Walter Isaacson explores how Leonardo da Vinci dissected human eyes to perfect the Mona Lisa’s smile while his war machines failed, contrasting with Elon Musk, who granted unprecedented access—revealing serial focus and childhood trauma from his father’s abuse. Jennifer Doudna’s Nobel-winning gene editing mirrors Isaacson’s shift toward women in science, inspired by Ada Lovelace. The Declaration of Independence’s "self-evident" truths, shaped by Franklin and Adams amid secrecy (signed August 2–4, 1776), became a catalyst for rights despite contradictions like slavery. His biographies highlight collaboration over lone genius, framing innovation as a shared endeavor across eras. [Automatically generated summary]
Now they love me because most of them have gotten jobs in the private sector for two and three times more money than they were being paid by the federal government.
We had some jobs where you had 10 workers for one job, 10 workers for a job that one person should be doing.
And we've gotten rid of a lot of those jobs.
And by getting rid of them, these people became available to work in the private sector.
And as you know, the numbers are incredible.
So the job numbers are incredible.
The financial numbers are beyond belief.
Again, they thought it couldn't be done in four years, and I did it in one year.
And the numbers you're going to see is these, I don't know if you notice also construction numbers, the jobs for construction workers.
You know why?
Because they're building plants all over the United States, that's why.
And when these plants open in a year from now, some sooner, some a little bit later, but when these auto plants, AI plants, and thousands of other types of plants, when they open over the next period of a year, year and a half, you're going to see numbers like we've never seen before in this country.
Thank you very much, everybody.
Thank you.
unidentified
Thank you, Mr. President.
Let's go.
America's Book Club is brought to you by these television companies and is supported by the Ford Foundation.
From the nation's iconic libraries and institutions, America's Book Club takes you on a powerful journey of ideas, exploring the lives and inspiration of writers who have defined the country in conversation with civic leader and author David Rubinstein.
As a young boy growing up in Baltimore, I went to my local library and was inspired to read as many books as I could.
Hopefully people will enjoy hearing from these authors and hopefully they'll want to read more.
Now from the National Archives in Washington, D.C., former CEO of CNN and editor of Time Magazine, best-selling biographer of Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, Benjamin Franklin, and Elon Musk, Walter Isaacson.
Well, you know, in our professions, we meet a lot of smart people.
And at some point, you realize smart people are a dime a dozen.
In order to be a genius, you have to be creative.
You have to think out of the box.
And one of the things that struck me when I wrote about Benjamin Franklin early on was what a great scientist and technologist he was.
We think of him as a doddering dude flying a kite in the rain.
But those were the most important scientific experiments of the time.
So I decided to do as sort of the row I would plow in the field of biography, those who connect the arts and the sciences, the humanities and technology.
Very much self-taught because he was lucky to be apprenticed to his older brother who was a printer and bookseller.
So he'd take the books down every night.
But when you look at really great people, sometimes it's a team.
And you needed smart people for the founding of our nation.
And you had Jefferson and Madison and so you needed passionate people like Samuel Adams and his cousin John and people of great rectitude like Washington.
But the real key is can you find the common ground?
Can you bring people together?
And Franklin had a wisdom that's not always there with intelligence.
You know, he was definitely not winning the award for the best family man ever.
He has Deborah, his common-law wife.
She had been married before, and her husband had disappeared.
So they had to have a common law relationship.
Franklin even has a son, a son born out of wedlock, right before they got married, but he takes the son in.
And so not only is his relationship with Deborah sort of functional, she didn't like to travel, he traveled all the time, but William became a loyalist to the crown and broke with his father, Benjamin Franklin.
So that conflict in the family is part of the interesting tale.
Well, Jefferson gets to be chair of the committee, as you know, which includes John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and two other representatives.
Adams takes credit for making Jefferson have the right to write the first draft.
Although I think even if they didn't want Adams to do it, Jefferson was the youngest but the best writer.
But what happens is Jefferson finishes a draft on June 21st, I think, 1776, and sends it down Market Street one block to Ben Franklin and says, would the good Dr. Franklin make any improvements he wants?
So you can watch five different drafts of the Declaration, which for those of us who are editors is kind of inspiring.
It took about three or four years, but I had been thinking about Franklin and especially his science.
My father was an engineer.
I loved the idea of the invention of batteries and electricity and currents.
And so I'd always studied his science.
And then I said, after I'd done Henry Kissinger, I wanted to figure out balance of power diplomacy, which was Franklin's expertise, but how that connected to Newtonian checks and balances.
What he did was discover that lightning was electricity, which was quite important because lightning was the biggest scourge of the time.
He also discovered that electricity was a flow.
People thought, you know, static electricity, they couldn't quite figure it out.
But he realized he coins the terms plus and minus, negative and positive, battery, and he realizes it's called the single fluid theory of electricity, which other than Newton's theories is probably the most important theory of that century.
Now, a lot of people who are great geniuses and accomplish a lot in life have complicated personal lives.
So you've already mentioned Franklin had a complicated personal life, but his grant, his son, did he not, was he not in favor of imprisoning his son because his son was a loyalist?
And there was not really a just personal chatting.
You know, Rousseau, others had done their pensés like Pascal, but they were basically meditations.
Franklin writes in the pure vernacular, just chatting away at the reader.
So he's almost inventing not just autobiography, but that folksy, homespun way of writing that you see all the way through Will Rogers and to the present.
Well, after I finished doing Henry Kissinger and had to deal with the blowback and the fallout and him explaining to me how I was wrong about how great he was, I said, I'm going to do somebody who's been dead for 250 years.
And so I walked back to Franklin.
And then after doing Steve Jobs, it was somewhat similar.
I mean, he was a tough character to deal with.
I said, I'm going to do somebody who's been dead 500 years.
The Germans would call it fingerspetzengefuel, of how something somewhere would affect something else, how everything is interrelated in foreign affairs.
So as he's playing off the North Vietnamese with the Russians, their patron, the Chinese, he could do that real politique that he learned from Bismarck and Metternich.
I did Ben Franklin, Einstein, and I was at a book event in California, and there's Steve Jobs.
He says, Let's take a walk.
And we take a walk.
And he says, Do me next.
And my first reaction was, Yeah, you arrogant, you know, Franklin, Einstein, you.
But then I realized, first of all, that he had been diagnosed with cancer and that he had affected our lives more than anybody else.
Everything from the cell phone we have in our pocket to the fact we can plug in a computer and play with it to retail stores to digital animation, everything, a thousand songs in our pocket, that he had affected our lives the most.
And he was somebody who connected technology to the humanities, so he was perfect.
I made an arrangement with Steve Jobs, which is, I don't want to do it based on interviews.
I want to do it based on being by your side, walking through your design studio with Johnny I, being at meetings, being at your house in Palo Alto, just watching you.
Well, the important thing about the book was I just let the story tell itself.
I realized I had such good material.
Every meeting, everything about him, everything from Steve Wozniak to John Scully, who he got rid of, all these people.
And so I didn't try to preach or pontificate.
I said, just let me tell you a story.
And the book did well, not because of the book, but he was just, you know, almost canonized from here to China, and everybody wanted to read about his magic.
So when you're a book writer, let's say a history book writer or writer of biographies, typically you do lots of research.
You could do three, four, five years, and then people start writing.
That's what they do.
Some of them do that way.
Like Ron Chernow would say he spends four or five years researching, then he writes.
In your case, you're a journalist by background, and so when you get information, do you go back after a week or two and write it up, and then you write your book in kind of a serial way, or do you wait till all the research is done and then you start writing?
So the books we've talked about were people who were mostly people who were, let's say, born in the United States, or not Kishner wasn't born here, but spent most of his life here.
When you wrote about Einstein, he spent a large part of his life in Germany and in Europe.
Did you have to learn German to be able to understand everything he had done earlier in his life?
No, although I did have a German translator, just as when I did Leonardo, I had somebody who not only knew Italian, but knew the Umbrian dialect of the 1500s, which is what Leonardo did.
I'm doing Marie Curie now and joyfully knew French as a child and I'm learning French again.
I mean, he had a little place near Berlin on a lake, and that was problematic.
Eventually the Nazis came in and raided it, which is why he came over.
So he's at the end of Long Island, and he'd be dreaming in these little dinghies, just one person, and they'd have to send the Coast Guard out for him.
I think that what was important was he would say, even when I was doing general relativity, the most elegant theory in all of science, whenever he was stumped, you know, sometimes we have writer's block.
I think he had equation blocked.
He'd say, I'd pull out my violin and play Mozart, which would connect me to the harmony of the spheres.
His first wife was somebody in the Zurich Polytech with him, who was the only woman, Mileva Marovich, who was a physics student at the Polytech, and helped him in some ways in the 1905 papers by typing them up, helping with the math.
And some people say she doesn't get enough credit, although in my book I explore exactly what you can do.
Interestingly, they had a relationship before they got married, and they had a child, and because it was considered in German Jewish circles not to be very good to have children out of wedlock, they gave the child up for adoption.
Later, when they got married, they never went back to find the child.
Yeah, it's one of life's mysteries, and we have many mysteries in my biography, like who is the mother of Benjamin Franklin's son, William.
I play with that in the book.
But also, what happened to Albert Einstein and Maleva's first child, who seems to have been put up for adoption and probably died young in one of the plagues.
Okay, so you mentioned something about Albert Einstein and the child, and we talked about the one he gave up.
And that reminded me of something that's maybe the most kind of interesting part of the book on Steve Jobs, at least the part I thought so was interesting.
Steve Jobs was adopted.
And at one point, his sister found out who their father was.
And you can tell the story of, did he want to meet his father after all these years?
Now, when Einstein died, probably violating a lot of medical ethics, the surgeon who was there at the end took his brain out to examine whether he had some special features.
Whatever happened to that brain and did he have a different brain than everybody else?
We biographers have a dirty little secret, which is we make it seem like some guy or gal goes to a garage or a garret, has a light bulb moment, innovation happens.
We all know it's a team sport, that creativity is a collaborative effort.
So I wanted to show that through the innovators, how all these people work together.
And you had a magical time beginning, say, in 1955, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, who does the World Wide Web, and Bill Gates are all born that year.
And then what happens for Steve and Bill Gates is Silicon Valley happens.
You have venture capitalists coming in and funding it.
You have Stanford doing basic research.
You have government funding of basic research.
So you have, just as you had in Florence in 1500 when Leonardo comes from the village of Vinci, you had in Silicon Valley the cradle for innovation.
As Steve Jobs said to me when he said, I want you to do my biography because you connect the humanities to the sciences.
And then he said, and the ultimate of that is Leonardo, the guy who does Vitruvian Man, you know, the naked dude doing jumping jacks in the circle and square.
And he said, that's the symbol of it.
And the really great thing about Leonardo, and here we are in the National Archives, is that he left us more than 7,000 pages of his notebooks.
You can just go page by page and see him sketching the people for the Last Supper, but also trying to do Fibonacci's equations by how curls work.
With Steve Jobs, I tried to get his stuff from the 1990s.
He and I tried to get the memos he wrote.
They were in a next computer and the operating system doesn't work.
Somewhat controversial, but at least 12 that have been totally finished, and up to 18, depending on how you count things, like Salvador Mundi, the one that's disputed that I think Mohamed bin Salman bought.
Well, it's the most famous because it's the greatest painting ever done.
He worked on it for at least 15 years, carrying it with him wherever he went.
And the thing that makes it miraculous is the science of it.
He dissects the human eye, you know, as a scientist, to figure out that in the corner of your eye, you see shadows and colors well, but in the center of your retina, you see points.
And at one point, Jackie Kenny, when she's First Lady, talks de Gaulle and the Minister of Culture in France into lending the Leonardo famous Mona Lisa to the National Gallery of Art, which is a couple blocks from here.
Was that a big deal in the United States when he came over?
And de Gaulle had to be totally smitten by Jacqueline O'Nassis to allow it to come both here to the National Gallery and then I think to the Metropolitan Museum.
As you know very well, the National Gallery has the only Leonardo painting in North America or probably outside of Europe, which is Ginevra da Benchi, which is in some way the precursor to the Mona Lisa.
I mean, the famous helicopter, which looks like that corkscrew.
I don't think you can even say the name without going like this, because you have to show it.
That, of course, never works.
But eventually, the theory behind it works.
He does have these great weapons of war he's trying to do for the Duke of Milan and for other warlords he's working for.
I think there's certain things he does that works, but he loved being an engineer, but it's mainly the architecture and some of the things he designed that worked the best.
Well, my daughter actually said when she was applying to college, and we of our generation think you're supposed to help them with the essay, and she wouldn't let me even read it.
I said, who did you do?
And she said, Ada Lovelace.
I said, who's Ada Lovelace?
She said, oh, dad, she invented the first computer algorithm.
So Ada Lovelace becomes a framing device of a book The Innovators I did.
But after doing physics, with Einstein and the digital revolution, the next revolution is life sciences revolution.
I said, how can I capture that?
And I got to know all the people who are doing gene editing.
And Jennifer Doudner said, she's the one who's going to win the Nobel Prize.
And it's hard to hack the Swedish Academy, but we were able to make sure she won the Nobel Prize.
Well, you wrote a book about her, and as you're writing the book, and I don't remember, it was just the book was about to come out when she won the Nobel Prize?
And there's a wonderful picture in the book, because she's at Berkeley, and at 5 a.m., she's told she's in the kitchen on the phone with her husband and little son.
And the main question I had is, how did they get that picture?
But Berkeley, every person who might win a Nobel Prize, they send a photographer that night to be on their porch.
So another person you wrote a book about that got a lot of attention was a person named Elon Musk.
Another person whose childhood was a bit so how did you get access to Elon Musk and did he let you do what Steve Jobs let you do, just wander around with him?
What he is is a serial tasker who, like Napoleon, knows there's a detail on the battlefield that needs my attention and goes right there.
So even the night that the Twitter board accepted his offer and he's going to suddenly buy Twitter, the world's going nuts about it.
We're flying to Boca Chica, which is where SpaceX is.
And he goes into the conference room.
There's like 20 people in there and he just bought Twitter by going.
All he is is focusing on the Raptor engine and the wiring and the need for a heat shield in the Raptor engine and spends more than an hour deeply focused on that.
And then suddenly switches attention once that meeting is over to full self-driving problem they're having and then to a problem at Twitter.
His genius is in material science and understanding exactly why Ingenelle shouldn't be the head on the Raptor engine skill and in manufacturing things.
Steve Jobs was brilliant at going around the design studio and saying, hey, let's make the curves on this iPhone this way.
But then they tossed it over the ocean to China to have it built.
Musk believes that if you're not manufacturing your own things, you're not able to iterate day after day.
So SpaceX, Tesla, they're building the big factories.
He was in the book, as you know, he's furious about Biden not inviting him to the Electric Vehicle Summit, his daughter having transitioned and he thinks it's all woke mind virus, all these things.
So I watch him move from being an Obama supporter to being very anti-woke, very populist, right.
And I knew that he wanted to go into government.
It's a shame because had he gone into government and focused on what he's good at, like going to the Pentagon and saying, this procurement process is crazy, or the way you're building the F-35 is nuts, or to do things like that, he could have changed the government for good.
But instead, unfortunately, he started, you know, let's get rid of this part of USAID and firing people.
His father, you know, when Elon got beaten up as a kid at school by bullies, he'd go home and his father said, it's your fault, you're useless, you're a loser, and would make him stand in front of him for an hour and berate him.
And his father, as more has come out recently, but some is in the book, has children by his own stepdaughter.
And so it's that darkness of Elon's childhood that gives him the drive, but also gives him the demons.
Well, one of the great things we're talking about, great archives, is we also have her notebooks.
And nobody's really going page by page through the archives and figuring out what did she do each day.
We all know she's St. Marie Curie.
And the interesting thing is right around 1900, when we have Einstein as a patent clerk trying to figure out relativity and other things, she's the person who best understands that chemistry is basically physics.
It's how the electrons are revolving, how they radiate.
She comes up with the concept of radioactivity, names it, discovers radium.
And so that notion that's at the core of the 20th century comes from Marie Curie.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and they're endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
35 words that become our mission statement as a nation.
It's a great contradiction embed, or the tragic contradiction, embed in the founding of our nation.
Because indeed, he writes, all men are created equal.
And when George Mason does it in the precursor document, the Bill of Rights, the Rights of Virginia, he puts when they enter into society.
But Jefferson just keeps all men are created equal.
It becomes a forcing mechanism because as you know, fourscore and seven years later, at the Gettysburg Cemetery, Lincoln refers to that sentence saying, a nation dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
So it becomes a forcing document to make us better.
Well, as you know, Abigail Adams writes to John Adams, who's on the drafting committee, what about don't forget the ladies?
And John Adams writes, we're not giving up our masculine rights.
But the cool thing about the sentence is that it wasn't a description or declaration of the way things were at the time.
It was the aspirational document.
So you look at 249 and a half years since then.
We have expanded what does it mean?
Who's included?
Not just white male property owners, but over each generation, whether it's the 7,000 people killed at Gettysburg or the civil rights movement with Dr. King, we expand that sentence to make it so that all people are part of that sentence.
Adams, of course, was resentful, as he was of Benjamin Franklin.
He's a great person, but he was kind of resentful.
And he let Jefferson be the drafter because Adams thought that Adams had done the most important thing, which is on July 2nd, 1776, there's a motion to declare independence.
And so Adams thought that for henceforth we'd be celebrating July 2nd as our birthday.
And he was really annoyed.
You can explain why the first year afterwards, they end up celebrating July 4th, and Jefferson gets the credit.
Well, what happened was in 1777, they were so busy working in the Continental Congress, they forgot the date, and they took them a day or two to get organized.
They said, we'll celebrate on July the 4th.
And for 50 years after that, Adams and Jefferson disparred over whether what was more important, the July the 2nd vote or the July the 4th Declaration.
One of the really poignant things, though, is 50 years after the signing of that declaration, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson die on the same day, and they had reconciled finally at the end and write some beautiful letters to each other.
People thought at the time that that was a sign of providence, that basically these two great founders died within a couple hours of each other on July the 4th, 50 years today.
So all these geniuses, if you could have dinner with any one of these geniuses, who would you want to have dinner with and why?
Leonardo was the last person in history who, I think, knew everything you could possibly know about everything that was knowable and saw the patterns that rippled across creation.
One thing we didn't mention about him is that he took a lot of dead bodies and cadavers and basically dissected them so he could see how the body worked, right?
So for people that want to be the next Walter Isaacson, write about geniuses or write so many different books while they have other jobs, what would your advice be?
Well, I sit there and all the worries drain from every muscle in my body because I have a little mantra, a little slogan on my computer that says, let me tell you a story.
Because whenever I get stumped, instead of trying to write some complicated analysis, I say, what's the most interesting tale, anecdote I can tell that will illustrate this?
Now, given all the number one bestsellers you've written and the famous books, do you have an editor who actually still edits you or you don't need an editor at this point?
Well, I definitely had over the course of most of my career Alice Mayhew, a legendary editor at Simon Schuster, who did Woodward and Bernstein, helped create the concept of all the presidents, men.
And Alice Mayhew, in the very first book I wrote with a friend, which was about six friends and the Cold War, she kept writing in the margin, a tigta, and it stood for all things in good time.
Don't get ahead of the story, don't get behind it, keep it chronological.
And I said, Alice, why?
She said, if it's good enough for the good Lord doing the Bible, he has the best opening sentence in the beginning, comma.
And so Alice is always in my head as my editor.
I now have another great editor, Priscilla Payton.
Now, do you have people coming up to you from time to time at cocktail parties saying, well, I am a genius myself, and maybe you could write my biography.
He said, well, I think out of the box, just like Einstein does.
And I say, yeah, but he do what was in the box before he thought out of it.
I do have a lot of people, and now this is not a plug, but with a group of my students at Tulane and others, computer science, we're creating a company called Boswell and Company, which, you know, students will hear your story.
AI will help process it.
Because I believe everyone deserves to have their story told.
I love every Tuesdays and Thursdays I teach a couple of courses, engaging with them, getting the energy and the feedback, and especially in this troubled time to watch them chew on what's happening.
I never would have guessed how much fun it is to be at Tulane with some really cool students.
Yeah, you know, I talk about all the geniuses I've written about had these challenging, misfit childhoods.
For me, it was the opposite, which is why I get to write about geniuses, but I'm not one myself, which is my father and mother were the nicest, most honorable, and smartest people I ever met.
And my brother and I, I still live in New Orleans within about seven blocks of our Napoleon Avenue house where I grew up.
And it was just glorious to be in the most interesting city with the most loving parents.
My father was an engineer, which helped.
And so we would do electric circuits in the basement and test vacuum tubes and stuff.
And they were very proud, but they kept me grounded, which is why it's good to be back in New Orleans, which is, you know, I can brag that I was on C-SPAN.
And my friends, I once, I'll tell you a story about being on C-SPAN once.
Our 35 closest friends from high school have New Year's Eve together every time, upstairs at Antoine's.
So one night we had this great New Year's Eve party, and the next day, after being a bit hungover, one of my friends, I talked to him, he says, that's amazing.
How did you go from the dinner to be, I said, what do you mean?
He said, well, when I got home all drunk, I turned on C-SPAN and there you were.
And I said, oh, no, that was pre-recorded.
In New Orleans, they don't understand the virtues of videotape.
When I graduated from college, I had studied John Locke and philosophy at Harvard and then Oxford.
And I thought I actually wanted to be an academic philosopher.
But I also had worked for the Times Picking Union in New Orleans and stuff.
And I went back to see my old philosophy professors at Harvard and said, I'm trying to decide, here's my thesis on Locke, whether I should become an academic or whether I should be a journalist.
And both of them said to me, you would make a great journalist.
This is the original copy of the Declaration of Independence.
It's faded beyond recognition.
The reason is it was folded up many times and put in storage.
When the British were invading in 1814, this was put together in a package and it was buried in Leesburg, Virginia, hiding it from the British.
Ultimately, it was put on display at the patent office for about 30 years in a row and faded a lot.
Ultimately, you know, it was decided that we would have perfect copies made, so replicas were made.
This was not signed on July the 4th, despite the fact it was agreed to on July the 4th, because on July the 4th, the British were invading and controlling New York.
And therefore, the New York delegation couldn't come to vote for this.
So they said, here's what we'll do.
We want to get an engrossed copy, clean up the text.
We'll get an engrossed copy, and then we'll have the delegates come back in early August.
It was signed between August 2, 3, and 4 when delegates came back to sign it.
And signing it was not that easy a thing to do because it was treason.
So when they adopted the document on July the 4th, nobody's name went on it.
So nobody had committed treason publicly.
The British didn't know who signed it.
When they came back in August, they did sign it, but it wasn't released publicly until, I think, January of the subsequent year because there had been some victories and maybe the people thought it wasn't so likely that the United States would lose.
But anyway, it wasn't revealed publicly until, I think, about January of 1770, 1777.
One of the natural tensions, that's a glorious tension in American life, which is to what extent we're a democracy of the people and to what extent we're a federation of states.
And of course, they were wrestling with it back then and we're still wrestling with it now.
But they begin the document with we the people.
And it just means every citizen, not every person, but mainly white male landowners.
But eventually that gets expanded and we the people becomes an expansive concept that more and more people, women, blacks, minorities, all get included into.
unidentified
See more with Walter Isaacson in the Rotunda of the National Archives on America's Book Club, The Treasures, available at c-span.org slash ABC and C-SPAN's YouTube page.
Watch America's Book Club, C-SPAN's bold original series, Sunday, February the 22nd, with our guest author, former Reagan administration official, and a Library of Congress living legend, Linda Chavez.
She has written a number of books, including Out of the Barrio, An Unlikely Conservative, and The Silver Candlesticks, a novel of the Spanish Inquisition.
She joins our host, renowned author and civic leader David Rubenstein.