Walter Isaacson
Aspen Institute President and CEO

[Biography | Honorary Degree]

Benjamin Franklin, among the most versatile of the Founding Fathers, was by turns a diplomat, scientist, inventor, revolutionary, businessman and university founder. Yet, says biographer Walter Isaacson, “if you asked him what he was, he would say a printer, a newspaperman, a publisher.”

Read more on Isaacson [here]

Isaacson, like the celebrated subject of his latest book, is first off a journalist—with a string of other accomplishments. His career has straddled print, online and broadcast media. He’s written three nonfiction books. He’s directed two of the most influential news outlets in the world, TIME magazine and CNN.

“People like me become journalists because we actually believe it can help—that drawing more people into the news, helping explain it more works,” Isaacson said during a 2002 interview on public television’s “Newshour.”

Isaacson’s career began in his hometown of New Orleans, working summers at the Times-Picayune newspaper while attending Harvard. He subsequently wrote for The Sunday Times of London and received a master’s degree in philosophy and politics from Oxford University. Upon returning to the United States, he worked for the New Orleans States-Item.

In 1978, he joined the staff of Time, first as a political correspondent and eventually becoming national editor and editor of new media. In 1995, he was named managing editor.

In 2001, he became chairman and CEO of CNN and led the cable network as it covered the biggest breaking-news event in the United States since Pearl Harbor. “The news [that] has happened since September 11 [makes] people realize that the world matters and that they have to take it seriously,” he said four months after the terrorist attacks.

Since 2003, Isaacson has led the Aspen Institute, an international education and leadership organization whose mission is to “promote enlightened leadership based on values.” The institute sponsors seminars for corporate executives and other leaders, policy programs, leadership initiatives and other educational and policy forums.

Despite dealing with the daily tumult of breaking-news journalism, Isaacson has carved out a niche as a biographer of influential American policymakers. His first two books are "The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made" (Simon & Schuster, 1986), co-authored with Evan Thomas, and "Kissinger: A Biography" (Simon & Schuster, 1992). "The Wise Men" profiles six prominent figures from the post-World War II era.

His latest is "Benjamin Franklin: An American Life" (Simon & Schuster, 2003), a much-praised biography 12 years in the making, of the complex man he calls “the Founding Father who is most made of flesh and blood.”

“We can see ourselves and our values reflected in him, because he’s not intimidating the way George Washington is,” Isaacson said in an interview for the University of Pennsylvania, the college that Franklin founded. “But, deep inside, he was a man of great virtue, especially the virtue of tolerance and especially, religious tolerance.”

And that, Isaacson says, is a virtue needed not only in Franklin’s day but in ours as well. “The virtue of tolerance, I think, is the most important virtue we need in the 21st century,” he told CNN after the book was published last year.

“When Thomas Jefferson wrote the first draft of the Declaration, he had a great line: ‘We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable.’ And Franklin crossed out ‘sacred and undeniable’ and put, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident.” [Franklin] said we need to be a very tolerant nation in which our rights are based on reason, not based on religion, and I think in this century, we have to be tolerant of all religions and all tribes, and that was the thing that Benjamin Franklin taught us.”

Isaacson will be awarded an honorary Doctor of Humane Letters degree and will give the main Commencement address.