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What Does This Man Think He's Doing?

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.

What Does This Man Think He's Doing?

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.” walter2

“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.”

What Does This Man Think He's Doing?

Isaacson’s conviction that independent minds can think through the impasses of the age, that there are solutions to independent problems, has extended into the way he writes.

When they came out, his biographies of Henry Kissinger and the architects of Vietnam were criticized as overly coddling, which may be because history demands a posture of absolute censure for the generation of politicians they profile. (One reviewer even branded the far-more-successful Franklin book as a “hagiography.”) But Isaacson sees and admires in Kissinger and Acheson a sort of eclectic genius—an abiding curiosity for fields in which they were not experts. Moreover, his subjects come off above all as men of letters—elegant writers with liberal educations who believed that the world of ideas was solvent for the entanglements of the world of situations.

And his subjects, Franklin and Einstein included, achieved success—and material success, at that—through the life of the mind. Isaacson is deeply sentimental about New Orleans, but does not fail to see the recovery as an opportunity for ancillary profits. In the New York Times last summer, he reported that President Bush had told him that “if he were young and looking to make his mark or some money, he would move to New Orleans,” and the idea is one Isaacson greets approvingly. He repeatedly quotes Franklin with what might be a personal motto: “You can do well by doing good.” Isaacson has. In addition to his places in Aspen, Washington, and Broadmoor, he owns a breathtaking pied-à-terre on Jackson Square, the French Quarter piazza Bush made famous with a live address last September, his voice quavering in apology before the bronze, intrepid figure of General Andrew Jackson.

Over breakfast on the square, Isaacson tells me about the new book he’s incubating, on the Battle of New Orleans. Pointing to the statue, he remarks how much potential the War of 1812 has for deep and colorful characters. As with all of Isaacson’s books, however, there’s a moral as well. “The battle taught us that New Orleans is a city that’s worth saving. It’s a city that’s worth fighting for.”

The speculation is that Isaacson might try to take on some more of that fighting himself. Nearly everyone I spoke to for this article weighed in on rumors that he was planning to run for governor of Louisiana in 2008. Isaacson shrugs off the talk, at least of a gubernatorial run. But adds, “I might want to get into politics someday.”

Isaacson began his career covering the city hall of the flamboyantly controversial mayor Moon Landrieu, who now lives a few doors down from Isaacson’s family in Broadmoor—and still calls the Aspen CEO “boy reporter.” Yet the governor’s mansion in Baton Rouge would be an odd choice for someone like Isaacson. Louisiana is still very much in the shadow of Huey Long, from his namesake bridge to the ruined Big Charity hospital and other vestiges of the governor’s extraordinary tenure.

In many ways, Isaacson is the anti-Long: Where the Kingfish dressed corruption and mild tyranny in the rags of progressive idealism, Isaacson is an idealist in a pragmatist’s three-piece suit. “Most of the problems in the world have easy solutions,” he says at a lecture at Tulane Law School. “Everyone knows the solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict: It’s two states, an Israeli one and a Palestinian one. And everyone knows where the border between the two states should be, down to just a few miles. The disagreement is only over those few miles.”

What Does This Man Think He's Doing?

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.”