2016 Goldsmith Award Recipient — Walter Isaacson

Walter Isaacson, ’74, received the prestigious Goldsmith Career Award for Excellence in Journalism on March 3 in a ceremony at the Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. Walter is a former chairman and CEO of CNN, former editor of TIME, current president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, author of bestselling books on Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein, and Benjamin Franklin, and not least, as a Harvard undergraduate, he was a member of the Harvard Lampoon. Walter gave the ceremony’s keynote speech on, “Technology and Journalism” to a sell-out audience of several hundred in the John F. Kennedy, Jr., Forum at the Kennedy School.

Walter is currently working on a biography of Leonardo da Vinci.” I am reading the thousands of pages of Leonardo’s journals in their original form,” Walter told The North American Pembrokian when asked how he is approaching this new project. He casually added, “Leonardo wrote them all in a renaissance Florentine dialect, and in mirror-image cursive.” meaning the text is written backwards, from right to left, in a handwritten renaissance script, and in a language no longer spoken. Perhaps after mastering Einstein’s theory of relativity for his Einstein biography, Walter was looking for a real challenge this time!

Congratulations, Walter!

For more on the awards, the ceremony, and Walter’s keynote speech:  http://shorensteincenter.org/goldsmith-awards-2016/