Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson is the President and Chief Executive Officer at the Aspen Institute, a nonpartisan educational and policy studies institute based in Washington, DC. Walter has been the Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer at CNN and the editor of TIME magazine. Walter’s most recent book, The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (2014) is a biographical tale of the people who invented the computer, Internet and the other great innovations of the digital age. Walter is the author of Steve Jobs (2011), Einstein: His Life and Universe (2007), Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (2003), and Kissinger: A Biography (1992), and coauthor of The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made (1986). Walter began his career at The Sunday Times of London and then the New Orleans Times-Picayune. Walter joined TIME in 1978 and served as a Political Correspondent, National Editor and Editor of Digital Media before becoming the magazine’s 14th editor in 1996. Walter became Chairman of the Board of Directors and Chief Executive Officer at CNN in 2001 and then President and Chief Executive Officer at the Aspen Institute in 2003. Walter is Chair Emeritus of Teach for America, which recruits recent college graduates to teach in underserved communities. From 2005-2007 Walter was the Vice-Chair of the Louisiana Recovery Authority, which oversaw the rebuilding after Hurricane Katrina. Walter was appointed by President Barack Obama and confirmed by the Senate to serve as the chairman of the Broadcasting Board of Governors, which runs Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, and other international broadcasts of the United States, a position he held from 2009 to 2012. Walter is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and serves on the board of United Airlines, Tulane University, the Overseers of Harvard University, the New Orleans Tricentennial Commission, Bloomberg Philanthropies, the Society of American Historians, the Carnegie Institution for Science, and My Brother’s Keeper Alliance. Walter was born on May 20, 1952, in New Orleans. Walter is a Graduate of Harvard College and of Pembroke College of Oxford University, where he was a Rhodes Scholar.