For one thing, the two-year stint as chairman of CNN that immediately followed was an anticlimax. Isaacson says he took the job because he saw it as a new challenge, but admits it was a strange one. “It’s not that I’m above watching T.V.,” he says, “It’s just not something I do that much. I didn’t have a particular joy or love or feel for T.V.” It showed: Between 2001 and 2003, Fox News leapt to the top of the ratings, creating a tense atmosphere in Atlanta, where little changed in response. CNN denies rumors that it forced its chairman out, while Isaacson himself is candid: “I was just not very good at it,” he says.

The acerbic, sharp-elbowed atmosphere of CNN during a ratings war may have been the wrong one for the talents that had brought him so far. “I think Walter really wants to rule the world,” says author Kurt Andersen, who was on the Lampoon with Isaacson. The New Orleans native started on that path early by attending Deep Springs, the ultra-selective college-cum-ranch in California, before matriculating to Harvard. “Walter has always been Walter,” says Nicholas Lemann, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia, who grew up with him in New Orleans and then went to Harvard with him. “I think his parents were always in awe of his larger-than-life qualities, and wondered how they produced him.”

“Walter is a once-in-a-generation journalist,” says Evan Thomas, editor-at-large of Newsweek, who also went to Harvard with Isaacson. The two co-wrote The Wise Men, a biographical tableau of the Cold War. “He’s a rare combination in journalism: He’s really an enthusiastic guy, but he’s no Babbitt; he has one of the best bullshit-detectors I’ve ever seen.” But asked about why Isaacson left CNN, Thomas hints that his friend’s disposition may have been unsuited for the combative, polarized atmosphere of the time. “Most journalists are loners; Walter is more sociable, more able to work a room. And most journalists are cynical, but he’s genuinely optimistic—sentimental, patriotic.”

Isaacson left CNN at the cusp of the Iraq War, which would further catapult Fox’s ratings share. The job at the Aspen Institute allowed him to return to Washington, his wife’s hometown. He says it also gives him more time to write. Some friends say that a retreat to a dogmatically non-partisan think-tank was a natural move for a thinker scarred by a deeply politicized media war.

“The most important formative influence in my life by far was growing up in New Orleans,” Isaacson says. “I loved every smell and every taste and every sound of that city, and I still get choked up remembering a few chords coming out of a window at Tipitina’s as I walked down Napoleon Avenue.” So when the city was devastated in 2005, he says, “I wanted to throw myself into doing what I could to help it come back.”

In addition to his work on the LRA, Isaacson has been the linchpin of Harvard’s reconstruction project in Broadmoor, the New Orleans neighborhood where he grew up. It’s a section with a historically Jewish population, including the Isaacsons, but one that also counts a substantial population of poor, and mainly black, residents. The storm, and the subsequent dithering of the federal and state governments, hit it particularly hard. Working with Doug Ahlers, a Belfer Fellow at the Kennedy School and New Orleans native, Isaacson has helped organize a substantial project to rebuild Broadmoor—one that got a major boost, and an imprimatur, from a $5-million pledge from the Clinton Initiative last September. “Walter knows everyone,” Ahlers says, “and he has had an amazing ability to put us in touch with all the right people.” And, once in touch, he adds, “Walter also does a little strong-arming of people as well.”

Isaacson has come to believe that reconstruction will happen on a local, neighborhood level, and he’s something of a micromanager. He is just as much at home with the major donors he meets regularly—the Clintons, Shorensteins, and Gateses—as he is with the people of Broadmoor. He spends half an hour chatting with the deacon of a local church he meets while giving me a tour, and is in constant contact with LaToya Cantrell, the dynamo who heads the Broadmoor Improvement Association.

For all the voracious networking and positioning for which he is famous, Isaacson—in his garden in Georgetown or over sazeracs at the Columns—is hardly emblematic of his mercurially ambitious generation. He speaks in a slow, easy southern drawl, punctuated with pauses that fall somewhere between pensive and pregnant. He has a buoyancy and a wit much more germane to a novelist than to an institute head, and a modesty that—at least while a tape recorder is running—borders on self-abnegation. Asked how much of his own money he contributes to New Orleans, for instance, he is coy. “I wish I had a few million dollars to fix this city,” he says, “but,” calling up a familiar refrain, “I’m just a writer.”

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