Walter Isaacson Has a Plane (To Catch)**

"Newton, forgive me..."
-Albert Einstein, Autobiographical Notes

One morning Washington D.C. called my cell phone. I usually let my voice mail field calls before coffee but when D.C. rings, it's always a good idea to answer. A man with a casual and kind southern drawl asks to speak with me. He introduces himself as Walter Isaacson and says that there's a note on his desk that says he must return my phone call.

Confused at first, I then suddenly remember my inquiry to his secretary at the Aspen Institute the night before

"Oh, it was an email," I say.

"Whatever," Walter Isaacson replies. When Walter Isaacson says "whatever" it is not in the same sarcastic sense that the teenagers take, it's in the don't-worry-everything-will-be-all-right type of inflection.

I stumble through what is frequently called the "elevator pitch."

"Sounds good. I will email you my contact information," he says from Washington D.C.

I am a happy journalist.

Albert Einstein was a demagogue. He was also a passionate Zionist. Some described him as anti-authoritarian, insubordinate, and bohemian. He was given to fits of romantic fantasy. He was pacifistic to a point short of the rise of Nazism and he was a violinist. At times he could be very prophetic, deeply spiritual but then he was chronically unkempt and most frequently disheveled. In public he was pithy and witty, but in private he could be womanizing, unsympathetic, socially inept and of course profoundly intellectual and most of all, creative. Though he was conscious of all these failings and exploited them to his own benefit.

His ideas changed the world in a time when the world was already primed for change. The old guard was failing and the clockwork universe of Newton was not conforming to the way things appeared to behave in real life experimentations. Though small at first, the discrepancies were disturbing. It was a phenomenon not simply restricted to the sciences.

Freud unhitched the unconscious from the conscious mind, Picasso and Dali painted new views of the world, Bartók and Stravinsky rewrote composition, Duke Ellington and Count Basie invigorated high-spirited danceable music and "flappers," who cut their hair and donned short flashy dresses followed them.

Albert Einstein used his Gedankenexperiments or "thought experiments" to pose problems that he answered with his theories: What would the world look like if he traveled on a beam of light? How would a person perceive the universe if he were traveling extremely fast in relation to another person standing still relative to the moving person? Does anybody really know what time it is?

That last one may have become a lyric to a Chicago tune decades later, but it was something that Einstein was very concerned about. Through his years of developing his Special and then General Theory of Relativity he realized that space and time were all part of the fabric of the universe contorted by massive objects, like the earth and the sun, which then created the effect of gravity. The theory predicted that time was not constant, but flowed differently in different gravitational fields. Effectively, Einstein killed the "clockwork universe," which really irked a lot of people.

>Original Message: From: Lon S. Cohen
>To: Isaacson, Walter
>Subject: Re: Walter Isaacson
>We can then do the email interview over the following week or two. - Lon

>Isaacson, Walter wrote:
>Thanks. At your leisure. Walter.

>Original Message: From: Lon S Cohen
>Any plans to come to the Book Expo next weekend b/c I will be there. - Lon

>Isaacson, Walter wrote:
>I will be at BEA doing an autograph session Saturday noon. All best, Walter.

The BEA is the publishing industry's version of a Roman Orgy. Everyone who is anyone gorges themselves on publicity, promotion and free swag. Then when it's all over we take a collective breath and wonder what the heck happened on Saturday night anyway? I strode the columns and rows of the Jacob Javits Center searching for my man, Isaacson. It would be my only chance to catch up with him in person, as he no longer frequents Sag Harbor.

Event: Book Expo America
11:30am-12:30pm Autographing area, TABLE 23
Jacob K. Javits Center
New York, NY

A hangover prevented me from joining the autograph session mid-afternoon on Saturday so I was desperate. A small publishing press was offering free wine to promote some book that was probably about wine. I chugged a little of the hair of the dog and with renewed vigor, stalked like a predatory beast.

Then there he was, as casual and purposeful as his accent, standing in the Simon & Shuster area, fielding a few questions, looking busy yet not overwhelmed and utterly confident. One thing about Walter Isaacson is he exudes this particular aura of approachability.

I stuck my hand out and introduced myself and reminded him about me all in one run on sentence.

"Right. Did we do that yet?" he asked at the end of my verbal expulsion. As if we were just talking about an order of Girl Scout Cookies and not an interview with a best-selling author, the former CEO of CNN and former Managing Editor of Time Magazine.

"No. Not yet," I said.

If you drive a car at Riverhead raceway on the weekends and own a body shop where you plaster NASCAR sticker over everything and spend Sundays glued to the T.V. watching cars go around a track four or five hundred times, then this is like meeting Richard Petty, seven-time NASCAR Champion and seven-time Daytona 500 winner.

It's like Fonzie meeting Elvis.

He turned his attention elsewhere and that was it.

>Original Message: From: Lon S. Cohen
>Did Mr. Greene do the editing on your book? - Lon
>
>Isaacson, Walter wrote:
>Brian was most important. All best, Walter

Brian Greene is the Post-Modernist to Einstein's Modernism. He is trying to tie up the determinism of Relativity and the probability of Quantum Physics with Strings. Various models of String Theory predict up to thirty-something dimensions in all, including the four that Einstein described. Brian assisted Walter Isaacson with some of the more technical details in the biography.

Isaacson spent summers in Sag Harbor when he was working at Time. Early in his career he ran into a famous Simon & Schuster book editor and they got to talking about American politics. The editor challenged him to write a book about the American leaders who brought this country to global dominance between World War II and Vietnam. In 1985 wrote The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made, followed by biographies of Henry Kissinger and Ben Franklin.

At the helm of Time, Walter Isaacson found himself in the peculiar position of having to pick the Person of the 20th Century out of all of Time's famous-and sometimes infamous-People of the Year issues. Roosevelt, Gandhi, and Churchill were all considered but Einstein beat them out for the title because he embodied all of characteristics in Isaacson's litmus test. Once day Isaacson discovered that many of Einstein's as yet unreleased personal papers were going to be made public. It was then that he decided that the Man of the Century needed an equally hefty biography to go along with the honor.

By 1955 Einstein was still unsuccessfully working on a Unified Theory to combine his General Theory of Relativity with Quantum Physics. What bothered Einstein most was the fact the young whippersnappers touting Quantum Physics found its probabilistic nature of no real concern. Einstein, though once considered a renegade, had become an old fogey. His constant defiance of a universe run by probability instead of determinism was the physic's equivelant of yelling, "You kids stay off my lawn!" Sadly, in June of that year he passed away, never fully completing his dream.

To Einstein's credit, more than a hundred years after he first proposed them, his original theories hold water, while Quantum Physics, though thoroughly tested and proven, has been worked on by hundreds of great minds and becomes even stranger and more difficult to comprehend or consolidate into a so-called Theory of Everything. But Brian Greene is still trying.

>Original Message: From: Lon S. Cohen
>Mr. Isaacson, Just checking in to make sure you received my list of questions for the interview. Thanks so much. - Lon
>
>Isaacson, Walter wrote:
>Dear Lon Cohen,
>I am sorry to say that I have just finished my book tour, and out in Chicago doing work for Teach for America, and am off to Aspen where I become immersed in my Institute work. So I no longer have the time or focus to handle this interview.
>Very quickly, from an airport, a few tidbits, which I hope helps:
>I write at home every night from 9 pm to 1 am. I work on a laptop and e-mail my work to myself every couple of days so I can access it wherever I am.
>I love physics and math and wondering about nature, which is why I indulged myself by choosing this topic.
>Both Franklin and Einstein were exemplars of creativity, which is why I chose them.
>What is creativity? That's what I tried to explore in both cases.
>Brian Greene is one of the coolest guys I've ever met. He and his wife Tracy are planning a big public science festival in NY next year, and I hope to be a part.
>I try to explore in the book his qualms about quantum mechanics, and there I explore all the reasons why.
>They're calling my flight. So I'm off. Sorry that I didn't get these on book tour, but now I really must move on to other endeavors.
>Good luck with everything. I appreciate your kindness.
>All best, Walter

That should be the end of it all but after writing this I thought that if it does ever see the light of day, Mr. Isaacson should at least see what he has wrought. I sent him a copy of the story.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Lon Cohen
> To: Isaacson, Walter
> Sent: Tue Aug 21 18:54:59 2007
> Subject: Re: Walter Isaacson
>
> Hello Mr. Isaacson,
>
> Hope this summer was a good one for you so far and that your work at the Institute is going well. I have attached the article I wrote about our interview for you to read. I had a great time writing it.

> Isaacson, Walter wrote:
> Very well done. Smart. Tom Wolfe would be proud. Walter

> Thanks.
>
> Lon S. Cohen
> Writer

**The title of this article is in complete and utter reverence to the Gonzo (or sometimes called New) Journalism of the famous story Frank Sinatra Has A Cold by Gay Talese written in 1966.