Walter Isaacson
Professor of History, Tulane University
Author, Elon Musk
I think it's important at a certain stage in life, if you're able to do so, to go home. Because if you've been successful enough, you want to pay back to the community that allowed you to be successful.
Summary
This week on “Leadership Matters,” Alan sat down to discuss leadership, history and writing with one of the greatest storytellers of the 21st century, Walter Isaacson. Walter is currently a professor of history at Tulane University and has served in many executive roles, including those of CEO of CNN and the Aspen Institute, as well as editor of TIME Magazine.
During this fascinating hour, Alan’s conversation with Walter spanned everything from his upbringing and his great love for his home city of New Orleans to his prolific career as a media executive and best-selling biographer. Walter shares with Alan his decades-long journey focused on bridging gaps between different stakeholders in order to foster constructive discourse around some of our most challenging problems.
Most recently, while still teaching classes at Tulane University, Walter published his best-selling book, Elon Musk, where Walter delves into the background of one of today’s most prominent businessmen.
Mentions & Resources in this Episode
Guest Bio
Walter Isaacson is a Professor of History at Tulane and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg, a financial services firm based in New York City. He has been the CEO of the Aspen Institute, the CEO of CNN, and the editor of Time Magazine.
Isaacson’s most recent biography, Elon Musk (2023), is an intimate chronicle based on spending two years by Musk’s side. He is also the author of The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race (2020), Leonardo da Vinci (2017), The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014), Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made(1986).
He is a host of the show “Amanpour and Company” on PBS and CNN, a contributor to CNBC, host of the podcast “Trailblazers, from Dell Technologies.”
Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. He is a graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar. He began his career at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune. He joined TIME in 1978 and became the magazine’s 14th editor in 1996. He became CEO of CNN in 2001 and the CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.
He is chair emeritus of Teach for America. From 2005-2007 he was the vice-chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. He was appointed by President Barack Obama to serve as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States. He has also been a member of the U.S. Defense Innovation Board.
In 2023, he was awarded the National Humanities Medal by President Joe Biden. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Royal Society of the Arts, and the American Philosophical Society. He serves on the board of United Airlines and Bloomberg Philanthropies.
Episode Transcript
Alan Fleischmann
Today I'm joined by an acclaimed professor and biographer, a leader, a seasoned executive with many years of experience in news media and bringing together key stakeholders across the public, private and civil society sectors to discuss solutions to the world's toughest challenges. Walter Isaacson is currently a professor of history at Tulane University in New Orleans, Louisiana, and an advisory partner at Perella Weinberg. Prior to joining the faculty at Tulane, Walters served as the editor of TIME magazine, was the former chairman and CEO of CNN, and the former CEO of the Aspen Institute.
Throughout his career, Walter has worked through some of the United States’ most challenging moments, including 9/11 and Hurricane Katrina, and has used his positions to help the country move forward in these difficult times.
Walter Isaacson has become one of the most preeminent biographies of our time, having recorded the life stories and driving forces behind some of history's most effective leaders in the public and private sectors, including Albert Einstein, Dean Acheson, Steve Jobs and, most recently, Elon Musk. His wealth of personal experience, his ability to distill the lessons of history and its leaders have given Walter a wide array of perspectives that I am excited to discuss in today's show. We'll also delve into his backstory, his fascinating career and the lessons in leadership he has learned along the way. Walter, welcome to Leadership Matters. It is a pleasure to have you on the show.
Walter Isaacson
Thanks for having me, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
I'm thrilled to have you, we're gonna have a good time. You know, I like to pretend that I read every one of your books. I know I read DiVinci recently, I've actually read them out of order from when you actually published them. And every time I read one of your books, I'm blown away. I'm blown away. So I want to get that. But before we go there, people don't always realize this, you're back in New Orleans, where you're from.
You were born in New Orleans, you were raised by your father, who was an engineer and your mother who was a real estate broker. Describe a little bit what life was like around the house growing up, brothers and sisters, anything about that.
Walter Isaacson
I had a charmed childhood, a totally charmed childhood, which I think makes me better as an observer than as a disrupter. When I look at the people I've written about, who are very disruptive, they tend to have had a troubled childhood, whether it's Leonardo, growing up in the small village of Vinci, and being gay and left-handed and illegitimate, and his father won't legitimate him, he runs away to the town of Florence. Or Einstein growing up Jewish in Germany. Or Steve Jobs being adopted, and then readopted. Ah, and then of course, Elon Musk, most of all, growing up in South Africa with a brutal childhood, and a psychologically abusive father.
As for me, you know, my parents were the nicest people I've ever known, and the smartest people I've ever known. And my brother and I grew up right about eight blocks from where I am right now in New Orleans, a city totally filled with magic and parades. And I went to the same school from kindergarten to 12th grade and still spend New Year's Eve with people I knew in school, people I've known my whole life.
So I love having moved back down here to New Orleans, even though I love coming up to New York City where we have an apartment. And I think it's important at a certain stage in life if you're able to do so, to go home. Because, you know, if you've been successful enough, you want to pay back to the community that allowed you to be successful. In my case, it was a community of New Orleans. So I teach here, I'm on a few boards and nonprofits and certainly try to help the community here.
Alan Fleischmann
There must be something very special. When I hear you talk about New Orleans, you just use the word magical a minute ago. I can tell you feel so strongly about the community, its history. How is it so distinct from any other city in the United States? What is it about that that makes it so magical and so special?
Walter Isaacson
You know, when I look at places that are cradles of creativity, they often have a lot of diversity to them. I mean, Florence is where people are flying, fleeing from the fall of the Ottoman Empire where the trades from Asia were coming in Florence at a stable currency, the florin. It had people from all over Europe, people coming from Mainz, Germany, where Gutenberg had just invented the movable type printing press. And they basically set up shop in Florence, which becomes a publishing capital. And I think that diversity can be found in a whole lot of places. Both ideological diversity, ethnic diversity, people coming in from various places.
You see that in Philadelphia where they're, you know, a town that had Anglicans and Quakers and slaves and freed slaves and Jews and more Arabians in the 1770s when Ben Franklin gets there as a runaway, and certainly the Bay Area of California in the 1970s where Bill Gates was. And then, well, Steve Jobs in particular goes and had everybody from the free speech movement to you know, hippies to the electric Kool-Aid acid test people, and the engineers from Rockwell and other places. New Orleans has always had waves and waves of diverse people coming starting with the French, coming here when the Wichita Indians was ensconced here in southern Louisiana. And then the Spanish come and you have waves after that. You have both Georgia free African Americans as well as slaves and freed slaves. You have Jews and Italians and Germans coming in and, most recently, Hispanics, and then the Vietnamese have come in here. When you get such a pot of different types of flavors, it becomes a gumbo or in particular becomes jazz music, because the drummer's from the Congo Square are meeting the people coming back from the Spanish-American War hocking their quartets. And They’re dealing with the people in the French opera house and the spirituals of people who came from the plantations. And you end up with a Louis Armstrong in 1900, who helps pull it all together as jazz.
So I like the diversity of New Orleans. I think there are people in this country who prefer to be in their own enclaves with people like themselves, and there are people like me who love being around just a mix of people that have some friction to it. But that friction leads to creativity. And that's a great divide in our society, between those who relish the diversity and pluralism of some of our cities, and those who would rather be in a more homogenous environment.
Alan Fleischmann
Now, it's amazing. It's amazing how much we think of food, you think of culture, you think of music. When you think of New Orleans. I mean, it is amazing. You actually took a talent to writing and leadership early on in your journey, I guess there in New Orleans. You were in high school at the Isidore Newman school. You were student body president and you were voted Most Likely to Succeed, which seems like a lot of people get voted then that doesn't work out, in your case it did. What principles or values did you learn from those early years that spurred you to aim high in all your endeavors? Because when I think of all the different things I've seen you lead, you've never done mediocre very well. You kind of raised the bar and expected a lot from yourself and from others. So I'm just curious, was that something that kind of came out of a mentorship? Or was it in the waters of school? Or was it just you?
Walter Isaacson
You know, I think the school taught a lot of camaraderie, a lot of collegiality. We all knew each other since kindergarten, so you couldn't put on airs by the time you were seniors. You couldn't be strutting around because people remembered you, when you had big ears, or, you know, when you're in fourth grade and did ridiculous things. And I think we had each other's back. I learned that creativity is a team sport that, you know, innovation tends to be a collaborative effort. And I think I learned that from the Newman school. Michael Lewis was there, later on Peyton and Eli Manning, the school that had a lot of successful people. But we all learned to play on teams.
I also think that, we had a slogan at the school, which is “We learned to do by doing, Discimus Agere Agendo.” And we were pushed to just try to do things. It began as a manual training school. So we made radios and circuit boards and used soldering irons and had, you know, shop classes that were just as important as some of our other classes.
Alan Fleischmann
And so it sounds to me you did a lot of writing already. Was that part of your beginning of writing as well?
Walter Isaacson
No, when I was about 12 years old. I used to go across Lake Pontchartrain here to the old Lazy River, sort of a bayou-like river called the Bogue Falaya, where my friend Thomas had a house and a few others at homes. And Tom, my friend Thomas, had an uncle named Uncle Walker. We never could figure out what he did for a living. Some people call him Dr. Percy but he didn't seem to practice medicine. He always seemed to be drinking bourbon and eating Hogshead cheese on the dock overlooking the Bogue Falaya. And I asked his daughter, well, what's your dad do? And she said, “Well, he's a writer.”
Now, I didn't know you could be a writer. I mean, I know you could be an engineer, like my dad, and my grandfather, my uncles and my brother now is. I knew you could be a doctor or a fisherman. But the idea that you could be a writer was strange. And I remember, you know, a year or so later, maybe I was 13 or 14, I read his novel that had just come out, The Moviegoer. And I couldn't quite figure out what he was trying to teach us. It seemed to be just the tale of a guy spending a week before Mardi Gras. But there were lessons. So what are you trying to teach us, Uncle Walker? And he said, I'm not trying to preach anything.
He said it's a story. He said that two types of people come out of Louisiana: preachers and storytellers. He said, for heaven's sake, be a storyteller. This world's got far, far too many preachers. And so it was his way of saying, if you get to tell the narrative, you get to tell the story. That's how we convey lessons. That's how we convey ideas. That's the way the Bible does it. I mean, that's the lead sentence everywhere “in the beginning,” comma. And so I came out in New Orleans wanting to be a storyteller.
And that's something else in the water here Michael Lewis will tell you, which is we go out at night. I'm going out tonight with John Martin, a political correspondent in New York at Politico now and a couple of people to a fish restaurant. And I know we're going to do it all night, is we're going to tell stories. And for me, when I'm writing the book, I don't try to pontificate. I don't try to tell the reader what to think. I keep a little sign above my desk that says, “Let me tell you a story.” And whenever I've got something to convey, whether or not it's like how Elon Musk drove people crazy, but also to do things they didn't know they could do. Or how Leonardo combined science and art, instead of just trying to analyze it and explain it. I say, let me tell you a story. And I try to figure out what's the best stories that I've heard or reported on that will convey those ideas.
Alan Fleischmann
How did you decide, when you were looking at college you went to Harvard University and you ended up studying history, right? And literature? Did you decide, I want to go there because it's a great place for me to hone those skills and storytelling. I mean, you're from the South at that point, going all the way to New England, as a great university as Harvard is, it must have been a big decision.
Walter Isaacson
Your listeners can see this, but I'll hold it up for you. On my desktop right here, still 50 years later, is Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom. Like and you can even look at it here, the opening pages with my little notes of things I didn't quite understand. And of course, Quentin Compson is a southerner, goes up to Harvard and tries to tell the story there, tells a story in The Sound and the Fury and Absalom, Absalom. And I like to think that I went to Harvard because I've always had on my desk this paperback of Absalom, Absalom.
And I didn't have it on my desk here just because I knew you were going to ask something. It's just sitting here. Right? But what it always is, and but I'm not sure that's really why I went to Harvard, I know that I knew of Harvard because of Quentin Compson. And Faulkner wrote about his journey up north to Harvard. But it was the only Northern College I applied to, in some ways. And I just figured, okay, time to get out of New Orleans a bit. And Harvard was Harvard.
Alan Fleischmann
Were there any metrics, I'm sure the answer would be yes, were there any mentors and professors that struck you during those four years at Harvard?
Walter Isaacson
You know, I went to Harvard in the days where you could go through for four years and not a professor would know you by name. But there were a couple of professors, one of whom was the opposite of a mentor, the old Alan Highmart wrote about the Puritan mind in New England and he was really, really rough and I don't think he liked me. He actually flunked me on one of my oral exams. About second-generation Puritans he kept grilling me on.
But I did have another professor, their history professor in literature named Daniel Aaron, who was New England-born and bred, I think, but he wrote about the South and he wrote about the Civil War. And I remember he was such a good professor. I think he was, at that time, the only one who knew who I was by the time I graduated. But Daniel Aaron actually came down to New Orleans to visit at one point, he wanted to come see the town. And I took him across Lake Pontchartrain to see Walker Percy, and he died at about age 100. You can look it up. It wasn't too long ago. But for the rest of my time, I kept up with Dan Aaron.
Alan Fleischmann
That's right. Well, you weren't a member, you were the president, I think of the Cygnet Society. And you were a member of the Harvard Lampoon. And I think it's one of your classmates, I guess the author Kurt Anderson described you as the “mayor of literary Harvard” while you were there. So you obviously –
Walter Isaacson
I haven't heard that, like I was on the Lampoon with Kurt. And once again, I think one of the joys of life, or two of them, one is to be grateful. And remember every sort of nice thing that happened instead of being resentful about the bad things that happened and you know, being a kid in New Orleans and being a student on a humor magazine with a nice little building, that was just magical. And Kurt was at my side the whole time, I mean, Kurt was my friend in college but he became an extraordinarily successful novelist, and a nonfiction writer who invented with Graydon Carter Spy Magazine, was editor of New York Magazine. And we all became friends back then. And I think the other secret to life, besides being grateful for those memories, is to stick with those you grew up with, the people who know you.
So I mean, Kurt didn't meet me until we were on the Lampoon in college. But in the subsequent 40 or 50 years, you know, we see each other all the time. And it's, once again, the people you know are your friends because they've known you forever, not because you are editor of TIME, or ran CNN or Aspen Institute. And they also can keep you in your place a bit if you start getting a little swell-headed. They'll just tell you a story and poke fun with the time that you got drunk during a dinner for John Lane at the Harvard Lampoon and made a fool of yourself.
Alan Fleischmann
Sounds like maybe a true story.
Walter Isaacson
Totally true.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Well, you, you obviously enjoyed Harvard a lot, you were really involved and obviously took on leadership positions, and then you were awarded a Rhodes scholarship. And you studied philosophy, politics and economics at Oxford. Tell us a little bit about that experience there. And also, you know, at that point, had you thought about where you wanted to have a career? You're a bit of a renaissance man, like so many of the people you write about. Or did you imagine yourself already at that point and be involved in lots of different things? Or just couldn't figure out the sequencing, but you knew you'd be involved in lots of things?
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. I mean, I've always wanted to be involved in a lot of things. And that's sort of the secret of everybody from Leonardo da Vinci to Ben Franklin was they kind of wanted to know anything they could figure out about, every subject that's knowable, and have, you know, it's why I was never a great specialist. But I love knowing everything from how to make electronic circuits from my father to how to parse Moby Dick from Alan Heimer. And when I went to Oxford, once again, I mean, you’re just talking about places on this planet that have pure magic. I was in Pembroke College, which I think in the 1620s or so, was founded in the room where Dr. Johnson lived and there was still his tea pot in a locked case in the room there. And had an oxford gabadon, sort of like a tutor, but a professor, and you meet with them twice a week. And mine was a guy named Zbigniew Pełczyński, who had led the resistance to Hitler in his native Poland and then become a resistor to communism, and helped form Open Societies Institute and then came to Oxford and taught. I remember, the first week he was teaching me – we were writing about how the popular will is expressed and what was then called the Soviet Union. And you have to write a paper each week for your tutor to read and you read it aloud to him sometimes sitting in a garden at Pembroke College. And afterwards, he said, “Okay, that paper’s not very good.’ And I was kind of taken aback because, you know, I was used to people's wow, that's a good paper and explain why my thinking was very good.
And he said, Do you know a person named Bill Clinton? I said, no, I've never heard of Bill Clinton. Back then Clinton, I think, was a failed congressional candidate from Arkansas and Dr. Pełczyński had tutored him two or three or four years earlier, maybe five years earlier. And he says, he said to me, Well, you must know him. You're from Louisiana, aren't you? And I said, yeah. And he said, well, Clinton was from Arkansas. And I said, well, wait a minute. I was annoyed by that point. I said, I don't think I've known anybody in Arkansas at all in my whole life. But it was that Pełczyński also became, in the end, a lifelong friend of mine; he died too, relatively recently. But I remember going up to where he had a place and coming to Norton, one of those magical villages near Oxford and helping him tear down a barn and rebuild things and taking my wife and my daughter there years and years later. So once again, a secret of my own, I think the feeling of gratitude is that I've always tried to keep up with and always been able to keep up with whether it's my kindergarten friends we have New Year's Eve with or Daniel Aaron and Dr. Pełczyński, whose tutorees are Kurt Anderson, who was a classmate. I always like to keep up with people who've been an important part of my life.
Alan Fleischmann
It's amazing, actually. Amazing. Another question for you. Then you went back after Oxford, back to New Orleans. Right. That's when you join the New Orleans Statesmen Item, it was the Times Picayune,
Walter Isaacson
Well, the Time Picayune. I mean, they were kind of merged, it was the period where morning papers and afternoon papers were – anyway, we call it the Times Picayune.
Alan Fleishchmann
And that was when that was your first stint in journalism?
Walter Isaacson
Yes, and no, I did some summer jobs at the Times Picayune/States Item. But I also, while between my junior and senior year of college, I got an internship at the Sunday Times of London working for the great Harry Evans, who was then not the great Harry Evans. He was a boy wonder who had just come from a newspaper called The Northern Echo, I think it was, and he had come to London to take over the Sunday Times, a weekly paper. And I had spoken at Harvard, and I sent him some writing I had done for the summer job at the Times Picayune. And oddly enough months later, I got a telegram. This was in the days before email and long-distance phone calls that was saying that I would be hired for the summer. And so I worked for the Sunday Times of London and the Times Picayune, and then after I finished Oxford, got a graduate degree. I worked a little bit for the Sunday Times. But at a certain point, the work permit rules were getting nasty on me. And I went back to New Orleans and rejoined the Times-Picayune.
Alan Fleischmann
Well you covered politics a lot, right. I mean, you were–
Walter Isaacson
More importantly, I've covered police headquarters. So the first you know, my first gig, which was five a.m. till noon on the police headquarters beat. Learning that you just ask questions, you knock on people's doors – even if there's been a murder in the family.
I remember covering the first day I was on the job, there's a murder. And I went to the scene and got all the info from the police. You had to go to a payphone then to call in your story to the rewrite man. And I call it in to Billy Rainey the rewrite man and after I finished giving them all the facts I’d gathered he goes “Did you talk to the family?” I said, “No Billy, they just had somebody killed in their family.” And he said, “Go talk to the family.” I said oh my god, so I walked the three or four blocks back to the house and knocked on the door. And lo and behold, the family invited me in, pulled out the high school yearbook pictures, pulled out everything and just talked to me for more than an hour. And I realized then that if you're willing to listen, people are willing to talk and that's the way you get a story.
Alan Fleischmann
It's amazing. You're known for, and tell me if this is mythic or if this is real, that you predicted 12 mayoral elections?
Walter Isaacson
What happened was when I was, after I moved up from the police beat to covering City Hall and politics, there was a mayor's race that had 12 candidates. Six of them serious, six of them kind of joke candidates, one who campaigned in a gorilla suit. Because he was going to bring his gorilla to the Ottoman Park Zoo was his campaign promise. He ended up starting a Ruth's Chris Steakhouse.
But anyway, I went to every ward leader, every assessor in the city, they all held court and various bars and various neighborhoods. And I went with a spreadsheet. We went precinct by precinct with every, I went precinct by precinct with every ward leader, said how many votes is Joe DiRosa gonna get, Chep Morrison gonna get, and, you know, Moon Landrieu is gonna get that. That’s Mitch’s father. And it was actually Dutch Morial, and by the end of about five days of that reporting, I went out on a limb and did a column that says here's the exact order they're gonna finish and the exact percentage they're gonna get. Now, it's sort of half joking. But it was published a week before the election. And lo and behold, it was the exact order they finished, and within a half of a point for each one of them from the percentage they got. So TIME magazine was sending an editor around various corners of the United States back in the old days when people were looking to hire journalists. And the newspaper was touting running ads, sort of our ads in the paper and on the side of their truck saying, our City Hall reporter called the race, right. And that's how I got a job at TIME Magazine.
Alan Fleischmann
Oh, wow. If people think that you were the great predictor that you were, they wanted to figure out what was your science and how you did it, if predictions are the same?
Walter Isaacson
That same prediction is something that we forgot for a while in journalism, which is knock on doors, ask people. And just don't ask a leading question. Just say, what's going to happen in the Ninth Ward? What's going to happen in the 14th precinct here? And I remember, many, many, many years later, after I'd worked at TIME Magazine, and CNN and covered politics and learned also the value, when I covered the New Hampshire primaries for TIME Magazine, of just knocking on people's doors and saying “What’s up? “Tell me about what you think about this election.”
And then a few years later, after I left journalism, I was driving across America with Kathy, my wife, and it was 2016. And in upstate New York, throughout Pennsylvania, you see trucks on Trump, Trump, Trump, and you see no Hillary signs. And you go into the local diner and you hit people talking and you ask them questions. It's like, yeah, we need to shake things up. I'm for that guy, Trump. And I got back and I told my journalistic friends, I said, you know, Trump's gonna win this thing. They said “no way”. I said, well, I've been talking to people, I've been counting the yard signs. They said, oh, no, we have much better ways of doing that. We look at Facebook likes and we have focus groups, and we do polling. And I said, Okay, I'm glad to know that.
And then when Trump won. I remember talking to some of the friends again, and I said, you know, journalists got to get back into the business, not of trying to figure out what's on Twitter and what's trending on Facebook, but knocking on doors and asking people what they think because we've lost touch with the way people think.
Alan Fleischmann
And that's a good, good issue, that technology can help advance us. But he can't replace the human dimension and the intuition and the listening as well.
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, listening.
Alan Fleischmann
And curiosity, part of it is asking the right questions and then waiting for the answers.
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, but sometimes it's not too much asking the right question, because I remember when I was knocking in New Hampshire, I was covering the Ted Kennedy campaign and Ronald Reagan campaign of 1980. And there was a whole group of reporters in the Boston Globe who were pretty awesome. Mike Barnicle is still famous, but it was Tommy Oliphant and Marty Nolan and Bob Healy. And then Tim Ross, it was hanging with them and others. And they said to me, okay, kid, let's go door knocking. And you know, I kind of knew what that was from my Times-Picayune days. But we'd fan out into Portsmouth, New Hampshire or Manchester, Concord or just a small town, and when you knocked on doors, you weren't supposed to ask a brilliant question. The best way to do it, as Mike Barnicle told me, is just knock on the door and say, “What's up? What's happening? What do you think about this election?” You don't give any leading questions. You don't sort of say, did Trump say this…? Is Hillary saying this…? You just say, tell me what you're thinking.
Alan Fleischmann
And listened. While you were at TIME you covered the Reagan administration and the Cold War. And then suddenly, you wrote one of the greatest books of all time, The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World they Made, and then you wrote Kissinger
Walter Isaacson
Let me make sure to give a shout out to Evan Thomas, because I talked about friendship and collaboration, Evan and I were both in college at the same time. And he and I wrote The Wise Men together, because we were kind of bored at TIME Magazine. And it was fun. It was not only a book done by two collaborators, but it was about six people who worked together in a collegial fashion during the Cold War. So it was also about teamwork. And about a time when our country could have three Republicans and three Democrats working in harness to help us figure out the Cold War.
Alan Fleischmann
It's an amazing book, even now, I recommend people read it. You know, it's funny, I remember years later, when you were at the Atlantic Council's Rivers of Ideas Festival in Washington. And you had arranged, if I recall, was that you would do an interview, the first time you got to do an interview, sit down with Henry Kissinger, who passed away last week, to talk about China, his book. But he had not had a best friendship, I would argue, for all those years. And you had to leave because you couldn't do the actual interview, because then Steve Jobs was on his deathbed. And you had to get moving in order to prepare what became the book that came out about Steve's life just right after that. I remember being there, you weren't. I forget who did the interview, may have been Evan Thomas. But someone gave the interview on your behalf. And he was so irritated that you left him.
Walter Isaacson
Well, I didn't know that. You know, I've always asked my wife. I said at some of my birth, some birthdays, I have one year to gather all the people I've hung out with over the past years and remind me of all the stories I've forgotten. But yeah, that one rings true, because I remember being called, it was clear Steve Jobs wasn’t going to make it much longer. That must have been September or August of 2011 or September 2011. And I flew out and stayed out in California, at his guest house during the last few weeks of his life. I’m sorry Dr. Kissinger was upset.
Alan Fleischmann
There was a very active precedent, he was upset. But yeah. But when he started off he was irritated that you weren't there. And he said, “What is your book about? And he said, he kind of looked at the guy, leaned forward and said, kind of “You dummy. The title is China. It's about China.” I think it went downhill from there. You wouldn't have asked that. But –
Walter Isaacson
Actually, Kissinger's book on China is very good and relevant for these times. Because I think we've gotten over our skis a little too far, confronting China. And what we really need is that balance that Kissinger was good at, of competition and cooperation, but also playing them off against Russia. Kissinger was appalled near the end of his life and would still be appalled that we've made the biggest mistake Bismark says you can make, which is get your two adversaries and drive them into each other's arms. And the fact that we've driven China and Russia into each other's arms, maybe even with Iran, is a complete failure of foreign policy. I mean, you know, because you've worked for foreign policy consulting firms and been a leader in foreign policy, that’s rule number one is don't do that.
Alan Fleischmann
I agree completely. Was that the beginning of your reading biographies of The Wise Men, obviously with your friend, and then Kissinger. Was that your first full biography?
Walter Isaacson
Yeah. I did, actually at Harvard, I hadn't really thought much about biography. T. Harry Williams, his biography of Huey Long, which is done as a great storytelling book. It's not a preachy book. But I wrote a biography of a weird art collector in southern Louisiana who built a plantation called “Shadows” in the middle of the bayous. And I went back and we searched his life. And I did that for Daniel Aaron, who I mentioned earlier. And that's when I first realized, okay. And then I realized that biography is an interesting approach. And then at TIME Magazine, when Evan and I were there, we always put a person on the cover of TIME. Nowadays that sometimes happens, sometimes doesn’t. And Henry Luce, who invented the magazine said, always tell the history of our time to the people who make it. And I realized that biography was a way to talk about history and our times, because the universities in the academy had gotten away from biography, which was considered the great school of history, and it was flawed. And they all wrote about forces and socio-economic trends.
But Kissinger himself, the very epigraph of the book I wrote on him, is a comment he made off the record to a reporter during his shuttle missions in the Middle East, which I found in one of the files. And he said, "When I was a professor at Harvard, I used to think history was made by great forces. But now when I see it up close, I can see the difference that a personality makes.” And he was talking about Sadat, Dodd, and Golda Meir, and probably about himself. But I always like to do history through biography. I mean, it's nothing new. I mean, it's the way the Bible teaches us lessons, you start with Adam and Eve.
Alan Fleischmann
It is sticky when you go through people. And I always say that the DNA of any organization is its leader, whether it's a CEO, or your organization, private or public and civil society. And I think, you know, we all love that storytelling about the person and then you tell the history and the ecosystem around it, but you really did make it accessible to people. But I'm curious, you know, when you think about all the biographies that you've written, and you’ve written so many, and even The Wise Men, which covered so many formidable leaders at the time, what is it about them that stands out, that makes you say, I'm going to focus on them?
Walter Isaacson
I mean, they’re creative people. They're not – most of them are considered to be geniuses, whether it be Einstein, or Ben Franklin or Leonardo or Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or Jennifer Doudna, or Ada Lovelace. But they're not geniuses simply because they're smart. They're geniuses because they, to use Steve Jobs’ phrase, “think different,” they think out of the box. They're imaginative, they're creative. And so I guess the theme of my books is: what causes creativity? Why is it so important? How do people get it?
Alan Fleischmann
And are there certain lessons there that you would share with me, I guess you can't be mediocre and fit in the category of some of these figures we're talking about. But for some of them, for some folks, are there certain things that, certain qualities that you'd always say that there are, they are hone-able, you can hone them.
Walter Isaacson
At the end of my Leonardo DaVinci book, I did a couple of, four or five pages of some common lessons. Here's what you can have. And number one is curiosity. I mean, Leonardo was always writing in the margins of his notebook things he was curious about, like, why is the sky blue? Or how do they walk on ice in Flanders? Or what does the tongue of a woodpecker look like? And we'll never be as smart as Einstein or Leonardo. But we can all be just as curious. I mean, we were all curious as kids, and then it gets beaten out of us by grownups who say, quit asking so many stupid questions. But I'm here in New Orleans, and the sky is a deep blue right now, I'm looking out of my window at it. And we forget to say to ourselves, why is the sky blue? And nowadays, if you want to know, you can pretty easily find out, you know, either Google it or ask Grok or ChatGPT. But from Benjamin Franklin, who put it in his notebook to Einstein, who had it in his notebook, they do little experiments, they spray water, they put light through the water, they try to figure out the diffusion of light by tiny particles. Well, you can go that deep if you want. You just have to have curiosity.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing curiosity, and I guess follow through too, right.
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, yeah. I mean, Einstein when he was a little kid got a compass. I think he was eight or nine years old, and he marveled at how the needle twitched and pointed north. And for days, he just couldn't get over it. Now I remember getting a compass when I was a kid, and you marvel over a lot, the needle and nothing's touching the needle, but it moves at points north. And then a few minutes later is like, “Oh, look, a dead squirrel” and you're onto something totally different. For his entire life until his deathbed, Einstein’s trying to figure out what is the field equation? How do field equations interact with particles? How do you reconcile quantum mechanics with relativity theory? Or to put it more simply? Why is the compass needle twitchin’ to the north? And he was mesmerized by field theories. So yeah, you’ve got to not only be curious, you’ve got to stay curious.
Alan Fleischmann
When you were at TIME and then CNN you continued to write, right? I mean, I'm curious about two things. What was it like being CEO, you know, to be the boss at TIME, which you eventually became, you started as a reporter. And then you became, you know, the big boss there as the editor in 1996. And you went on to be in 2001, the CEO of CNN. So from the perspective that at this point, you're still the journalist, I'm sure curiosity has become a big part of your DNA. But you also had to be the operational guy.
Walter Isaacson
What I was not good at was being a manager of people. I mean, I liked it at TIME magazine, when I knew the 400 people or so I worked with, I knew them all by name, I knew their families, they'd come to my house for barbecues. And I couldn't do that at CNN, there had been a few thousand people. And I was not a tough, disruptive manager, which sometimes an organization needs. When I was at TIME, I still would write. I made it a point that at least twice a year, I would get out from behind the editor's desk, and spend three weeks doing a story.
I went, as you know because you worked with her, I went with Madeleine Albright through the Balkans and on a long tour, she was trying to deal with that situation, and wrote a cover called, you know, Albright’s War. I spent three or four weeks with Bill Gates. And this is in the late 1990s, when the Internet was just taking off and Microsoft was trying to cope and did a cover story on Bill Gates. So I tend to always want to report, write my own stories and make somebody else run the magazine for a few weeks. And they tended to be stories about people.
Alan Fleischmann
And you just when you were at CNN is when you wrote Ben Franklin, right?
Walter Isaacson
Yeah, I mean, I was writing Ben Franklin. And like I said I was not great at CNN. As I said, I was not a great manager. I didn't understand television very well. I wasn't all that interested in television. But the company I worked for, Time Warner, owned TIME and owned CNN and I got moved there. And I remember late in the evenings, when Larry King would come on around nine o'clock. I'd realize okay, I don't have to keep worrying about CNN anymore. I don't have to watch Larry King. And I would work on my biography of Benjamin Franklin, which I found very satisfying.
Alan Fleischmann
Now, remember, I also think I'm not making this up. But I remember at the unveiling of the Secretary of State portrait in the State Department of Madeleine, I believe you spoke at the Ben Franklin Room, at least I remember being totally enraptured when you described Ben Franklin. And I think the Ben Franklin Room was where we actually did the unveiling. But I remember that it was that day that I went home and bought the book. I had read the biography because you shared things about Ben Franklin, you know, the renaissance man that he was. I thought I understood, I thought I knew, but I had no idea at some of the controversy in his life. And that came out in that. I think you gave a talk I was at that day.
Walter Isaacson
Well, as I said, at some point, at one of my birthday parties, my wife is gonna have to have you there. Because I bet you remember that. And it sounds like a lot of fun. And I wish my memory were better of those things.
Alan Fleischmann
Well, you went from seeing it to the big president of the Aspen Institute, which in many ways, I think I would argue was its greatest era, because, you know, we still create convenience, we create catalysts for leadership. And, you know, obviously, this show is about leadership. But you did a lot to bring a lot of very disparate folks kind of the way, the New Orleans way, I guess. Now, thinking about your journey of that friction. You were not afraid to bring different folks together and create those uncommon tables. In fact, it wasn't that you were afraid. That was really kind of your mission, I would argue where you really create a lot of little bitty communities and greater communities to construct dialogue and I'm curious whether, I mean, that's definitely you in the New Orleans kind of experience I would argue.
Walter Isaacson
It's like being collegial and trying to bring people together, which is what Ben Franklin did. That was as well as the Constitutional Convention and the Declaration. And I remember writing about Ben Franklin, as I said, earlier, while I was at CNN, and there was one part where he's writing, he is editing Thomas Jefferson's magnificent sentence, “we hold these truths,” and Jefferson had written “We hold these truths to be sacred.” And Franklin crosses out and writes, “self evident,” and then it goes on. “They're endowed with certain unalienable rights.” And you'll see John Adams’ edit, “which is endowed by the Creator” that was marveling at how our founders balanced the role of divine providence, and the role of rationality, in creating our rights.
And I was, that day when I was working on that, and that evening, and then the next morning, somebody at one of the CNN meetings that morning said, we have a great Crossfire show a judge, Roy Moore is putting the 10 commandments on an Alabama courthouse steps, and a federal judge is telling him he can't do it, and they're gonna have to show and I said, Oh, great, and who's gonna be for the 10 commandments, who's gonna be against it. And then like, a few days later, I'm just having trouble sleeping, because it's like here we were in journalism, using religion to divide us, in contrast to our founders who use religion to unite us. And so I wanted to get away, I thought, the media, the Gulf War was over, I thought, the media with the rise of Fox and MSNBC was becoming more divisive than unifying. And I said, I gotta get out of here. And that's when I was offered the job to run the Aspen Institute. And its mission, basically, is to bring people with different viewpoints together to try to find common ground based on our common values. And to me, that was such a refreshing thing after dealing with CNN, or dealing with cable news, I should say.
Alan Fleischmann
I mean, there's an extraordinary tradition at the Aspen Institute that you inherited, but I was very involved when you were there, and I felt like it was a real transformation as well. You know, and I think a lot had to do with the fact that you, you did delegate and created a platform for people to be entrepreneurial and innovative on their own. And you were a great convener yourself. So you brought a lot of interesting talent to the table that allowed your colleagues to actually amplify and scale their initiatives. But it was quite entrepreneurial. There was a real era of transformation, and convening. And again, it goes back to what you love the most about your roots, you know, that broad friction, that innovation, that uncommon table. And I'm just curious if you realize that when you were doing it that you were speaking to the young Walter, or whether it just was a good part of the journey?
Walter Isaacason
Oh, yeah, no, I realized what we were trying to do was twofold. One was in a period where the world and our country was getting more divisive and polarized, how do we try to bring people together, whether it be, you know, Sam Nunn and Dick Lugar from different parties figuring out what to do with arms control, or people on health care, anything. And secondly, I wanted to open it up. The Aspen Institute was sort of a closed, elite, invitation-only. And I thought that one of the reasons that our society became polarized was that we had too many elite institutions where people thought that powerful people were behind closed doors secretly making decisions, and it led to the rise of populism. I wanted to make sure we opened up the Aspen Institute so that we did things in public, we had Ideas Festivals, like the one you talked about that was in Washington, or in Aspen, or various other places. And we took it on the road so that we could, anybody who wanted to, could come to an Aspen Institute event either around the country or in Aspen and see all the people we had convened. It was not like the Aspen Strategy Group had been, which is off the record behind closed doors, you know, convening.
Alan Fleischmann
When did you know that it was time to leave, but how do you figure out when it's time to leave?
Walter Isaacson
Well, you know, when I took the job, they were kind of worried that oh, how long is that, and they said, "Well, will you promise to stay for a year?" And I said, I promised to stay seven years. I mean, that's how long it will take. And seven years is a good feeling, you know, a good time to get something done. And after seven years, Kathy and I are discussing, and I said why would I leave this job, this job is great, you know, we love it. And there's so much more we can do. And so I stayed eight years, nine years. And after about, I think it was 12 years, I finally said, you know, what, if I'm going to have a second act, and if the Aspen Institute is going to have a next act, as much as I'm enjoying this, it's time to let go. So I told the chair of our board and a couple other people, I was ready to step down. And they convinced me, I ended up saying another two years while they found a successor and the successor could come. But I think it is, you know, like the sell-by dates on the cartons of milk in the grocery store, you got to know what the sell-by date is. Because if you're just clinging on to a job, after 12 or so years, you have to ask yourself, is this the best for the institution? And is this the best for me? I was coming to New Orleans to see what's out there.
Alan Fleischmann
I was just at – that was my next question. It sounds like you wanted to go home.
Walter Isaacson
Well, the hurricane had hit and I had become vice chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority way back. And I thought maybe New Orleans won't survive. But we were able to bring it back and even take things from the Aspen Institute, including how to have parental choice in the school system, how to invent a school system from scratch, that worked quite well. But when a place you love and you feel you owe everything to seems like it might be on the brink of extinction because the levees broke, it makes you think, okay, I gotta get home. So we got a place in New Orleans. And I don't think we moved back all in one day, but we got a place in the French Quarter. And slowly, the center of gravity of my life shifted back to New Orleans.
Alan Fleischmann
And that was pre-Tulane – going down to New Orleans?
Walter Isaacson
I actually began teaching at Tulane after I told the folks, the board of the Aspen Institute, I was ready to step down. And Tulane offered me a chance to be a free-wheeling professor there. And I started teaching there. And then as I said, it took two more years, I think for the Institute to finally get somebody in. So for a bit of that time, I was commuting teaching at Tulane, but also running the institute.
Alan Fleischmann
And then you join Perella Weinberg, on the advisory board, or as an advisory board member and teaching at Tulane continuing to write your books, you still maintain the role of a great convener, and the different things that you do, and, and all that as well. So I'm just curious, maybe we talk about the newest book, Elon Musk, about Elon, but are there lessons about leadership? Are there – you know a little bit about the book, I'd love you to tell our folks here because I want them to buy it and read it. Because it's an amazing book, you sent it to me and I already started reading it. It's an amazing book. Actually, I'm just curious, are there any lessons that you extract even from Elon who's so in our day-to-day that you'd want to share?
Walter Isaacson
Here's a complicated lesson that comes from Elon Musk, and earlier from Steve Jobs, because they were both rough characters, they were tough on people. They can be mean and in some ways, in Elon's case, he's on the autism spectrum and he can just be uncaring about other people's feelings at times. But they both had, and Musk has, a huge amount, this desire to help humanity. To make us get to Mars, to make us have a sustainable planet, make us have artificial intelligence and robots that are safe.
And something that Jobs said to me is if you care too much about the feelings of the people around you, you're going to lose sight of the feeling for humanity at large and the missions that you need to accomplish. And he said to me, you know, you have a lot of empathy, which means you really, really care how the people around you are feeling. He said, “That's admirable to a point, but at some point, it becomes almost vanity because you want people to like you. You're doing it not simply because it's best for CNN. You're doing it because you want to be popular. You want to be a well liked boss. And that vanity, it kept you from disrupting CNN.” And sometimes you have to be rough to be a disruptive leader.
But the real lesson is probably the oldest lesson in human wisdom that we know of, which was what was carved on the top of the Oracle, the temple for the Oracle of Delphi in ancient Greece. It was know thyself. And I realized, both when I was at CNN, Aspen Institute, when I'm writing about people, I gotta be true to who I am, I'm never going to be a great disruptive leader, I'm never going to get rockets to Mars, because I do have too much of a desire, perhaps for people around me, to like me.
That gives me certain strengths, I can rally a team at the Aspen Institute, and we have a hell of a good time, I can have one of the most talented teams ever at TIME magazine, and we all just love each other. But if digital media is disrupting magazines, or if cable news is being disrupted by MSNBC and Fox and other things, my strength is not firing people, being disruptive, breaking china. And so I look at other leaders I've written about, Benjamin Franklin, who had an enormous amount of empathy and always was bringing people together. Jennifer Doudna, who I wrote about in The Codebreaker. She has, she's the nicest person you'll want to know. And so, biographies don't say here's the one way to do it. The good thing about biographies is you can read quite a few of them. And people have different ways of knowing themselves. And once you know yourself, you say, I'm going to be more like Ben Franklin, who's the one I relate to. I mean, he created things like the Aspen Institute. He was a writer, he tried to bring people together. And I'm a little bit less like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk, even though in my books, I can admire what they've done.
Alan Fleischmann
That's amazing. Actually, I have a question for you. I thought about this a long time – who writes the Walter Isaacson biography?
Walter Isaacson
I think those of us who write about people in the arena, we shouldn't fall prey to the conceit that we're also in the arena. As I said, I'm somebody who doesn't break a lot of china, I'm more suited to observing people in the arena than I am for being the gladiator in the arena. And so I don't think there's, I haven't fallen prey to the conceit, that somebody should write my biography. I think there's a role in life for the amazing innovators I write about. And I think there's a role not quite as big in life. But people tell their stories, Homer telling about Odysseus or Boswell telling you about Dr. Johnson. That's a good enough role to play. But it's not the role where I get confused and think I'm in the arena and have a biography written about me.
Alan Fleischmann
I may have a different opinion on that one, because I actually think it'd be an amazing story. Because it would be really fascinating, you know, to actually not only tell the story of your life, your journey and your passion, and it started in New Orleans, and came back to New Orleans, but along the journey along the way. But I also think, bringing up all these extraordinary people that you've covered, that you've enlightened us with, and having them in your biography would be a fascinating way of kind of bringing in the spirit, the souls of the ghosts of these folks in the journey that you are on for so long. But you know, I knew when we started this that I was gonna need more than an hour of your time to actually tell your story a little bit.
But I just want to say to you how much this has been so you've been listening to Leadership Matters. on Sirius XM Radio, and at leadershipmattersshow.com. I'm your host, Alan Fleischman. What a great hour we've had with Walter Isaacson, who is a great leader, a great storyteller, someone who actually believes in community, and he tells the story of those leaders who affect change continuously. And I just urge everyone to buy the Elon Musk book, but I also wouldn't stop there. If you haven't read any Walter Isaacson's books, go get them. There are many. I love the Da Vinci book. As I mentioned, I love the Einstein book. I love the Benjamin Franklin book and the Steve Jobs book. And he just really goes on and on. And I would just say you can tell a lot about where we're going. Not just where we've been by getting into the head of some of these extraordinary leaders and understanding who they are warts and all. So thank you for that and I hope you continue. What's your next book?
Walter Isaacson
Probably go back into history. I don't want to deal with somebody who has been alive after what I did. After Kissinger, I went back to 200 years and did Ben Franklin, and after Steve Jobs I went back like 500 years and did Leonardo. So I'll go back in history.
Alan Fleischmann
That's pretty cool. Well, Walter, this has been such a pleasure–
Walter Isaacson
Thanks so much for having me, Alan.
Alan Fleischmann
I look forward to many more. Thank you so much, real pleasure.