January 28, 2025 • 40 mins
On episode five of the third season of the Between Bites podcast, Nina Compton and Larry Miller sit down with renowned author, journalist, professor and New Orleanian Walter Isaacson.
Isaacson reflects on his remarkable career, from covering quirky New Orleans politics to leading Time Magazine and CNN. He candidly discusses the rise of partisan, opinion-driven journalism and how it prompted him to shift his focus to crafting narrative-driven biographies.
With insights on writing, journalism, and Isaacson's love for New Orleans, this episode is a must-listen for anyone passionate about the art of storytelling.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
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Speaker 1 (00:10):
Big wait for thee.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
All right, welcome to another edition of Between Bites with
Nina Compton and Larry Miller. Nina, who are we joined
by today? Walter Isaacson is here, everybody, perhaps the most
accomplished New Orleanian of all time, not in ways of
the biggest Well, thank you, we're here, fan or absolutely so.
(00:43):
I again that your business card must be the size
of legal paper. But journalist, author, professor, many many other
things in and out of the business world throughout your career,
a remarkable life that you just keep living and don't
sit back and rest on where We're happy to know
(01:04):
you as a person and to feed you and your
wife Kathy often enough. But it's even we're excited today
to get together and just chat.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
It's good to be back.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I was on this show once, back in the days
of COVID.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well, so you are a lifelong born and raised New Orleanian.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I live now four blocks from where I was born.
I was born in Turo Infirmary and now I live
on St.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Charles.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's cool. Now, along your life you have made different
stops around the world and some pretty remarkable spaces. You
grew up here, went to Newman had a great time.
And then where did you decide to go to college?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
You know, my parents and all four of my grandparents
went to Tulane. But I decided, all right, I'm out
of here for a while.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I went up to Harvard.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Then I came back and I worked for the time
speaking in State's Item here because my roots are pretty.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Deep here, right.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
But what's it growing up in New Orleans and then
going to Boston. Those brutal winters I.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Had never seen.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Major snow are cult most brutal winter. When we got there,
it was me and a guy named Richie Carlin, who's
also from New Orleans. We decided the room together and
it was a huge snowstorm and cold, and back then
they hadn't invented those down mark you know, north face
type things, and so I had some fringe jacket with
(02:31):
little fringes and we were miserable.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I mean, it would be fun, I think, to look
out the window and see feet of snow falling.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
It's fun to see it from the inside looking out raged.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And it's fun to see it for the first days.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, yeah, and then it's too much.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
How did they react to you?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
No, you didn't grow up with snow.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I had snow in the Islands.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I had sand seventy five DeGreasy year round.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So complain when you when you were in Boston, how
did they were? They incredibly charmed by the accent and
the genteel Southern ways.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Well, you know, there were a group of us that
came up from New Orleans that year, I think four
or five of us, and we had all read Faulkner
once to read Absolum absolom, and so we were all
being Clinton Thompson pretending to be southerns I remember we.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Drove up in my Pontiac and we.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Bought cases of Dixie beer, remember Old Dixon Beer, And
it was somewhat inauthentic because we're from New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
You know, we didn't play the Southern.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Role. But I know when we went to college, for
at least the first six months, we were doing that
until we realized it was inauthentic.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And then when you were done with Harvard, that wasn't
enough for you either as far as you're learning. So
you decided to go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well, it was lucky. I was working as an oyster
shucker at the old Hula Hans.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
On Bourbon Strew. Yeah, and I.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Was, you know, doing Christmas vacations a little bit. I
worked for T. Smith and Son Steve Adoors in the
summer on the right near here on the Luisa Street wharf.
And I remember that Christmas in my senior year, applying
for roads and you're kind of lucky because they do it.
They did it geographically, so you know, if you're coming
(04:21):
from Louisianasissippi slightly better I shouldn't say that, a slightly
better shot than you were coming from New York and Boston.
And I remember the roads board was at the Royal
Orleans and Willie Morris, the writer, was on it. And
years later I found out because he told me that
Bill Clinton, who was in like a failed congressional candidate
(04:42):
from Arkansas, was on it too. But I remember when
I won it, but I still had to go back
to Hula Hans and do the afternoon shift, and I
didn't want to tell anybody there I had just won
a Rhodes. But so I finished my shift and still
know how to open oysters.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
How fast are you?
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I'm not as good as Felix's or acme.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Yeah, what's your favorite way to eat oysters?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Raw? And I love it?
Speaker 3 (05:13):
You know lemon sometimes you know you've done these things
with the what's it called the vinegar on you Manyonet,
I love that, and I hate to say it, but
when I go to Manale's and sometimes on the way
home from Tulane, I'll stop at Menale's just in late
afternoon froists, I put a lot of ketchup in, but
(05:37):
those are good oysters.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
Yeah yeah. What else is one of your favorite things
to eat in New Orleans?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Well?
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I love New Orleans food.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
I love the way the fusion like you do both
hear it and compare, which is you bring the flavors
of everything now with possibly the Islands and New Orleans,
and so that fusion of what I would call creole
high like you go to Moscas and you have you know,
Creole Italian you and we have so many restaurants, as
(06:08):
you know, we come to your restaurant a lot, but
we almost have a tradition, Kathy and I of galatoise
date night, Sunday night, same table whatever. Golf fish is
the best crab meat on top of it, and I
start with the good day, meaning the both the crab
salad and the shrimp rahmalode.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
That's an excellent choice.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And we love moscas and we love Antoines, you know
New Year's Eve.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
In fact, that New Year's Eve.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Where we had the tragedy, we were having dinner as
we have for thirty years.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
About two dozen of us have met at Antoines. High
school friends upstairs at Antoine's always the same thing. So
I'm pretty much a traditionalist. And we live in New York,
you know, a bit of a time, and we have
a little apartment there, and I'm the only person who
thinks that New York City is a foody.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, that was one of the things I was going
to ask as you moved away as a young man
for brief periods of time, were there any food memories
that stuck out? That you had a shrimp up in
Boston and he said, it's not as sweet as a
golf shrimp, or I missed shrimp from lot at Antoines?
Were there any of those things?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
I'll tell you the one thing, you know, the proofs
remembrance of things past. Uh. He bites into the madeline,
which is a taste he has. When I first went
to Oxford, there was a French rest and called the Elizabeth,
and I'd never had crimbroulet, and I remember my first
week there, somebody took me there and had the crimbrulet,
(07:42):
and for some reason, I just it was really hot
on the top. And I've always searched now for the
perfect crimbrulet.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
So maybe you.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Depression.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
The challenge flag has been raised.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Yes, I love.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I've never seen it on you man.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
We have it at compared we do a mango oh
mango crop.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, maybe we'll go there. This eavesoning.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
See, so out of school, you become a journalist and
you're here, back and forth. That leads to a job
with Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, I was waiting for the paper here. And it
was the most amazing mayor's race, I guess seventy nine,
seventy nine, and it was after moon Land, who'd serve
two terms, and there were twelve people running for mayor
and it was all over the map, and it was
Dutch Mariol and Joe DeRosa and a few.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
People like that, who are so contenders.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Who's some people real contenders, But there were also people
who as a restaurant tour you might remember this Rodney Fortell,
whose wife Ruth started Ruth's Chris's Steakhouse Wow. And Rodney
Fortell was running on a platform of getting a gorilla
for the New Orleans Zoo, and so he would show
up at all rallies and all debates wearing a gorilla costumes.
(08:59):
Oh my god, So tell me this is not.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
A hard race to come.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
And I was very lucky because so the first primary,
I went to Mike Roka fort Fisherman's Wharf. Everything involves
restaurants when you tell story. And he was a ward
leader down in the Irish Channel, and he got the
various assessors and the award leaders together and we went
over ward by ward who was going to win each ward?
(09:24):
And so I went out on a limb and I
did sort of a half joking column saying, here's how
it's going to turn out exactly. Here's the order of
the twelve candidates, and here's the percentages they're going to get.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And it turned out to be right. The order was right.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I was with a percentage point, not because I was
so smart, but because Mike Okafort and I think Ronnie,
one of the Burke family members was they were all
doing this for me. And that was a time that
a Time magazine editor was wandering around the country trying
to recruit people. These were in the good old days
of journalism when magazine sent people out to recruit reporters,
(10:02):
and the Time spicky and say tied them where they were,
touting the fact that my column had been right. And
he gave me a call and offered me a job
at Well. We had a few interviews, and then I
got a job at Time.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
So the other I'll tell a story I haven't told
too often, which is the other job I got That week.
I had been at Oxford study and there was a
guy named cord Meyer who was at the embassy in
England for the United States, and he got to know
every student and one day he called and said, I'm
coming to New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I'd like to meet you.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
See you again, and we met at the Hilton by
the airport, by the swimming poolt O, man is this guy,
And he was, of course the director of the CIA's
county intelligence you know agents, right, and he was recruiting
me to see if I would join the CIA. So
I had an offer from Time and an offer from
(10:58):
c and I went home to my we lived on
Napoleon Avenue. Then I went home and my mother listened
to it all through and I ended up I don't
know what we probably would have lost.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
The Cold War.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's so extreme different, it's amazing. Do you often think
back what would have changed? Or do you look at
world events?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Sort of?
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Except for I will say something disappointing, which is Cordmyer
in the middle of talking to me about it. He'd say, well,
you know, we wouldn't really want you to be a
secret agent. We'd want you to be an analyst at headquarters.
And I'm going, how disappointing. So yeah, I guess if
I had taken the job, I'd still be sitting there
in Langley reading reports.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Changing the world. Nonetheless, So the idea to write a book,
when did that first come to you? Or even the
possibility that I haven inside of me to try and
knock this out?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, you know, I worked for Time Magazine with a
guy I went to college with, Evan Thomas. We were
friends and joined Time Magazine together after I left the
paper here and back then the internet wasn't anything, and
so you only had to write one day or two
days a week because it was a weekly magazine, and
anything on Monday through Wednesday got thrown away anyway, and
(12:18):
so we're bored out of our minds we're covering. I
was covering Reagan's campaign, and you get frustrated because you
have to write a whole lot of stuff and then
it gets boiled down to about a thousand words in
the magazine. So one day I was covering the Reagan
campaign and they were handing out leaflets about the American
(12:39):
establishment and how they're you know, the Rockefellers and the
Builderberg group and the roth Childs and whatever. And I said, Evan,
what's this American establishment thing? Because he was a preppy,
he had gone to prep school, and we decided, why
don't we write a book about it? And we picked
six characters, generally unknown people to most people, Abel Harrimon,
(13:00):
Dean Atchis and that six friends who had gone to
Grotten and Yale and Sculling Bones together and then created
our Cold War policy. It was an obscure, weird book,
but a wonderful editor named Alice Mayhew, who had edited
Woodward and Bernstein, said I've always wanted to publish that book.
It's a prequel to the Best and the brightest, meaning
(13:22):
the Halberstam book.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And so we.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Published that book and it was a somewhat surprising success,
and I thought, wow, people are going to pay me money.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
This is kind of cool. That's neat.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
So how do you approach writing?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Like is it?
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Just give me the insight because I'm trying.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I'll tell you the great insight I got down here.
One of my mentors was Walker Percy, the great novelist
who lived in Covington. But uh, and he was the
He was the uncle of a very close friend. So
we used to go to Covington and go skiing on
the Boga fly and fishing and hunting for turtles. And
(14:04):
his daughter was our age. And at one point I said, Ann,
what does your dad do? He's always sitting on the
dock the bayou, eating hogshead cheese and drinking bourbon. Well,
he's a writer. And I didn't quite know what do
you mean. I knew you could be an engineer like
my father was, or a fisherman or a doctor. And
then the Moviegoer came out and I was about twelve thirteen,
(14:28):
I guess ten or twelve years old, and I finally
read it and I said, you know, Uncle Walker, what
are you trying to teach in this book? There's like
lessons and he said that two types of people come
out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. He said, for Heaven's sake,
be a story to the world has too many preachers.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So my goal ever.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Since Alice Mayhew did the Editing of the Wise Men
and she always wrote all things in good time, keep
it chronological.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Is I'm not a writer.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I'm a storyteller, and I tell stories in a narrative, chronological,
reported way, and I let other people preach or make
their judgments.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Right, that's neat. How did you as that that? What
do you call that?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Those fears of influence over you? And the style of writing?
Was that always with you or has it honed through
the years or you always knew that you could make
unopinionated stories.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Well back when I was growing up on the paper
here and the time, we actually tried to be objective, unbiased.
I mean I covered both Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan
for Time. And you know nowadays you're paid to have
opinions and pop off on cable TV or talk radio
or podcast. We were trained to be pretty straight and
(15:55):
I was trained here at the State's Item as it
was at the time it was merging into the Times
Picky In. I had a great city editor named Billy Rainey,
and I covered police headquarters a.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Five am till one pm beat. We had a one
pm deadline for the afternoon edition. And he was always
just tell me the facts. You know.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
You'd call them up and say this happened. He'd go,
all right, well, you know, and he would go through
everything I needed to report, and he taught me a
big lesson. The very first day I was on the job,
there was a murder out in Carlton Avenue of a woman,
a young woman, and I went.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
To the scene.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
You then g went to a tayfunk at K and
B on Carlton and Clayborn and called in the story.
He said, well, what are the parents. I said, well, Billy,
I didn't go talk to the parents. He said, go
back to the house and talk to the parents. I thought, well,
there's no way. I knock on the door and the
parents are there and they talked to me for about
an hour. They're pulling out year books. They want to
(16:56):
tell the story. So the main thing I learned is
if You're willing to live and people are willing to talk.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
That's amazing.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
What has been your biggest challenge being a writer?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
The writing has always been fun. My biggest challenge as
a journalist was the rise of the partisanship and the advocacy.
Not advocacy journalism because in some ways that's fine, but
the biased, you know, uh journalism, and not just partisan
but almost poisonous and ideological. And I was working at
(17:32):
CNN after Time Magazine, and I watched the rise of
Fox and the rise of MSNBC.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
And when you say working, you were the president.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah, it was a CEO in tariff CNN and we
were doing fine. And it was the Gulf War and
nine to eleven and our brand of very straight journalism
of sending Nick Roberts in the Bagdad and Chris john
amanpoor to cover the wars. We had Aaron Brown and
others as anchors. That was working well, but on our
(18:03):
left flank. Ms NBC was coming up on the right
flank Fox and they started doing much better, not having
reporters and Baghdad bureaus, but having Bill O'Reilly's or Rachel
maddow's give you their opinions and to me, that was
a challenge, and that's why I got out of journalism.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
I mean, it has to be.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
It's tough for me as someone who has always loved
journalism and what it was and what it's supposed to be,
to now have to select your brands of journalism just
because something else annoys you, instead of just reading the
story that's there to be told.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
It used to be from the end of World War
Two until about the year two thousand, there was a
sort of mass media where most people had shared the
same common pool of facts and information. You might think
there was, and there was at times various biases, but
Kronkit would say, that's the way it is. We'll be
(19:02):
having coffee the next day and say here's what you know.
What do you think of what happened? And we get
to make our own opinions. I think that was a
particular period. Nowadays, everybody goes to the corner of the
blogger sphere or their corner of their podcasting world, or
of talk radio or cable news, and people have come
(19:27):
away with different sets of facts. And that's a deep
problem in our country which we're seeing manifest and our politics.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And it even happened to you personally on your watch
at CNN where you were actually reaching out to Republicans
right saying we're not trying to Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
I mean was there was a feeling when I came
to CNN. It was before Fox was really growing that
fast that CNN was part of a center left liberal
media establishment.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And I always have an open mind, and I'm thinking
about it.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
You know what, there's some truth to that. There's an
odious smell of truth to some of that. Most of
the journalists would probably registered. I mean I never registered
in a party. I was always an independent. But when
I was a journalist, but and I said, you know,
maybe we do have some unconscious biases. And I went
(20:20):
to Capitol Hill with Newt Gingridge and many others who's
a professor of history at Tulane years ago, and I said, okay,
I want to talk to Republicans to say we're going
to try to show all sides. I got criticism of that.
That shows how weird things were becoming. I was slammed
for going to Capitol Hill and visiting Republicans and saying
(20:43):
we're trying to be open. We want you to be
guests on our network as much as anybody, that's a shame.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
And so in regards to writing a book or interviewing
people who has been, who have been like the most
instrumental people through your journey.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Well, Alice Mayhew, who's this unbelievably great editor at Simon
and Schust. So she died a few couple of years ago.
She was the one who accepted the wise men on
the spot. And unlike almost any other author, you know,
I've never let other publishing houses bid on my books
or have any auction. I would just have lunch with
(21:23):
Alice and I'd say, okay, Benjamin Franklin, I'd say okay,
Steve Jobs or whatever. And she taught me to make
things a narrative. And she was religious. She read the
Bible a lot, and she said, it has the best
lead sentence in the beginning Coon, so just keep those
(21:46):
rhythms of the King James Bible and tell it the
way you know a good narrative would.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
So she was very influential.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
I had great editors at time, and you know, in
some ways, the greatest rocks I have of the fact that,
as I said, we have the same couple of dozen
people who meet at Antwine's on New year's even any
other times the people I was in fifth grade or
sixth grade with. That's why I've come back home is
(22:18):
if you've run CNN and been editive time, you don't
know who's your friend. Everybody's blowing smoke at you. But
I come back home and they remember me when I
had really big ears a kid, and so I'm grounded
by being among family and friends here.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And that's neat when you are choosing the next book,
the subject of the next book, what is that process
like or is it ongoing?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Where you know there's a great light and Lord of
the rings of he who wanders is not lost. And
I've kind of been wandering around. And what happened was
after The Wise Men, which ends with Vietnam War starting,
I said I want to do something, so I did
Henry Kissinger. After dealing with Henry Kissinger at the end
of it, I said, Okay, I'm gonna do somebody's been
(23:09):
dead for more than two hundred dealing. And I also
wanted to understand balance of power diplomacy. And that was
Benjamin Franklin. Because we think of him as a doddering
dude flying a kite in the Rain, but he was
the greatest diplomat we had, and then he was a
great scientist. So that made me want to demystify Einstein.
After that, I had done Ben Franklin and Einstein, and
(23:31):
I was at a book party somebody was sewing in
California and Steve Jobs was there. He said, take a
walk with me, and they said, do me next, and
so I said, I said, all right, Ben Franklin, Albert.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Einstein, you you arrogant.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I'll do you in thirty or forty years when retire.
But then somebody said, if you're to do him, you
gotta do him now. I said, I didn't know he
was diagnosed with He said, well, he's keeping it. He
kept it a secret he had and told the board.
But he talked to you the day after his diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So that was a way.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And I like going back and forth between history, you know,
and then contemporary things because I'm pretty good at reporting,
at doing what Billy Randy taught me at the newspaper here,
which is just listen to people. And so I would
sit there for two years just listening to Steve Jobs
and did that book. But once I did that, like
I'm going to go back five hundred, Leonardo, when Steve
(24:27):
was the one who told me, he said, you think
you're wandering, but you actually have a pattern, which is
you love people.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
You don't love power.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
You don't write about presidents, and you don't even write
about genius, even though you think you do. It's about
people who are imaginative and innovative because they stand at
the intersection of technology and the humanities, at the intersection
of the arts and sciences. Ben Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs,
(24:55):
and so I realized that was what interested me. And
I've always looked at people who have connected the sciences
and the humanity.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
And you're educated fairly heavily in the humanities. Your your
dad was an engineer. Where did that fascination with science
come in.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Well, you know, it's all about dad.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Biographers know whether it's Elon Musker, Henry kissinguror Einstein, it's
all about living up to their dad. And my dad
was a wonderful engineer, was the engineer for the structural
and mechanical and electric with the super Dome what was
in the first Convention Center in the International Trademark.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Which is now the fourth season.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
So he would take me around and show me the
motor that did the revolving plumsul club on the top
of what is now the Four Seasons, and show me
how in one quarter horsepower the gears. So he loved
teaching things. And in our basement on Napoleon Avenue, we
had boxes of transistors and resistors and capacitors and soldering
iron and make circuits and fix radios, and.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So he taught me a love of technology. It wasn't
just science. It was what is a circuit?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
How do you make a circuit with resistance capacity to
transistors and they're on off switches, so how do they
process logical things? And nowadays people don't know how to
open their eyePhone. It is, but I remember being able
to visualize them what people thought was magic, but I
(26:28):
knew it was how technology works.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's wild And it's a gift too. Yeah, there aren't
a lot of people who can bring both of those worlds.
It's a gift to me, each of those worlds out there.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
It's a gift to me because I believe you can
learn anything if you really try. And people get afraid
of learning science. They you think I'll never be able
to do relativity theory right. This is a patent clerk Einstein,
who does you can't even get a job teaching at university.
And he's just visualizing how do you synchronize clocks using
(27:00):
light beam and signals? And I say, okay, I know
how to write this and explain it. But the joy
for me is I get to when I did Jennifer
Dowden in The Codebreaker, I got to edit human genes
in her lap. When I was doing Einstein, I get
to learn what is the theory of relativity? And I
(27:22):
not only believe you can learn anything. I believe there's
a real joy in learning if you let yourself, just
like you have a joy of making your side. I'm
gonna make pasta now for changing some of the menu, say,
and that's a joy, well if for anybody who wants it.
There is the joy of saying I can understand something.
(27:44):
I'm gonna learn something that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
So now we're gonna switch gears. Where we are in
the new year of twenty twenty five, and you are
at two Lane, and you have a book fair if
you want to tell us about and it has.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Been argued that it is your greatest contribution to the
city is the awareness of this book fair and what
it has grown into.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Well, thank you for asking about it. And you know,
when I was at the Aspen in Stute, we had
an Ideas Fessel and it got bigger and bigger book
as people are hungry to talk about books and ideas.
As I say, there's a joy in learning, and especially
in this era of a loneness, and COVID made it worse.
(28:30):
People like actually being in a place. They don't want
to just watch it on YouTube or something. And so
when I came back to New Orleans, Sheryl Landrew when
she was the first lady, had run in city Park
of Children's Book Fair, and we put our heads together
and I said, look, whenever I publish a book, I
(28:51):
got to go to the Miami Book Fessel. I go
to the Atlanta Book Festival. I go to the Los
Angeles Book Fessel, even Sun Valley Book how come we
don't have one here? And we have a cultural calendar
that for me begins on New Year's Eve, but yeah,
obviously goes through Twelfth Night, then Marty Grass and then Easter,
but then jazz Fest and somewhere in that cultural catalog
(29:16):
food and Wine Fest, maybe we should have an ideas
a cultural thing. So Cheryl and Andrew and I put
our heads together, and one of the things we learned
is it's easy. You invite Dorris Corns Goodwin, you invite
your Foust, do you invite Skip Gay, You invite all
these people and say do you want to come to
(29:36):
New Orleans for three days? And they go yes, In fact,
we're doing it now. It's March twenty seventh to twenty ninth.
And my biggest problem with Cheryl is she keeps saying,
You've got to quit talking to people because I'm like
talking to Maureen Daubs says can I said, sure you
can come this year. And now we've got more authors
coming than we have room on stage four. But we're
(30:00):
to make it both local with you and the cookbook
authors and Archie Manning and others talking about the Saints,
and then Gail Benson is doing things with Dennis Lasha
on the super Dome. So it's not just books, although
cookbooks count and you got a new one, but you know,
we're we're just trying to bring all these people together
(30:25):
and it's really fun. And I think it's great for
Now Orleans because we've got.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
An awesome literary heritage here.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I mean, you go back to Cage Chopin and left
Caddie o'hearne. But at least in my mind, I go back,
not that I'm that old, to Sherwood Anderson William Faulkner
Tennessee Williams, when the Double Dealer was the magazine being
published in the French Quarter and Faulkner was living in
what's now Faulkner Books. And I grew up, you know,
(30:54):
very in awe of that New Orleans tradition of writing
and Walker person we got.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
To throw him into it, of course. So what's next
for you for this year? What are you most looking
forward to?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Well, I'm looking forward to book Fast And the cool
thing about book FESTL I think is that it's open
to the public. You don't need to get a big
chief pass, you know, pay a lot of money. Is
it the tu Lane campus. Just take the street car,
the Fret bus and get there an uber And yeah,
if you want to be a patron, we have a
(31:26):
you know, some patron levels that help us put it on.
But it's also free and open to the community, and
you don't even have to think about in advance. You
just look at the schedule and you say, wow, I've
always wanted to hear Doris Karns Goodwin talk about John
Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt. And you know we have well,
(31:48):
we have a spectacular lineup and we almost model it
on Jazz Fest. I hope they don't get because we
do that fart that made Trix Well. We have about
six venues like the Tent on the Lawn and the
McAllister Auditorium, and you can pick a small venue which
is maybe some intellectual professors, or you can pick a
(32:10):
big venue and maybe John Grisham right talking about his novels.
And you just walk around with that little grin and say,
where am.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
I going next?
Speaker 4 (32:18):
I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Well, we're looking forward to, haven't you. You gotta cook
when you're there.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
I don't know yet, but I'm very excited about the book.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And you know, tell me about the book. I know it,
but tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
So it's really my culinary journey growing up in Solution,
then going through Jamaica, Miami, and then it book ends
in rans So it's very talking about the different creole
cultures that we have in the world. So it starts
off in solution ends in your ands, so it's showing
the similarities but also the differences. And I just really
(32:51):
wanted to document Caribbean recipes because we don't have a
lot of Caribbean cookbooks out there, so I wanted to
just make sure that we present and you.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Do it like I was talking about as a narrative,
as a journey. So it's not just a set of recipes,
it's a narrative journey. And when we talk about narratives,
it's all about the journey. It's about Odysseus setting off
on an odyssey or huck Finn setting off on a raft,
and that's you setting off from Saint Lucia.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
What do you say to an author who will never
swears to never ever do another book again.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
That's me right now.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I can't wait to read your next book.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
It's not going to happen. It's too much. It's a
lot of woke and it's such a long process because
you know you have to put everything into it, and
there's times where you're not inspired, you're not motivated, and
it's I would tell the rise of what I was
doing the book with me. I said, I need to
pause today because I'm not giving it my all, and
(33:55):
it's something that is very personal. It's it is a
long thing. It's not like an Instagram post where you
can delete it once it's published. That's it. So I
wanted to be very thoughtful, and we kind of took
a little bit longer than the normal process, but I
feel good about it.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Well, my advice is take your time. Yes, number two,
whenever you're stuck, pretend you're at one of these tables
and you say to yourself the six magic words, okay,
which are let me tell you a story. And whenever
you have trouble saying, say, wait a minute, let me
tell your story about when I first went to church
in Saint Lucia or when I left for the and
(34:33):
that gets you started. Because one of things we do
at restaurant tables and especially in New Orleans, is we're
very good at saying, let me tell you a story.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
I wish I had that advice when I got stuck.
But number two, Okay, we're gonna switch gears now. We're
entering Carnival season. Favorite kincake.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Oh yeah, I just went on twelve Night when the
Funny forty Fools or whatever, and to the place Tien
Williamson helps run on Saint Charles Biffel Town, and it
was a whole spread of cake cakes. And I always
get amused by the newest one, and that's you big
pies king cake.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
How was that?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
It's pretty? I mean kingcakes. You shouldn't overdo it on
king cakes, I know, while you're on a sugar rush.
One of my favorite stories, though, is I was part
of a group in New Orleans that was trying to
figure out the diversity of New Orleans and had to
celebrate it. And one of the people part of the
committee was a younger Vietnamese guy, and I'm talking about
(35:42):
how like when you come in from the Islands or
somebody comes in from Italy, they bring so much to
the jambalaya we have here. And he started saying, well,
you know, these new immigrants are coming in and they're
ruining things. He says, well, like they come in and
then they're ruining the kingcakes. They're putting strawberries in kin cake.
(36:04):
Now look at him, and he had you know, his
family had come in nineteen seventy five with the gimmes.
They have great bakeries. They're doing things, and I'm saying,
wait a minute, but it's sort of weird that the
last people who came want to pull up the ladder
and take new people coming a horrible right.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
So we have to learn now that ain't the case.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
That's great. I love that, but I'm more of a
Galatoi than the kincake. I'm not slush sugar. Larry luves
Larry loves me.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I'm going to say the thing that will get me
dis dising whatever disabused to being a New Orleanian is
the two things that are culinary delights here that I
can only take in limited portions or Begnet's and kincakes. Yeah,
I think once I get those sugar rushes, it's like
I say to myself, all right, let me give it
(36:55):
a break for a while.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
But I love the cafe ola so good one.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
They end up coming with it. Yeah, when you are
teaching at two, right, how large are your classes? You're
teaching the spring and teach.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Two classes this semester. Okay, one of them's fourteen students
and one of them is one hundred and forty students.
I love the diversity of that. I teach a seminar
in biography writing, and then with Nick Mattay, a great
computer scientist, we co teach a course called the Digital
Revolution from Ada to AI meaning Ada Lovelace in the
(37:33):
eighteen forties created the first computer algorithm too AI. And
that's a great course. I've just been teaching it past
a few weeks, and it's a way of learning the history,
but you also have to learn a little of the technology.
It's part of my thing about you can learn anything,
(37:54):
and you should stand at the intersection of the arts
and sciences. So if you're a history student, you may say, okay,
I love the history of how Microsoft was started, but
you also have to learn what is basic, What did
Bill Gates actually right? How did that make the personal
computer possible? You don't have to know a whole lot
of math and be able to code, but you have
(38:15):
to understand the technology and the history. So that's the
magic of what we're doing at Tulane.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Are there any students you look out there and say
you're not going to make it in life.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I'm just saying, I'll tell you it's just the opposite, Okay.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
I keep oh even when I'm up in New York.
We'll see all my students will get together, the ones
who you know were in the class before. It's amazing
how focused, dedicated and earnest the tu Lane students are
the class I have now on the digital revolution. I'm
already blown away by their eagerness to create great innovative products.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Do you tell them that? Oh yeah, I mean, and
I saw. I mean that as a.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
A right or wrong question. I just it was interesting.
I went to Georgia Tech where we had no humanity
being send back to us.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Oh yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
I hang around after class and we go over the projects.
And my wife is on the board of Idea Village,
and we're involved in New Orleans entrepreneurs Week, which this
year is sort of combining a bit with Book Festival.
So this notion of giving students who come here from
all over the world to come to Tulane and they're
(39:35):
innovative a chance to be innovative in the city of
New Orleans is important.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
Well, so thank you so much for spending the morning
with us. And it's always been a pleasure having you
and chatting with you, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Well.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Spending the morning with you, Nina and Larry is almost
as good as spending the evening with you for.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Having me back to BABS.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Thank you, which I will continue to call by Water America.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
That's all right, as long as you call yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
And bring the Krember leg for compla. Guys, I know
what you're saying. That's what happens when you cross culture.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
You never stopped learning, So thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Bike.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Wait for the Yeah, Wait for Yeah, Gay, Wait for
the remember make wait for the Reaper, wait for the
make Way for the Everybody was the Rock
Big wait for thee.
Speaker 2 (00:17):
All right, welcome to another edition of Between Bites with
Nina Compton and Larry Miller. Nina, who are we joined
by today? Walter Isaacson is here, everybody, perhaps the most
accomplished New Orleanian of all time, not in ways of
the biggest Well, thank you, we're here, fan or absolutely so.
(00:43):
I again that your business card must be the size
of legal paper. But journalist, author, professor, many many other
things in and out of the business world throughout your career,
a remarkable life that you just keep living and don't
sit back and rest on where We're happy to know
(01:04):
you as a person and to feed you and your
wife Kathy often enough. But it's even we're excited today
to get together and just chat.
Speaker 1 (01:11):
It's good to be back.
Speaker 3 (01:11):
I was on this show once, back in the days
of COVID.
Speaker 2 (01:18):
Well, so you are a lifelong born and raised New Orleanian.
Speaker 3 (01:24):
I live now four blocks from where I was born.
I was born in Turo Infirmary and now I live
on St.
Speaker 1 (01:31):
Charles.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
That's cool. Now, along your life you have made different
stops around the world and some pretty remarkable spaces. You
grew up here, went to Newman had a great time.
And then where did you decide to go to college?
Speaker 3 (01:44):
You know, my parents and all four of my grandparents
went to Tulane. But I decided, all right, I'm out
of here for a while.
Speaker 1 (01:50):
I went up to Harvard.
Speaker 3 (01:52):
Then I came back and I worked for the time
speaking in State's Item here because my roots are pretty.
Speaker 1 (01:58):
Deep here, right.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
But what's it growing up in New Orleans and then
going to Boston. Those brutal winters I.
Speaker 1 (02:06):
Had never seen.
Speaker 3 (02:08):
Major snow are cult most brutal winter. When we got there,
it was me and a guy named Richie Carlin, who's
also from New Orleans. We decided the room together and
it was a huge snowstorm and cold, and back then
they hadn't invented those down mark you know, north face
type things, and so I had some fringe jacket with
(02:31):
little fringes and we were miserable.
Speaker 2 (02:35):
I mean, it would be fun, I think, to look
out the window and see feet of snow falling.
Speaker 4 (02:40):
It's fun to see it from the inside looking out raged.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
And it's fun to see it for the first days.
Speaker 4 (02:45):
Yeah, yeah, and then it's too much.
Speaker 2 (02:48):
How did they react to you?
Speaker 1 (02:50):
No, you didn't grow up with snow.
Speaker 3 (02:52):
I had snow in the Islands.
Speaker 4 (02:54):
I had sand seventy five DeGreasy year round.
Speaker 2 (02:57):
So complain when you when you were in Boston, how
did they were? They incredibly charmed by the accent and
the genteel Southern ways.
Speaker 3 (03:06):
Well, you know, there were a group of us that
came up from New Orleans that year, I think four
or five of us, and we had all read Faulkner
once to read Absolum absolom, and so we were all
being Clinton Thompson pretending to be southerns I remember we.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Drove up in my Pontiac and we.
Speaker 3 (03:26):
Bought cases of Dixie beer, remember Old Dixon Beer, And
it was somewhat inauthentic because we're from New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (03:33):
You know, we didn't play the Southern.
Speaker 3 (03:37):
Role. But I know when we went to college, for
at least the first six months, we were doing that
until we realized it was inauthentic.
Speaker 1 (03:46):
That's funny.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
And then when you were done with Harvard, that wasn't
enough for you either as far as you're learning. So
you decided to go to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar.
Speaker 3 (03:54):
Well, it was lucky. I was working as an oyster
shucker at the old Hula Hans.
Speaker 1 (03:58):
On Bourbon Strew. Yeah, and I.
Speaker 3 (04:01):
Was, you know, doing Christmas vacations a little bit. I
worked for T. Smith and Son Steve Adoors in the
summer on the right near here on the Luisa Street wharf.
And I remember that Christmas in my senior year, applying
for roads and you're kind of lucky because they do it.
They did it geographically, so you know, if you're coming
(04:21):
from Louisianasissippi slightly better I shouldn't say that, a slightly
better shot than you were coming from New York and Boston.
And I remember the roads board was at the Royal
Orleans and Willie Morris, the writer, was on it. And
years later I found out because he told me that
Bill Clinton, who was in like a failed congressional candidate
(04:42):
from Arkansas, was on it too. But I remember when
I won it, but I still had to go back
to Hula Hans and do the afternoon shift, and I
didn't want to tell anybody there I had just won
a Rhodes. But so I finished my shift and still
know how to open oysters.
Speaker 4 (05:02):
How fast are you?
Speaker 3 (05:04):
I'm not as good as Felix's or acme.
Speaker 4 (05:08):
Yeah, what's your favorite way to eat oysters?
Speaker 1 (05:11):
Raw? And I love it?
Speaker 3 (05:13):
You know lemon sometimes you know you've done these things
with the what's it called the vinegar on you Manyonet,
I love that, and I hate to say it, but
when I go to Manale's and sometimes on the way
home from Tulane, I'll stop at Menale's just in late
afternoon froists, I put a lot of ketchup in, but
(05:37):
those are good oysters.
Speaker 4 (05:38):
Yeah yeah. What else is one of your favorite things
to eat in New Orleans?
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Well?
Speaker 1 (05:45):
I love New Orleans food.
Speaker 3 (05:46):
I love the way the fusion like you do both
hear it and compare, which is you bring the flavors
of everything now with possibly the Islands and New Orleans,
and so that fusion of what I would call creole
high like you go to Moscas and you have you know,
Creole Italian you and we have so many restaurants, as
(06:08):
you know, we come to your restaurant a lot, but
we almost have a tradition, Kathy and I of galatoise
date night, Sunday night, same table whatever. Golf fish is
the best crab meat on top of it, and I
start with the good day, meaning the both the crab
salad and the shrimp rahmalode.
Speaker 4 (06:28):
That's an excellent choice.
Speaker 3 (06:30):
And we love moscas and we love Antoines, you know
New Year's Eve.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
In fact, that New Year's Eve.
Speaker 3 (06:36):
Where we had the tragedy, we were having dinner as
we have for thirty years.
Speaker 4 (06:41):
Wow.
Speaker 3 (06:42):
About two dozen of us have met at Antoines. High
school friends upstairs at Antoine's always the same thing. So
I'm pretty much a traditionalist. And we live in New York,
you know, a bit of a time, and we have
a little apartment there, and I'm the only person who
thinks that New York City is a foody.
Speaker 2 (07:02):
Well, that was one of the things I was going
to ask as you moved away as a young man
for brief periods of time, were there any food memories
that stuck out? That you had a shrimp up in
Boston and he said, it's not as sweet as a
golf shrimp, or I missed shrimp from lot at Antoines?
Were there any of those things?
Speaker 3 (07:21):
I'll tell you the one thing, you know, the proofs
remembrance of things past. Uh. He bites into the madeline,
which is a taste he has. When I first went
to Oxford, there was a French rest and called the Elizabeth,
and I'd never had crimbroulet, and I remember my first
week there, somebody took me there and had the crimbrulet,
(07:42):
and for some reason, I just it was really hot
on the top. And I've always searched now for the
perfect crimbrulet.
Speaker 1 (07:49):
So maybe you.
Speaker 4 (07:52):
Depression.
Speaker 2 (07:52):
The challenge flag has been raised.
Speaker 4 (07:55):
Yes, I love.
Speaker 1 (07:58):
I've never seen it on you man.
Speaker 4 (08:00):
We have it at compared we do a mango oh
mango crop.
Speaker 1 (08:03):
Yeah, maybe we'll go there. This eavesoning.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
See, so out of school, you become a journalist and
you're here, back and forth. That leads to a job
with Time magazine.
Speaker 3 (08:14):
Yeah, I was waiting for the paper here. And it
was the most amazing mayor's race, I guess seventy nine,
seventy nine, and it was after moon Land, who'd serve
two terms, and there were twelve people running for mayor
and it was all over the map, and it was
Dutch Mariol and Joe DeRosa and a few.
Speaker 2 (08:35):
People like that, who are so contenders.
Speaker 3 (08:37):
Who's some people real contenders, But there were also people
who as a restaurant tour you might remember this Rodney Fortell,
whose wife Ruth started Ruth's Chris's Steakhouse Wow. And Rodney
Fortell was running on a platform of getting a gorilla
for the New Orleans Zoo, and so he would show
up at all rallies and all debates wearing a gorilla costumes.
(08:59):
Oh my god, So tell me this is not.
Speaker 1 (09:01):
A hard race to come.
Speaker 3 (09:03):
And I was very lucky because so the first primary,
I went to Mike Roka fort Fisherman's Wharf. Everything involves
restaurants when you tell story. And he was a ward
leader down in the Irish Channel, and he got the
various assessors and the award leaders together and we went
over ward by ward who was going to win each ward?
(09:24):
And so I went out on a limb and I
did sort of a half joking column saying, here's how
it's going to turn out exactly. Here's the order of
the twelve candidates, and here's the percentages they're going to get.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
And it turned out to be right. The order was right.
Speaker 3 (09:38):
I was with a percentage point, not because I was
so smart, but because Mike Okafort and I think Ronnie,
one of the Burke family members was they were all
doing this for me. And that was a time that
a Time magazine editor was wandering around the country trying
to recruit people. These were in the good old days
of journalism when magazine sent people out to recruit reporters,
(10:02):
and the Time spicky and say tied them where they were,
touting the fact that my column had been right. And
he gave me a call and offered me a job
at Well. We had a few interviews, and then I
got a job at Time.
Speaker 2 (10:14):
That's that's amazing.
Speaker 3 (10:16):
So the other I'll tell a story I haven't told
too often, which is the other job I got That week.
I had been at Oxford study and there was a
guy named cord Meyer who was at the embassy in
England for the United States, and he got to know
every student and one day he called and said, I'm
coming to New Orleans.
Speaker 1 (10:34):
I'd like to meet you.
Speaker 3 (10:36):
See you again, and we met at the Hilton by
the airport, by the swimming poolt O, man is this guy,
And he was, of course the director of the CIA's
county intelligence you know agents, right, and he was recruiting
me to see if I would join the CIA. So
I had an offer from Time and an offer from
(10:58):
c and I went home to my we lived on
Napoleon Avenue. Then I went home and my mother listened
to it all through and I ended up I don't
know what we probably would have lost.
Speaker 1 (11:09):
The Cold War.
Speaker 2 (11:12):
That's so extreme different, it's amazing. Do you often think
back what would have changed? Or do you look at
world events?
Speaker 1 (11:21):
Sort of?
Speaker 3 (11:22):
Except for I will say something disappointing, which is Cordmyer
in the middle of talking to me about it. He'd say, well,
you know, we wouldn't really want you to be a
secret agent. We'd want you to be an analyst at headquarters.
And I'm going, how disappointing. So yeah, I guess if
I had taken the job, I'd still be sitting there
in Langley reading reports.
Speaker 2 (11:44):
Changing the world. Nonetheless, So the idea to write a book,
when did that first come to you? Or even the
possibility that I haven inside of me to try and
knock this out?
Speaker 3 (11:56):
Well, you know, I worked for Time Magazine with a
guy I went to college with, Evan Thomas. We were
friends and joined Time Magazine together after I left the
paper here and back then the internet wasn't anything, and
so you only had to write one day or two
days a week because it was a weekly magazine, and
anything on Monday through Wednesday got thrown away anyway, and
(12:18):
so we're bored out of our minds we're covering. I
was covering Reagan's campaign, and you get frustrated because you
have to write a whole lot of stuff and then
it gets boiled down to about a thousand words in
the magazine. So one day I was covering the Reagan
campaign and they were handing out leaflets about the American
(12:39):
establishment and how they're you know, the Rockefellers and the
Builderberg group and the roth Childs and whatever. And I said, Evan,
what's this American establishment thing? Because he was a preppy,
he had gone to prep school, and we decided, why
don't we write a book about it? And we picked
six characters, generally unknown people to most people, Abel Harrimon,
(13:00):
Dean Atchis and that six friends who had gone to
Grotten and Yale and Sculling Bones together and then created
our Cold War policy. It was an obscure, weird book,
but a wonderful editor named Alice Mayhew, who had edited
Woodward and Bernstein, said I've always wanted to publish that book.
It's a prequel to the Best and the brightest, meaning
(13:22):
the Halberstam book.
Speaker 1 (13:24):
And so we.
Speaker 3 (13:26):
Published that book and it was a somewhat surprising success,
and I thought, wow, people are going to pay me money.
Speaker 1 (13:35):
This is kind of cool. That's neat.
Speaker 4 (13:37):
So how do you approach writing?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Like is it?
Speaker 4 (13:42):
Just give me the insight because I'm trying.
Speaker 3 (13:44):
I'll tell you the great insight I got down here.
One of my mentors was Walker Percy, the great novelist
who lived in Covington. But uh, and he was the
He was the uncle of a very close friend. So
we used to go to Covington and go skiing on
the Boga fly and fishing and hunting for turtles. And
(14:04):
his daughter was our age. And at one point I said, Ann,
what does your dad do? He's always sitting on the
dock the bayou, eating hogshead cheese and drinking bourbon. Well,
he's a writer. And I didn't quite know what do
you mean. I knew you could be an engineer like
my father was, or a fisherman or a doctor. And
then the Moviegoer came out and I was about twelve thirteen,
(14:28):
I guess ten or twelve years old, and I finally
read it and I said, you know, Uncle Walker, what
are you trying to teach in this book? There's like
lessons and he said that two types of people come
out of Louisiana, preachers and storytellers. He said, for Heaven's sake,
be a story to the world has too many preachers.
Speaker 1 (14:47):
So my goal ever.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Since Alice Mayhew did the Editing of the Wise Men
and she always wrote all things in good time, keep
it chronological.
Speaker 1 (14:57):
Is I'm not a writer.
Speaker 3 (14:58):
I'm a storyteller, and I tell stories in a narrative, chronological,
reported way, and I let other people preach or make
their judgments.
Speaker 1 (15:10):
Right, that's neat. How did you as that that? What
do you call that?
Speaker 2 (15:18):
Those fears of influence over you? And the style of writing?
Was that always with you or has it honed through
the years or you always knew that you could make
unopinionated stories.
Speaker 3 (15:32):
Well back when I was growing up on the paper
here and the time, we actually tried to be objective, unbiased.
I mean I covered both Ted Kennedy and Ronald Reagan
for Time. And you know nowadays you're paid to have
opinions and pop off on cable TV or talk radio
or podcast. We were trained to be pretty straight and
(15:55):
I was trained here at the State's Item as it
was at the time it was merging into the Times
Picky In. I had a great city editor named Billy Rainey,
and I covered police headquarters a.
Speaker 1 (16:06):
Five am till one pm beat. We had a one
pm deadline for the afternoon edition. And he was always
just tell me the facts. You know.
Speaker 3 (16:17):
You'd call them up and say this happened. He'd go,
all right, well, you know, and he would go through
everything I needed to report, and he taught me a
big lesson. The very first day I was on the job,
there was a murder out in Carlton Avenue of a woman,
a young woman, and I went.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
To the scene.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
You then g went to a tayfunk at K and
B on Carlton and Clayborn and called in the story.
He said, well, what are the parents. I said, well, Billy,
I didn't go talk to the parents. He said, go
back to the house and talk to the parents. I thought, well,
there's no way. I knock on the door and the
parents are there and they talked to me for about
an hour. They're pulling out year books. They want to
(16:56):
tell the story. So the main thing I learned is
if You're willing to live and people are willing to talk.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
That's amazing.
Speaker 4 (17:03):
What has been your biggest challenge being a writer?
Speaker 3 (17:09):
The writing has always been fun. My biggest challenge as
a journalist was the rise of the partisanship and the advocacy.
Not advocacy journalism because in some ways that's fine, but
the biased, you know, uh journalism, and not just partisan
but almost poisonous and ideological. And I was working at
(17:32):
CNN after Time Magazine, and I watched the rise of
Fox and the rise of MSNBC.
Speaker 2 (17:40):
And when you say working, you were the president.
Speaker 3 (17:42):
Yeah, it was a CEO in tariff CNN and we
were doing fine. And it was the Gulf War and
nine to eleven and our brand of very straight journalism
of sending Nick Roberts in the Bagdad and Chris john
amanpoor to cover the wars. We had Aaron Brown and
others as anchors. That was working well, but on our
(18:03):
left flank. Ms NBC was coming up on the right
flank Fox and they started doing much better, not having
reporters and Baghdad bureaus, but having Bill O'Reilly's or Rachel
maddow's give you their opinions and to me, that was
a challenge, and that's why I got out of journalism.
Speaker 1 (18:22):
I mean, it has to be.
Speaker 2 (18:24):
It's tough for me as someone who has always loved
journalism and what it was and what it's supposed to be,
to now have to select your brands of journalism just
because something else annoys you, instead of just reading the
story that's there to be told.
Speaker 3 (18:39):
It used to be from the end of World War
Two until about the year two thousand, there was a
sort of mass media where most people had shared the
same common pool of facts and information. You might think
there was, and there was at times various biases, but
Kronkit would say, that's the way it is. We'll be
(19:02):
having coffee the next day and say here's what you know.
What do you think of what happened? And we get
to make our own opinions. I think that was a
particular period. Nowadays, everybody goes to the corner of the
blogger sphere or their corner of their podcasting world, or
of talk radio or cable news, and people have come
(19:27):
away with different sets of facts. And that's a deep
problem in our country which we're seeing manifest and our politics.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
And it even happened to you personally on your watch
at CNN where you were actually reaching out to Republicans
right saying we're not trying to Yeah.
Speaker 3 (19:42):
I mean was there was a feeling when I came
to CNN. It was before Fox was really growing that
fast that CNN was part of a center left liberal
media establishment.
Speaker 1 (19:57):
And I always have an open mind, and I'm thinking
about it.
Speaker 3 (20:00):
You know what, there's some truth to that. There's an
odious smell of truth to some of that. Most of
the journalists would probably registered. I mean I never registered
in a party. I was always an independent. But when
I was a journalist, but and I said, you know,
maybe we do have some unconscious biases. And I went
(20:20):
to Capitol Hill with Newt Gingridge and many others who's
a professor of history at Tulane years ago, and I said, okay,
I want to talk to Republicans to say we're going
to try to show all sides. I got criticism of that.
That shows how weird things were becoming. I was slammed
for going to Capitol Hill and visiting Republicans and saying
(20:43):
we're trying to be open. We want you to be
guests on our network as much as anybody, that's a shame.
Speaker 4 (20:50):
And so in regards to writing a book or interviewing
people who has been, who have been like the most
instrumental people through your journey.
Speaker 3 (21:01):
Well, Alice Mayhew, who's this unbelievably great editor at Simon
and Schust. So she died a few couple of years ago.
She was the one who accepted the wise men on
the spot. And unlike almost any other author, you know,
I've never let other publishing houses bid on my books
or have any auction. I would just have lunch with
(21:23):
Alice and I'd say, okay, Benjamin Franklin, I'd say okay,
Steve Jobs or whatever. And she taught me to make
things a narrative. And she was religious. She read the
Bible a lot, and she said, it has the best
lead sentence in the beginning Coon, so just keep those
(21:46):
rhythms of the King James Bible and tell it the
way you know a good narrative would.
Speaker 1 (21:54):
So she was very influential.
Speaker 3 (21:56):
I had great editors at time, and you know, in
some ways, the greatest rocks I have of the fact that,
as I said, we have the same couple of dozen
people who meet at Antwine's on New year's even any
other times the people I was in fifth grade or
sixth grade with. That's why I've come back home is
(22:18):
if you've run CNN and been editive time, you don't
know who's your friend. Everybody's blowing smoke at you. But
I come back home and they remember me when I
had really big ears a kid, and so I'm grounded
by being among family and friends here.
Speaker 4 (22:36):
I love that.
Speaker 2 (22:37):
And that's neat when you are choosing the next book,
the subject of the next book, what is that process
like or is it ongoing?
Speaker 3 (22:47):
Where you know there's a great light and Lord of
the rings of he who wanders is not lost. And
I've kind of been wandering around. And what happened was
after The Wise Men, which ends with Vietnam War starting,
I said I want to do something, so I did
Henry Kissinger. After dealing with Henry Kissinger at the end
of it, I said, Okay, I'm gonna do somebody's been
(23:09):
dead for more than two hundred dealing. And I also
wanted to understand balance of power diplomacy. And that was
Benjamin Franklin. Because we think of him as a doddering
dude flying a kite in the Rain, but he was
the greatest diplomat we had, and then he was a
great scientist. So that made me want to demystify Einstein.
After that, I had done Ben Franklin and Einstein, and
(23:31):
I was at a book party somebody was sewing in
California and Steve Jobs was there. He said, take a
walk with me, and they said, do me next, and
so I said, I said, all right, Ben Franklin, Albert.
Speaker 1 (23:42):
Einstein, you you arrogant.
Speaker 3 (23:46):
I'll do you in thirty or forty years when retire.
But then somebody said, if you're to do him, you
gotta do him now. I said, I didn't know he
was diagnosed with He said, well, he's keeping it. He
kept it a secret he had and told the board.
But he talked to you the day after his diagnosis.
Speaker 1 (24:00):
So that was a way.
Speaker 3 (24:03):
And I like going back and forth between history, you know,
and then contemporary things because I'm pretty good at reporting,
at doing what Billy Randy taught me at the newspaper here,
which is just listen to people. And so I would
sit there for two years just listening to Steve Jobs
and did that book. But once I did that, like
I'm going to go back five hundred, Leonardo, when Steve
(24:27):
was the one who told me, he said, you think
you're wandering, but you actually have a pattern, which is
you love people.
Speaker 1 (24:33):
You don't love power.
Speaker 3 (24:34):
You don't write about presidents, and you don't even write
about genius, even though you think you do. It's about
people who are imaginative and innovative because they stand at
the intersection of technology and the humanities, at the intersection
of the arts and sciences. Ben Franklin, Einstein, Steve Jobs,
(24:55):
and so I realized that was what interested me. And
I've always looked at people who have connected the sciences
and the humanity.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
And you're educated fairly heavily in the humanities. Your your
dad was an engineer. Where did that fascination with science
come in.
Speaker 1 (25:12):
Well, you know, it's all about dad.
Speaker 3 (25:14):
Biographers know whether it's Elon Musker, Henry kissinguror Einstein, it's
all about living up to their dad. And my dad
was a wonderful engineer, was the engineer for the structural
and mechanical and electric with the super Dome what was
in the first Convention Center in the International Trademark.
Speaker 1 (25:35):
Which is now the fourth season.
Speaker 3 (25:36):
So he would take me around and show me the
motor that did the revolving plumsul club on the top
of what is now the Four Seasons, and show me
how in one quarter horsepower the gears. So he loved
teaching things. And in our basement on Napoleon Avenue, we
had boxes of transistors and resistors and capacitors and soldering
iron and make circuits and fix radios, and.
Speaker 1 (26:00):
So he taught me a love of technology. It wasn't
just science. It was what is a circuit?
Speaker 3 (26:07):
How do you make a circuit with resistance capacity to
transistors and they're on off switches, so how do they
process logical things? And nowadays people don't know how to
open their eyePhone. It is, but I remember being able
to visualize them what people thought was magic, but I
(26:28):
knew it was how technology works.
Speaker 2 (26:31):
That's wild And it's a gift too. Yeah, there aren't
a lot of people who can bring both of those worlds.
It's a gift to me, each of those worlds out there.
Speaker 3 (26:39):
It's a gift to me because I believe you can
learn anything if you really try. And people get afraid
of learning science. They you think I'll never be able
to do relativity theory right. This is a patent clerk Einstein,
who does you can't even get a job teaching at university.
And he's just visualizing how do you synchronize clocks using
(27:00):
light beam and signals? And I say, okay, I know
how to write this and explain it. But the joy
for me is I get to when I did Jennifer
Dowden in The Codebreaker, I got to edit human genes
in her lap. When I was doing Einstein, I get
to learn what is the theory of relativity? And I
(27:22):
not only believe you can learn anything. I believe there's
a real joy in learning if you let yourself, just
like you have a joy of making your side. I'm
gonna make pasta now for changing some of the menu, say,
and that's a joy, well if for anybody who wants it.
There is the joy of saying I can understand something.
(27:44):
I'm gonna learn something that's beautiful.
Speaker 1 (27:46):
I love that.
Speaker 4 (27:48):
So now we're gonna switch gears. Where we are in
the new year of twenty twenty five, and you are
at two Lane, and you have a book fair if
you want to tell us about and it has.
Speaker 2 (28:01):
Been argued that it is your greatest contribution to the
city is the awareness of this book fair and what
it has grown into.
Speaker 3 (28:09):
Well, thank you for asking about it. And you know,
when I was at the Aspen in Stute, we had
an Ideas Fessel and it got bigger and bigger book
as people are hungry to talk about books and ideas.
As I say, there's a joy in learning, and especially
in this era of a loneness, and COVID made it worse.
(28:30):
People like actually being in a place. They don't want
to just watch it on YouTube or something. And so
when I came back to New Orleans, Sheryl Landrew when
she was the first lady, had run in city Park
of Children's Book Fair, and we put our heads together
and I said, look, whenever I publish a book, I
(28:51):
got to go to the Miami Book Fessel. I go
to the Atlanta Book Festival. I go to the Los
Angeles Book Fessel, even Sun Valley Book how come we
don't have one here? And we have a cultural calendar
that for me begins on New Year's Eve, but yeah,
obviously goes through Twelfth Night, then Marty Grass and then Easter,
but then jazz Fest and somewhere in that cultural catalog
(29:16):
food and Wine Fest, maybe we should have an ideas
a cultural thing. So Cheryl and Andrew and I put
our heads together, and one of the things we learned
is it's easy. You invite Dorris Corns Goodwin, you invite
your Foust, do you invite Skip Gay, You invite all
these people and say do you want to come to
(29:36):
New Orleans for three days? And they go yes, In fact,
we're doing it now. It's March twenty seventh to twenty ninth.
And my biggest problem with Cheryl is she keeps saying,
You've got to quit talking to people because I'm like
talking to Maureen Daubs says can I said, sure you
can come this year. And now we've got more authors
coming than we have room on stage four. But we're
(30:00):
to make it both local with you and the cookbook
authors and Archie Manning and others talking about the Saints,
and then Gail Benson is doing things with Dennis Lasha
on the super Dome. So it's not just books, although
cookbooks count and you got a new one, but you know,
we're we're just trying to bring all these people together
(30:25):
and it's really fun. And I think it's great for
Now Orleans because we've got.
Speaker 1 (30:29):
An awesome literary heritage here.
Speaker 3 (30:32):
I mean, you go back to Cage Chopin and left
Caddie o'hearne. But at least in my mind, I go back,
not that I'm that old, to Sherwood Anderson William Faulkner
Tennessee Williams, when the Double Dealer was the magazine being
published in the French Quarter and Faulkner was living in
what's now Faulkner Books. And I grew up, you know,
(30:54):
very in awe of that New Orleans tradition of writing
and Walker person we got.
Speaker 4 (30:59):
To throw him into it, of course. So what's next
for you for this year? What are you most looking
forward to?
Speaker 3 (31:05):
Well, I'm looking forward to book Fast And the cool
thing about book FESTL I think is that it's open
to the public. You don't need to get a big
chief pass, you know, pay a lot of money. Is
it the tu Lane campus. Just take the street car,
the Fret bus and get there an uber And yeah,
if you want to be a patron, we have a
(31:26):
you know, some patron levels that help us put it on.
But it's also free and open to the community, and
you don't even have to think about in advance. You
just look at the schedule and you say, wow, I've
always wanted to hear Doris Karns Goodwin talk about John
Kennedy and Teddy Roosevelt. And you know we have well,
(31:48):
we have a spectacular lineup and we almost model it
on Jazz Fest. I hope they don't get because we
do that fart that made Trix Well. We have about
six venues like the Tent on the Lawn and the
McAllister Auditorium, and you can pick a small venue which
is maybe some intellectual professors, or you can pick a
(32:10):
big venue and maybe John Grisham right talking about his novels.
And you just walk around with that little grin and say,
where am.
Speaker 1 (32:17):
I going next?
Speaker 4 (32:18):
I'm looking forward to that.
Speaker 1 (32:19):
Well, we're looking forward to, haven't you. You gotta cook
when you're there.
Speaker 4 (32:24):
I don't know yet, but I'm very excited about the book.
Speaker 1 (32:27):
And you know, tell me about the book. I know it,
but tell me about it.
Speaker 4 (32:30):
So it's really my culinary journey growing up in Solution,
then going through Jamaica, Miami, and then it book ends
in rans So it's very talking about the different creole
cultures that we have in the world. So it starts
off in solution ends in your ands, so it's showing
the similarities but also the differences. And I just really
(32:51):
wanted to document Caribbean recipes because we don't have a
lot of Caribbean cookbooks out there, so I wanted to
just make sure that we present and you.
Speaker 3 (33:01):
Do it like I was talking about as a narrative,
as a journey. So it's not just a set of recipes,
it's a narrative journey. And when we talk about narratives,
it's all about the journey. It's about Odysseus setting off
on an odyssey or huck Finn setting off on a raft,
and that's you setting off from Saint Lucia.
Speaker 2 (33:20):
What do you say to an author who will never
swears to never ever do another book again.
Speaker 4 (33:27):
That's me right now.
Speaker 1 (33:30):
I can't wait to read your next book.
Speaker 4 (33:32):
It's not going to happen. It's too much. It's a
lot of woke and it's such a long process because
you know you have to put everything into it, and
there's times where you're not inspired, you're not motivated, and
it's I would tell the rise of what I was
doing the book with me. I said, I need to
pause today because I'm not giving it my all, and
(33:55):
it's something that is very personal. It's it is a
long thing. It's not like an Instagram post where you
can delete it once it's published. That's it. So I
wanted to be very thoughtful, and we kind of took
a little bit longer than the normal process, but I
feel good about it.
Speaker 3 (34:11):
Well, my advice is take your time. Yes, number two,
whenever you're stuck, pretend you're at one of these tables
and you say to yourself the six magic words, okay,
which are let me tell you a story. And whenever
you have trouble saying, say, wait a minute, let me
tell your story about when I first went to church
in Saint Lucia or when I left for the and
(34:33):
that gets you started. Because one of things we do
at restaurant tables and especially in New Orleans, is we're
very good at saying, let me tell you a story.
Speaker 2 (34:41):
Right.
Speaker 4 (34:42):
I wish I had that advice when I got stuck.
But number two, Okay, we're gonna switch gears now. We're
entering Carnival season. Favorite kincake.
Speaker 3 (34:56):
Oh yeah, I just went on twelve Night when the
Funny forty Fools or whatever, and to the place Tien
Williamson helps run on Saint Charles Biffel Town, and it
was a whole spread of cake cakes. And I always
get amused by the newest one, and that's you big
pies king cake.
Speaker 1 (35:17):
How was that?
Speaker 3 (35:19):
It's pretty? I mean kingcakes. You shouldn't overdo it on
king cakes, I know, while you're on a sugar rush.
One of my favorite stories, though, is I was part
of a group in New Orleans that was trying to
figure out the diversity of New Orleans and had to
celebrate it. And one of the people part of the
committee was a younger Vietnamese guy, and I'm talking about
(35:42):
how like when you come in from the Islands or
somebody comes in from Italy, they bring so much to
the jambalaya we have here. And he started saying, well,
you know, these new immigrants are coming in and they're
ruining things. He says, well, like they come in and
then they're ruining the kingcakes. They're putting strawberries in kin cake.
(36:04):
Now look at him, and he had you know, his
family had come in nineteen seventy five with the gimmes.
They have great bakeries. They're doing things, and I'm saying,
wait a minute, but it's sort of weird that the
last people who came want to pull up the ladder
and take new people coming a horrible right.
Speaker 1 (36:19):
So we have to learn now that ain't the case.
Speaker 4 (36:22):
That's great. I love that, but I'm more of a
Galatoi than the kincake. I'm not slush sugar. Larry luves
Larry loves me.
Speaker 3 (36:34):
I'm going to say the thing that will get me
dis dising whatever disabused to being a New Orleanian is
the two things that are culinary delights here that I
can only take in limited portions or Begnet's and kincakes. Yeah,
I think once I get those sugar rushes, it's like
I say to myself, all right, let me give it
(36:55):
a break for a while.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
But I love the cafe ola so good one.
Speaker 2 (37:01):
They end up coming with it. Yeah, when you are
teaching at two, right, how large are your classes? You're
teaching the spring and teach.
Speaker 3 (37:10):
Two classes this semester. Okay, one of them's fourteen students
and one of them is one hundred and forty students.
I love the diversity of that. I teach a seminar
in biography writing, and then with Nick Mattay, a great
computer scientist, we co teach a course called the Digital
Revolution from Ada to AI meaning Ada Lovelace in the
(37:33):
eighteen forties created the first computer algorithm too AI. And
that's a great course. I've just been teaching it past
a few weeks, and it's a way of learning the history,
but you also have to learn a little of the technology.
It's part of my thing about you can learn anything,
(37:54):
and you should stand at the intersection of the arts
and sciences. So if you're a history student, you may say, okay,
I love the history of how Microsoft was started, but
you also have to learn what is basic, What did
Bill Gates actually right? How did that make the personal
computer possible? You don't have to know a whole lot
of math and be able to code, but you have
(38:15):
to understand the technology and the history. So that's the
magic of what we're doing at Tulane.
Speaker 2 (38:22):
Are there any students you look out there and say
you're not going to make it in life.
Speaker 1 (38:28):
I'm just saying, I'll tell you it's just the opposite, Okay.
Speaker 3 (38:32):
I keep oh even when I'm up in New York.
We'll see all my students will get together, the ones
who you know were in the class before. It's amazing
how focused, dedicated and earnest the tu Lane students are
the class I have now on the digital revolution. I'm
already blown away by their eagerness to create great innovative products.
Speaker 1 (38:59):
Do you tell them that? Oh yeah, I mean, and
I saw. I mean that as a.
Speaker 2 (39:05):
A right or wrong question. I just it was interesting.
I went to Georgia Tech where we had no humanity
being send back to us.
Speaker 1 (39:14):
Oh yeah, I mean.
Speaker 3 (39:15):
I hang around after class and we go over the projects.
And my wife is on the board of Idea Village,
and we're involved in New Orleans entrepreneurs Week, which this
year is sort of combining a bit with Book Festival.
So this notion of giving students who come here from
all over the world to come to Tulane and they're
(39:35):
innovative a chance to be innovative in the city of
New Orleans is important.
Speaker 4 (39:39):
Well, so thank you so much for spending the morning
with us. And it's always been a pleasure having you
and chatting with you, So thank you.
Speaker 1 (39:47):
Well.
Speaker 3 (39:47):
Spending the morning with you, Nina and Larry is almost
as good as spending the evening with you for.
Speaker 1 (39:53):
Having me back to BABS.
Speaker 3 (39:55):
Thank you, which I will continue to call by Water America.
Speaker 2 (39:58):
That's all right, as long as you call yeah.
Speaker 3 (40:00):
And bring the Krember leg for compla. Guys, I know
what you're saying. That's what happens when you cross culture.
Speaker 4 (40:08):
You never stopped learning, So thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1 (40:13):
Bike.
Speaker 3 (40:14):
Wait for the Yeah, Wait for Yeah, Gay, Wait for
the remember make wait for the Reaper, wait for the
make Way for the Everybody was the Rock
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com