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Walter Isaacson: My So-Called Writing Life (2014)

Walter Isaacson is the 2014 LEH Humanist of the Year. President and CEO of The Aspen Institute and the best-selling author of biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Ben Franklin, Isaacson c…

My parents were very literate in that proudly middle-brow and middle-class manner of the Fifties, which meant that they subscribed to Time and Saturday Review, were members of the Book-of-the-Month Club, read books by Mortimer Adler and John Gunther, and purchased a copy of the Encyclopedia Britannica as soon as they thought that my brother and I were old enough to benefit from it. Over a two-day period, as he read the just-published book, he dictated a flurry of letters declaring various points I made to be “outrageous.” Some were hand-delivered from his office on Park Avenue to the Time-Life Building by a mildly amused L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, who was then Kissinger’s young associate and later had the slightly easier job of being America’s viceroy in Iraq. “Oh,” he said, “we know how to go through proxy servers in Hong Kong that the censors are clueless about.” As I watch that region of western China erupt in occasional protests coordinated on Twitter and Facebook, and as I see the same happening in Iran and elsewhere, I realize that digital technology will do more to shape our politics than anything since Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press to Europe help usher in the Reformation.

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