Walter Isaacson (born May 20, 1952, in New Orleans, Louisiana) 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 Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007),1Benjamin 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 began his career in journalism at The Sunday Times of London 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 the chairman of the board of Teach for America. He is on the Board of Tulane University, Society for Science & the Public, United Airlines, and the Bipartisan Policy Center. He serves on the national council of The Shakespeare Theatre in Washington, the National Constitution Center, and on the Advisory Committee of the National Institutes of Health. In October 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. In December 2007, he was appointed by President George W. Bush to the chairman of the U.S.-Palestinian Public-Private Partnership, which seeks to create economic and educational opportunities in the Palestinian territories.2 He also serves as the cochair of the U.S.-Vietnamese Dialogue on Agent Orange, which in January 2008 announced completion of a project to contain the dioxin left behind by the U.S. at the Da Nang air base and plans to build health centers and a dioxin laboratory in the affected regions.3
