NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert.
NewsNation
Leland Vittert is doing something this week that viewers don’t often see TV anchors attempt: Telling his own story, one that’s been shaped by autism, a tough childhood, and a loving father by his side every step of the way.
In his new memoir Born Lucky: A Dedicated Father, A Grateful Son, and My Journey with Autism (Harper Horizon, Sept. 30), the NewsNation anchor opens up for the first time about his childhood autism diagnosis that influenced his early years—long before viewers would come to associate him with live shots from the White House and foreign datelines. He writes about how he didn’t actually speak for the first time until age three, and of being bullied so harshly at times that he cried himself to sleep.
Growing up, he didn’t understand why making friends was a struggle. In one memory from fifth grade gym class, a teacher assigned him to the girls’ team—a gesture meant to protect him from the boys.
Luckily, Vittert had a secret weapon in his corner that would help him not only overcome those challenging years but develop the resilience that would eventually lead to personal and professional success. It’s his father, Mark, who loved his son so much that he quit his job to help coach and raise him.
NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert’s story of resilience
Born Lucky, basically, is Vittert’s thank-you note to his loving and long-suffering father. It describes, among other things, a boyhood training regimen, courtesy of the elder Vittert, that ran the gamut from requiring young Leland to practice eye contact and decode humor to learning when to stop talking by reading social cues. At restaurants, if Vittert was too loud or talking too much, his dad would tap his watch—a private signal to wrap it up. He would then “postgame” the conversation with his son later.
For years, not even Vittert’s colleagues beside him in newsrooms have known the full extent of his struggle, or just how remarkable it is that he’s made it this far. As he puts it in a YouTube book trailer for Born Lucky, “This is about giving hope to tens of millions of parents whose kids are struggling every day. Not just with autism, but ADHD, learning disabilities, anxiety, bullying, and the difficulties of growing up. It’s hard.
“Your kid, your grandkid, doesn’t have to be defined by the diagnosis … I’ve never talked about this before with anybody, but it’s time to say thank you to my dad.”
To the extent that viewers know him at all, it’s because of the on-air version of Vittert’s professional story.
A former Fox News correspondent who reported from Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the Arab Spring, he’s now NewsNation’s chief Washington anchor who leads On Balance weeknights at 9 p.m. ET. During special coverage of a memorial service for conservative activist Charlie Kirk on Sept. 21, Vittert helped lead NewsNation to six straight hours topping CNN and MSNBC in both total viewers and the 25–54 demo, according to Nielsen data shared by the network.
In Born Lucky, he lays bare how difficult the road to this point really was—including the long stretch when, as Harper Horizon’s Matt Baugher notes, Vittert’s father was “in many ways his only friend.”
The memoir doesn’t just recount the struggles, though; it also rounds out the man viewers see on-screen. Readers get the kinds of detail that rarely makes it into broadcasts: It turns out, for example, that Vittert is a grill master whose specialties include pulled pork and ribs. He’s also a golf obsessive who keeps clubs in his office, as well as a devoted dog dad to a black lab named Dutch. For media watchers, such glimpses feel like fascinating outtakes from his off-camera life—the kind of personal texture that makes the men and women delivering the nightly news more relatable, and more human.
“If you had told someone that a kid like me—the one who couldn’t look people in the eye, who failed basic spelling tests, and who couldn’t read a room—would end up talking on national television every night, they would have rightfully questioned your sanity,” he writes near the end of Born Lucky. “That’s the thing about autism: It doesn’t always look the way people expect.
“In the end, I didn’t have to prove the world wrong—I just had to prove to myself that I belonged, not just in front of the camera, but in the life I built.”
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