Former President Bill Clinton and international best-seller James Patterson discussed their book, The President is Missing, in front of a crowd of thousands Saturday evening in Little Rock.
The book centers on a Southern president who disappears in order to save the country from cyberterrorism.
Being a president is “a tough job, and it is painfully lonely,” Clinton said. However, it's also “the most wonderful responsibility in the world,” he added.
The two went back and forth often over the phone to write the book, with Clinton filling in a lot of the detail about what it’s actually like to preside in the White House.
Part of the challenge, Patterson said, was figuring out if you can “write a page turner, a summer beach book, and also have it be kind of important about things.”
Arkansas native and award-winning actress Mary Steenburgen moderated the event. The main character “is heroic and flawed and sometimes sounds a little bit like you,” Steenburgen said to Clinton, which earned a laugh from the audience.
Read more in tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.