![]() ![]() It was a little constricting, especially compared with today, when there are so many outlets for people to write and express themselves. ![]() On the other hand, there were only three or four major news magazines and newspapers and networks, and they served as gatekeepers. I got to watch Strobe Talbott write books about Russia as well as report on it. ![]() And you had these deep benches of journalistic talent, writers who were serious thinkers as well as good reporters. You had great organizations, like Time, that could take writers from places such as Louisiana and train them, pay for them to go on campaign trails or to go to Eastern Europe to watch the crumbling of communism, all of the things I got to do in the 1980s. You became national affairs editor, managing editor, and finally, editor. HUMANITIES: When you got back to the United States, you worked at a newspaper in Louisiana, and then, in 1978, took a job at Time magazine. They were both pretty nice about it, saying, you know, You’d make a good journalist and writer. I said my other option was to be a journalist and a writer. And I talked to both of them about maybe becoming an academic philosopher. And I brought it back to the people who taught me at Harvard, who were two legends in the philosophy department, John Rawls and Robert Nozick. ISAACSON: Well, I was particularly interested in the philosophy of language and the philosophy of meaning. What were you researching? And why didn’t you become an academic? HUMANITIES: You studied philosophy too at Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. Those were the themes that Walker Percy addressed in his novels, which asked, What can science tell us about the human condition, if anything? And what can the humanities tell us about how to deal with science? And, most clearly of all, Steve Jobs, when we first started working together on the biography I wrote, said, in so many words, I learned to stand at the intersection of the humanities and technology, because I believe that’s where value is created. Likewise, Einstein, a great scientist, truly appreciated arts and the humanities, and they deeply informed his work. His science helped inform his enlightened view of governance, diplomacy, and the balance of power. Benjamin Franklin was a truly great scientist and his electricity experiments were the most important empirical studies of that era. That’s something that I have been dealing with my whole life. He actually talked about the intersection of science and the humanities. I can still remember Lynne Cheney, then chairman of NEH, introducing him. He delivered this lecture twenty-five years ago, and I came down to Washington to hear it. When I was asked to give the Jefferson Lecture, my mind went back to Walker Percy. He said it was best to do it the way the best parts of the Bible do, by telling a wonderful tale, and people will get the message on their own. He thought that too many journalists, and writers in general, feel they have to preach. He said, “For God’s sake, be a storyteller. ![]() He would say that two types of people came out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. I asked him about it, and expressed an interest in becoming some kind of writer. I remember asking him about The Moviegoer and then The Last Gentleman, when it occurred to me that there were some philosophical things he was trying to work out. An easygoing guy, but there were things roiling underneath. From his face you could tell he had known despair, but his eyes still smiled. And I realized, Oh, you can be a writer when you grow up.’ It was like being an engineer or a doctor or a fisherman, or anything else you could be in Louisiana. And then, The Moviegoer came out, when I was about nine years old. And we used to say to Ann, his daughter, What does your dad do? He’s always at home drinking bourbon and eating hog’s head cheese. Percy, but he wasn’t a practicing doctor. As a boy, I grew up trying to figure out what Uncle Walker did, because he was a doctor. ISAACSON: I had a friend of the family, an uncle of a friend, Walker Percy, who played a part in this. HUMANITIES: When did you first become interested in current events, history, and writing? Even with all of the frictions that diversity causes, as it certainly did in the early 1960s in New Orleans, it led also to friendships and creativity. It’s where jazz came from, all the different influences, likewise, with the food or the literature of New Orleans. Earlier in the century, Louis Armstrong had grown up in pretty much the same neighborhood. And one thing I learned was this: The diversity of a city, like New Orleans, helps add to its creativity. WALTER ISAACSON: Growing up in the Central City and Broadmoor areas of New Orleans was particularly interesting because you had a racial and economic diversity. HUMANITIES: You were born in New Orleans and grew up there in the 1950s and ‘60s. ![]()
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