After a successful career as a media boss, Walter Isaacson is turning his attention to a new challenge: Everything.
Ben Franklin, America’s first great Renaissance Man, made “industry” his sixth virtue; in his own canonical autobiography, he defined it with a tricolon of increasingly draconian precepts: “Lose no time. – Be always employed in something useful. – Cut off all unnecessary actions.”
Isaacson, Franklin’s second-most-famous biographer, claims he’s fallen short in pursuing his subject’s virtue. “Ben Franklin said, ‘Early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,’” he laughs, “and it’s advice that I’ve never followed.” Those who talk about Isaacson disagree with him on this point. “He gets Karl Rove on the phone whenever he wants,” Thomas says. “You can’t do that if you’re lazy.” A story famous among Isaacson’s friends has his Washington neighbor, former Clinton aide George Stephanopoulos, amazed during an all-nighter to see Isaacson working calmly across the street at 4 AM.
Simon & Schuster will release Isaacson’s next book, Einstein: His Life and Universe, in April. The subject seems like a departure, but it’s an interest the author has always secretly nurtured. According to his classmates, even as a History and Literature major at Harvard, Isaacson showed an amazing alacrity and acumen for math. But Einstein, whom Isaacson’s Time picked as Person of the Century, also possesses the sort of omnivorous éclat his biographer so admires—involved in the events and ideas of his age without being a political figure. Isaacson quotes him as if citing sacred poetry: “Politics is for the moment, but an equation is for eternity.”
Isaacson writes with an empathetic poignancy about Einstein’s most famous disappointment—the search for a unified field theory, an attempt to solve all the problems of physics in one neat and simple phrasing. But Isaacson’s Einstein is a creature apotheosized by his creativity and his array of activities. Through the different strokes of Isaacson’s brush emerges a polymath who narrowly misses any of the polarizing faults other biographers have dwelled on—he is neither atheist nor mystic; neither sexless nerd nor lecher; neither naïf nor cynic. The author paints the physicist as a “loner with an intimate bond to humanity, a rebel who was suffused with reverence.”
Of course, Isaacson cautions strongly against comparing himself to the subjects of his biographies. But perhaps with Ben Franklin there is more tangible material for what Auden called a “timid similarity.” Franklin was a journalist who changed jobs frequently—as Isaacson puts it, “every seven years”—from philosopher to jurist to inventor to ambassador. He was politically active (and an inveterate networker), but eschewed the harsh vicissitudes of electoral politics. He worked hard, juggled sundry responsibilities, and garnered both the admiration and jealousy of his age. And until he died, he signed all of his correspondence “B. Franklin, printer.”
For all his famous politeness and optimism, Isaacson occasionally lets on a degree of comfort in the power with which he is invested, or with which he thinks he’s invested. When discussing this piece, I made an off-hand assurance that the tone would not be openly hostile. “Don’t worry,” he responded joking. “If I don’t like what you write, I’ll just make sure no one ever reads your magazine again.”
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