice for me? You know, this is Geraldo Rivera. He's been all over the world, such a fabulous, famous correspondent. He goes, yep, stay single as long as you can. That was his only advice. I thought, really? That's it? I was 28 years old. And I called him when I got engaged. I was 42 when I got the age, 41, 42. I called Geraldo. I said, you know, Geraldo? I waited as long as I could. I'm 41. 42, is it okay if I get married? He goes, yeah, he goes, you waited long enough.

O'REILLY One piece of advice for you, okay? Don't spread it around you're taking marital advice from Geraldo.

VITTERT Oh, that's a good point. This was marital advice, this was...

O'REILLY Economic advice.

VITTERT Economic advice, pre-marital advice, pre-engagement advice from Geraldo.

O'REILLY And Geraldo's a good dad.

VITTERT He's a great dad.

O'REILLY Right. Just so the record will show, because Geraldo is an emotional dad, okay?

VITTERT He's an emotional guy.

O'REILLY I'm not an emotional guy. So Geraldo and I, we both have the same instinct that you've got to protect your children from evil, and you've gotta give them a foundation of behavior. This is how you should live. But he's an emotional guy, and I'm not an emotional guy, in the sense that I don't react, I think.

VITTERT You don't react?

O'REILLY I react to adults who are pinheads because they deserve no mercy. But not to the urchins. The urchins are just urchins. They're just growing up. So for me to go in and sit them down and, hey, did you know Abraham Lincoln? Come on now. So I'm not in that quadrant. There are a lot of emotional dads. You see them at the games. You see them at the soccer games, baseball games, where they'll beat you up if they think that you hit their kid in a cheap shot. You know, these are emotional dads.

VITTERT I thought you were gonna talk about the ones who would go beat the refs up.

O'REILLY All right, well, they're beating a lot of people up, and it's a game, that matters not. But what I do bring, or have brought, is a sense of humor. Okay, very important in my view of fatherhood. I would, I mock my kids all the time. I mean, gently, gently. It's not like I mock you and Cuomo, and you know. Gently, okay, but if they do something ridiculous, you know, can we see that again? You know, and they get it, and they like it because it's a form of affection. All right. You bring gentle humor into somebody's area, it shows you care enough about them to do it.

VITTERT I've tried it with my father. You're not a golfer, right?

O'REILLY No.

VITTERT You know what a gimme putt is?

O'REILLY You don't have to putt it., you're so close.

VITTERT And I can't tell you how many times I'm out on the golf course now with my father, and he won't give me a putt. It'll be three feet. Putt it, putt it. I'll give him four or five feet. It means what you do for your father.

O'REILLY It's competitive, he wants to beat you.

VITTERT Yeah, and I'll say to him, look, Dad, I wrote a New York Times bestselling book about you. Turned you into a hero. And you won't get me a three-foot putt?

O'REILLY Just putt it!

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O'REILLY In our business, we have to spend a lot of time honing our skills, like professional athletes or actors.

VITTERT My dad's got a lot of advice for me every night. Still, calls me every night, my dad after...

O'REILLY Does he?

VITTERT After every show. He's got thoughts.

O'REILLY Man, that's gold. I'll tell you what. That is gold. The only time that I ever spoke to my father about my career was when I was about to go to El Salvador to get shot at, okay, and you know what that's like. And he said, why are you doing that? I said, because if I'm successful, when I come back alive, that my status as a reporter rises, because not that many people cover shooting wars. He goes, not worth it. I said, I'll pay for the cemetery plot, don't worry about it, because he's a big money guy, my father. And so, there was no interaction. And the reason there wasn't any interaction, I was the first one in my family, remember, 1868, the first O'Reilly to break out of the working class. The first one.

VITTERT Well, you had made it to him. And why would you give that up?

O'REILLY Well, it was more than that. It was a fascination of this guy should be in the penitentiary. When I go back to my Levittown neighborhood, a lot of people still live there. They stare at me and go, How come you're not in jail? That's how rambunctious I was. I wasn't malevolent, but I was rambunctious. And nobody could believe it. I said, this is America. That's why. All right, I did what I had to do, and I enjoy my profession. But my father, never, ever. And the same thing with the girls I dated, or no, no, nothing, it's just you. And I didn't mind it. You know it wasn't like I it wasn't like you. It was like, he's here, he provides, he gives you a dose of reality. My father was certainly good at that. I don't need the touchy-feely. My mother will do that, okay? And that's the way I always saw it. And my neighbor who was like that, who was, you know, you guys hanging around and the kids are doing God knows what, It wasn't like therapy, family therapy, you would have gone bankrupt in two days in Levittown if you were a family therapist. Everybody's like, what?

VITTERT Well, you either have gone bankrupt or you would have had endless amounts of customers that needed you.

O'REILLY Well, they wouldn't ever admit it.

VITTERT But they needed you, yeah.

O'REILLY Oh, sure. I mean, you could have done a psychoanalysis. Now, today, you say you golfed with your father a lot, and that ... Do you guys talk about, now that you're successful, do you bring back the past, or do you just talk about-

VITTERT You know, it's interesting you say that. And I said about the book that we never wrote about the people who were mean. We wrote about it, but we never used their names. And I don't think we talk about the past a lot. I think telling this story, us both feeling like we were able to put this down, the story that the two of us had gone through together, It is, I think, how both of us deal with the past and talk about it and- sort of move past it and I think, at least for me, I find myself in a way all the more grateful to him.

O'REILLY So it was like therapy.

VITTERT Yeah. I never went to therapy as a kid, probably should have, but I didn't. My dad was my therapist. And interestingly enough, going to therapy on national television, sharing all these stories about my past and everything else is not exactly fun. It's kind of like sitting in a bathtub full of scissors. And I've said it is worth it because I really feel like it has helped people. But I think it's also helped me, too. I think it has also helped my dad.

O'REILLY But the fact that you take the time and you travel, to be with your father, play the golf and all that, I mean, that makes the bond stronger.

VITTERT It does. Look, I still talk to him two or three times a day. Talk to him every night after the show.

O'REILLY Does he tell you you're a pinhead, like I do?

VITTERT Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And you see, with you, I can fight back.

O'REILLY Right.

VITTERT With him, OK, Dad, you got anything else? Thanks, thanks. I say, you know, Dad there's people whose job it is to tell me, you know, give this kind of thoughts. He goes, yeah, but none of them will tell you the truth. I'll tell you the truth, okay?

O'REILLY All right, Leland Vittert, the book is Born Lucky, I want you to pick it up for Father's Day, great Father's Day gift. Now for BillOReilly.com Premium and Concierge Members, we have Killing Time coming up, another 10 minutes with Mr. Leland. And for those of you who haven't really caught on yet, that, you know, Premium Membership to BillOReilly.com is going to enhance your life. We leave you now. Thank you for watching.