What Does This Man Think He's Doing?

After a successful career as a media boss, Walter Isaacson is turning his attention to a new challenge: Everything.

by Greg Atwan
Spring 2007

Photograph by Susanna Howe

A rickety, unannounced shrine to garlic on the highway, and a prominent gastronomic day-trip in New Orleans tour-guides, Mosca’s is one of those places in America demure enough about its fame to reject the lures of renovation, vegetarianism, and credit cards, but just self-conscious enough to dot a far wall with the yellowing press clippings that document its renown. One of these, a tawny insert from a 1973 Times-Picayune, profiles the restaurant’s matriarch, Mama Mosca, and bears the byline of a young city reporter named Walter Isaacson.

These days, when Isaacson visits Mosca’s, he’s greeted with a sort of familiar reverence. When he steps in on a warm October night, the son of legendary record producer Allen Toussaint gets up to shake his hand. Johnny Mosca, the graying owner, limps over to see who’s attracted Toussaint’s attention. “I’m Walter Isaacson,” he announces, then adds, glibly, “I wrote that article about your mother on the wall.” “Oh,” Mosca nods, impressed. “What do you do now?”

You can’t blame Walter Isaacson for stumbling on his answer. For one thing, he doesn’t hear the question much in these parts. He is locally famous as vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority (LRA), the agency that has led the cleanup of southern Louisiana since hurricanes Katrina and Rita bulldozed the region nearly two years ago. Governor Kathleen Blanco, one of Isaacson’s many friends in high office, offered him the job in October of 2005, and it has proven one of the most high-profile in the only city in America where the local news—the ongoing effort to convalesce after the flood—regularly appears in national papers above headlines from Iraq and Washington.

But Isaacson is also president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a mega-think-tank that enjoins the country’s elite to seek non-partisan solutions to problems ranging from hurricane relief to stem cell research. He is chairman of the board of Teach For America, the inner-city and rural teacher corps, and sits on the boards of United Airlines, Tulane University, and Reader’s Digest (he advises several other magazines unofficially). At one point, Pembroke College of Oxford, where Isaacson studied philosophy as a Rhodes Scholar, comes up in conversation; he was, until recently, president of its American alumni association. And then he is a successful writer, with a major biography of Albert Einstein coming out in the spring—he may, in fact, be most famous for Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, a bestseller in 2003.

It was during that year, at age 51, that Isaacson abruptly left a long and extremely successful career in the media, which had reached an apex during his tenure as Time magazine’s managing editor, and then editorial director, from 1995 to 2001. Those who know the business describe Isaacson’s period at Time as nothing less than halcyon: Profits soared, and the managing editor was credited personally with expanding science coverage and renovating the magazine’s turgid style. He was also passionate about it. “Putting out Time was almost akin to having a party every week,” he says. “I loved doing it, and had a lot of talent for it.” Why he so precipitously left journalism remains a source of speculation.

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Keywords:

• Media

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