Walter Isaacson

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Walter Isaacson is the President and CEO of the Aspen Institute. He has been the Chairman and CEO of CNN and the Managing Editor of TIME. He is the author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003) and of Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and is the co-author, with Evan Thomas, of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). He is currently writing a biography of Albert Einstein to be published by Simon & Schuster in April 2007.

Isaacson was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. After graduating from New Orleans' Isidore Newman School and a brief stint at Deep Springs College, he attended Harvard College (B.A. in history and literature) and University of Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar at Pembroke College (M.A. in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics).

He began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune/States-Item. He joined TIME in 1978 and served as a political correspondent, national editor, and editor of new media before becoming the magazine's fourteenth managing editor in 1996. He became Chairman and CEO of CNN in 2001, and then president and CEO of the Aspen Institute in 2003.

He is on the Board of Directors of Reader's Digest, Tulane University, the National Constitution Center, and UAL Corporation (United Airlines); he serves on the national council of The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington; and he is the chairman of the board of Teach for America. On October 17, 2005 Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco appointed Isaacson vice chairman of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, a thirty-three-member policymaking board, led by Norman C. Francis, the president of Xavier University.