Washington National Cathedral

Sam Lloyd: Welcome, everyone. Our guest this morning is a man who makes his living in ideas and issues and, we hope, solutions. Walter Isaacson is president of the Aspen Institute, an ideas and public policy think tank. He is former CEO of CNN News and former editor of Time magazine and also the author of some popular, very well-received biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Henry Kissinger, and Albert Einstein.

He has also been involved very much in the policy realm himself. He spent some time several years ago working with the Louisiana Recovery Authority, working to rebuild New Orleans, and he is currently taking on another role. President Bush has asked him to head up the new U. S.–Palestinian partnership, an initiative to create business and educational opportunities for the Palestinian people. A very busy polymath man. Walter, it’s great to have you here today.

Walter Isaacson: It’s great to be with you, and thanks for all you’ve been doing here and thanks for all you’ve done in New Orleans, which we appreciate deeply. And I think, by that intro, it shows I can’t really keep a job.

Lloyd: You move around a lot.

Isaacson: Right.

Lloyd: Let’s start with the present. The Aspen Institute. If somebody goes on the Aspen website, you’re going to be overwhelmed by the number and range of things the institute is doing—environmental forums, Shakespeare discussions, public diplomacy workshops, youth business initiatives, globalization seminars, and the list goes on. Tell us, what do you think is the heart of Aspen’s work, and what are you most excited about that’s happening there?

Isaacson: The heart of what we do is leadership based on values, we hope. We try to train people, or bring together people, to look at problems and figure out a values-based solution. We’re in a world, as you know, and in a city that is very partisan, where people are always pulling each other apart, and we believe there’s a certain core of values, whether it’s on the environment or education or world affairs, that if you bring reasonable people together, you can find solutions.

Lloyd: Is it hard to find the core values? Do you… does Aspen represent a certain set of values? Do you try to articulate those as you go along?

Isaacson: At the core of the Aspen Institute is a seminar called the Aspen Seminar, which we hope everybody will take. Everybody’s welcome to take it. It’s a six-day seminar that explores the values of our society, starting with Plato and Aristotle and going up through Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and we try to look at the balances you have to create when you look at values. Because values are not one set of values that always rule, it’s how do you balance the role of the individual, the role of the community, or many other such balances. And so that’s the core of the Aspen Seminar.

Lloyd: Then you take up some particular issues that you work over a few years. Looking at globalization for example, that seems to be a consistent theme.

Isaacson: Well we try to look at very specific issues. For example, we’ve helped resolve the Agent Orange issue in Vietnam, because that’s an issue that can easily be resolved, except for governments can’t do it. Because the U.S. government is not going to admit responsibility for leaving dioxins at the Danang Air Base and elsewhere, and yet, as Americans, we know we should clean it up. So, with the help of the State Department and Defense Department and the Vietnamese government, we got a commission to do it.

It’s the same with the U.S.–Palestinian partnership. I think people of good values know that there are certain solutions over there that perhaps a non-government organization can get to more easily than governments can get to.

Lloyd: So do you actually get involved in something close to mediation, or at least try to frame a conversation where people who disagree can find some things to agree about to move forward?

Isaacson: Yes, that’s what we do, except for in the Middle East. I think we steer clear of the politics now. Secretary Rice is over there this weekend, if I’m correct. And I think, when she asked us to do what we’re doing, she said, steer clear of trying to mediate a solution that’s political, but try to do economic and educational opportunities. In some other issue we do try to mediate solutions.

Lloyd: Well, I want to dig into some of the areas that you’re involved, in but first, one more personal question—how does a… well, let me put it this way. What is the common thread for a bright, talented guy from New Orleans to make his way into the world and become heavily involved as a journalist and a media executive, then to write these books—Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Henry Kissenger—and then to turn to this Aspen work? What is… for yourself… is there a common thread that weaves through all these things, that has informed your work?

Isaacson: Well, partly, I like engagement with the world. I mean, it is… we all have life motivations and life goals. You know, some people want to be successful in business, or make money, and some people want to be powerful. I’ve always found the world to be a wonderful planet, probably the best of all the planets, and I’ve always wanted to be engaged in things in it.

I did it as a journalist for many years. As a journalist you get engaged, but you can’t get totally involved. As a biographer, you learn and you get to express the fact that history is made by people. People with real values, real character, and real imagination and creativity. So how do they affect history? And, to be honest with you, I did not like cable TV, so when I was at CNN, I was looking for a way to get out of the media and into public policy. And the Aspen Institute represented everything I thought was wrong with the media at that point, especially cable TV, meaning the tearing us apart, the polarization, and it was a chance to do the opposite, to be engaged in issues, but in a non-polarizing way.

Lloyd: Well, let’s talk about the area that you’ve plunged into recently. This U.S.–Palestinian partnership. You were asked by President Bush to step into one of the… maybe the hottest spot in the world these days, and make a particular contribution. Describe what that was, and why you took it on, why you thought it could make a difference there.

Isaacson: It actually goes back to Benjamin Franklin a little. This is something we’ve been doing before the government asked us to do it officially. The Aspen had had a Middle East strategy group, and Benjamin Franklin taught us that, if you’re ever going to have a stable democracy, and if you’re ever going to have peace, you need a middle class with middle-class values. You need the shopkeepers, the artisans, what he called the leather aprons, who knew how to deal with customers and valued education and economic opportunities. So we started a small business loan fund in the West Bank that tried to give… that has been giving a lot of loans, from $50,000 all the way up to $250,000 for medium-sized businesses, such as taxis and garment manufacturers and information technology start-ups. Because we want to create economic opportunity there.

Once we had been doing it, the State Department asked us to form a group that would do youth centers, where we could get American technology companies to teach technology there, where we could do more business enterprises. We’ve just started a mortgage facility. Having done mortgages very well in the United States, we thought we’d export sort of sub-prime mortgages to the West Bank, but at least we’re a nonprofit, so we can get away with it. We have a political risk insurance scheme. And I think all of these things together will help create a constituency for peace, and we’re doing it with the Israeli side as well.

Our venture capital fund for information technology is being led by the Palestinian telephone company and another Palestinian information technology, and its co-chairs are two Israeli business leaders, including one of them who invented instant messaging, and I worked with when I was at AOL-Time-Warner. So we’re trying to bring people together on the common things they can agree on—the need for good business and education opportunities.

Lloyd: So is it the vision that prosperity is one of the best ways to resist terrorism?

Isaacson: I think opportunities, prosperity, the chance to live out your dreams, the chance to get an education, to start a business, and frankly just having, as Benjamin Franklin said, a middle class that has a stake in peace. Everybody knows… I mean, I’m not involved at all… they, wouldn’t you know… I’m not involved at all with the political negotiations.

But I really think everybody knows what the political solution is. You’re going to have a two-stage solution. Hopefully with a democratic Israel living side by side with a democratic, prosperous Palestine. But to get there you need the fundamental civil society, economic society and educational institutions that’ll help move it along.

Lloyd: People need to have a greater stake in peace than they have now… than they have supporting terrorists, who act out their anger when they don’t have much else. So is this a long-term commitment? Are you all there for awhile to do this?

Isaacson: Well, to some extent I hope it’s long-term, because I hope there’s always thriving businesses there. To some extent I hope it’s not forever, since I do think we can get a solution to that region in the next couple of years. It’s a region that’s ripe to have a solution.

Lloyd: The Aspen Institute itself has a Middle East investment initiative. Tell us some thing about that.

Isaacson: That’s the thing I mentioned earlier, which is a small business loan fund. We give loans of $50,000 to $250,000 to businesses in the Palestinian territories.

Lloyd: Jumping back for a minute to New Orleans. How long were you involved there with the Louisiana Recovery Authority?

Isaacson: Well, I’m still involved, although at the moment New Orleans is doing quite well. You should come on down. There are parts of New Orleans that are still not rebuilt, and, to be honest with you, I think are there are parts that shouldn’t be rebuilt. The parts below sea level. I’ve never believed we should rebuild.

There’s enough land between the main levee systems which—you know New Orleans pretty well—between the 17th Street Canal, the industrial canal, near the river that’s above sea level. I think that part has been totally rebuilt. There are certain parts that probably won’t be.

The national response initially, as you know, was pretty almost shameful, but nowadays the national response has been great, both from the government level and from, you know, churches like yours who have been involved. We have a great new education system. We had a pretty terrible education system before the storm, and that’s what I’ve been most involved with, which is bringing charter schools down to New Orleans.

Every major school in New Orleans, every… I’d say about 85 percent of the schools in New Orleans are now charter schools. So parents have a choice between various charter schools they can go to. Now all of these are public schools, so it’s not a sort of an either/or, that you have charter or you have public, but any great charter school operator, such as Kip academy, which you know so well from this city, has come down and built five or six schools. The Edison schools has built some, Tulane University has built two charter schools. So parents have a choice of all these charter schools, just as if they were public schools, but they have entrepreneurs and dedicated people running them. So one of the things after any disaster is to try to figure out how you can make good come of it.

Lloyd: So New Orleans is back or is coming back—

Isaacson: New Orleans is coming back—

Lloyd: —the population is returning?

Isaacson: We had approximately 450,000 people before the storm. The city now has approximately 325,000. So you can do the math, perhaps I could do the math, but I can’t in my head at this moment. But, you know, three-quarters of the people probably come back.

I’m not sure New Orleans will ever be quite as big. I’m not sure it needs to be quite as big. But the old and historic part of New Orleans is totally back. The Port of New Orleans, which is so important to this nation, is more than a hundred percent back, for better or worse. One hundred fifteen dollar a barrel oil helps support of New Orleans quite a bit, and so does high food prices. So the port is back, the extraction industries, meaning oil, gas, sulphur, are totally back, and tourism is back. So you have a city whose heart and soul is now back, and the music is back, the fun is back. I’m going down there again next week. I was down a few weeks ago.

In the past six months, you kind of feel the revival of New Orleans and especially its neighborhoods. A lot of people you know are moving back down there. James Carville and Mary Matalin just moved there, put their kids into charter school. Michael Lewis, who you may know, moved back, and I hope to spend a lot more time now that my daughter’s in college getting… I have an apartment down there. We’ll be back a lot.

Lloyd: So you’ve worked in two societies in chaos, and two societies where government largely was in meltdown in one way or another. Do you see any similarities—

Isaacson: I see far too many similarities between Louisiana and the Palestinian territories—

Lloyd: That’s what I was wondering.

Isaacson: —and I’m not sure I want to go there too much, except for that it leads to what you do, and what we try to do at the Aspen Institute, which is, it all comes down to leadership. When there’s really good leaders, you get things done. Leaders who don’t care about pushing their own polarizing agenda, but care most about getting solutions.

You’ve seen some good leaders in the Palestinian territories. Dr. Salam Fayyad, who’s now the prime minister, is an extraordinary individual who’s just trying to build up that society. And that’s why I believe it’s so important for us to back the good guys, who are moderates, who want to have a relationship with Israel, who want to create a Palestinian state.

Likewise in Louisiana, we had some great leaders to emerge. President Scott Cowen of Tulane was one of them. We had other problems, where our political leadership was not good, and that’s why people died. That’s why it was hard to get the city back. So to me the lesson is good leadership, people with character, courage, and an ability to put aside their own personal ambitions, but try to do good for their society. That’s the most crucial thing you’ll find in any situation.

Lloyd: In just a minute, I want to invite people’s questions, but I don’t want to do that before we spend a couple of minutes on Albert Einstein, the book you just published about nine months or so ago and have been out and about talking a lot about. First of all, why Albert Einstein? You’ve been so engaged in the political process and government. How did you land on Einstein?

Isaacson: Two reasons. First of all, when I was doing Benjamin Franklin, I was astonished how good of a scientist he was. We think of him as some doddering old dude flying a kite in the rain, but the electricity experiments of Benjamin Franklin were the most important scientific advance of that era, and people of that era—Jefferson, Franklin, others—would have been ashamed, they would have considered themselves philistines if they said they knew nothing about science. And yet, in my generation, if you’re not a scientist, you can happily brag that you don’t the difference between relatively theory and uncertainty principal, or between a gene and a chromosome. Even though you would never brag that you didn’t know the difference between Hamlet and Macbeth or something.

So I believe that it was important to re-engage with science, and I love science, but I had become a little alienated from it, because I was not a scientist. Secondly, I was at Time magazine, and we were leading up to who should be the man or woman of the century, and there was a lot of argument over the five years leading up to it.

I think Rick Stengel, who is now the editor, wanted Churchill, and Jim Kelly wanted Franklin Roosevelt, and Priscilla Painton wanted Mahatma Gandhi, but I became convinced it was a century of science and technology where we went to the moon, split the atom, invented the microchip, understood gravity, and one person had his fingerprints over all of that which was Einstein. He was also a symbol of refuges from oppression, which was a great theme of the century—those who had fled Hitler or Stalin. So I wanted it to be Einstein, and I started researching him. I noticed that his papers were still under seal until 1986, and I made an arrangement that, when they became available, or even before they became available, I could start researching them. And I decided I wanted to do a narrative biography of him.

Lloyd: Well, in that biography there is a chapter called “Einstein and God,” and since were are where we are, we’d be curious about that. I gather he had quite an uneven or an episodic and complex relationship with his own Jewish tradition. Tell us something about that.

Isaacson: Yeah, he was born into a very secular Jewish family that thought, somewhat mistakenly, that they had assimilated into Germany at the beginning of the 20th century, and were good Germans. They were not practicing. As a young man, he becomes more interested in his religion and becomes, for awhile—and I’m talking about when he’s ten, eleven, twelve years old, very much of a practicing Jew.

When he is exposed to science and philosophy, he drifts away or rebels against the dogma of his religion. But he’s always conscious of his… what he calls his tribal affiliation with the Jewish people—very proud. And he’s a person, in the core of his soul, who resists authority, people trying to push him to conform. So as anti-Semitism rises in Germany, many of his friends and colleagues, like Fritz Haber, the great scientist, renounce their Jewishness and try to fit in.

Einstein, on the other hand, becomes more assertive about his kinship and affiliation with his Jewish heritage. Not that much with his religion, in terms of going to synagogue, but understanding the importance of his Jewishness. Now interestingly, to me, Einstein believed in God and was a person of deep faith, and that surprised people. In fact, in the late 1920s, when he was in Berlin as a professor at one dinner party—it was a very secular period in Berlin and very secular especially among Jewish intellectuals then—the hostess said she couldn’t believe that he really believed in God. And he said yes, there’s a spirit manifest in the laws of the universe. A spirit in the face of which we must be humbled and awed, that’s why I believe in God and that’s my sense of faith.

A young child asked him at one point, what was his evidence for God. And he said, well we’re like you—a child who enters a very big library, and we see all the books have been written and created, and we see that they’re ordered by special laws, and it’s a topic that is far too vast for our limited imagination. So we should be humbled and awed by the creation, and that’s what led me to my faith.

That did not satisfy a cardinal—Cardinal Mahoney in Boston at the time, who gave a sermon called “About Einstein,” saying it still smacked of atheism, because he did not believe in a personal God. He did not believe in a God you could pray to, who would intercede on our behalf. Einstein believed that you couldn’t pray to God and have him break the laws of physics for you, you know, pray hard enough to have the Redskins win, or something like that.

He said, for some people the existence of miracles is evidence of God’s existence, but for me it’s the absence of miracles, the harmonies in the universe, that are evidence of God’s existence. So a rabbi, Herbert Goldstein, the head of the Reform Jewish movement at the time in New York, sends him a great telegram saying, Einstein, do you or do you not believe in God? Answer fifty words or less.

So Einstein doesn’t use up his fifty words. He simply says, I believe in Spinoza’s God, a God whose spirit is manifest in the harmonies of the universe. No, I don’t think that pleased or satisfied the cardinal in Boston and probably not the rabbi. I feel on the stage, I’m in some Borscht Belt joke—a cardinal, a rabbi and Einstein. But I think it would… a lot of people, including people in your congregation, would understand wrestling with the notion of a creator, and it certainly would Ben Franklin, who was religious in that same way, a deist who believed in a creator and believed in God, but not necessarily an intercessional God who micromanaged our lives.

Lloyd: And you say that Einstein could be pretty fierce in his distaste for atheists.

Isaacson: Oh, yeah. He was always lumped together with atheists, and that drove him to distraction. He said, nothing bothers me more than when atheists use me as support for their own position, because… the fanatical atheists, he called them, and I have refrained from getting on book tours. You sometimes run into people, and Richard Dawkins and Chris Hitchens are both on book tour with their books that are both very much an attack on religion, and they both use Einstein somewhat awkwardly, but as Einstein would say he did not want to be enlisted by the atheists, since he was a person who had faith and a religion.

Lloyd: That’s great. Let’s go to questions from the audience.

Deryl Davis: If you’d come forward to one of the two mikes, please, if you have a question. Come forward for us, please.

Isaacson: I’m sorry, I can’t see very well.

Question 1: Good morning. You recently, at Aspen Institute, had a very exciting conference on the environment with some really of the finest thinkers on environmental issues, people like E. O. Wilson. And spinning off of Baxter’s… Dean Baxter’s very fine sermon this morning, I was wondering if there was some consensus that came out of there, as to what we can do collectively, as a society and as a world, to approach some of the environmental issues that we face.

Isaacson: It’s a good question. The answer is yes, but let me apologize because I… we also had a conference in the Palestinian territories of U.S.–Arab media that week, and I went there and did not go to the environment conference. But as a good micro-manager of the institute, I read what they did out there, and the consensus that formed is one that you and I could easily form. Which is, we know how to reduce the effects we’re doing on climate change, and also the issues of biodiversity, destroying of the rainforests, that all tie in to the problems we have. And it’s some thing that we have again made too polarizing politically. You need to do things that people on the left have advocated for a long time, such as conservation, and the use of alternative energy sources, especially wind and solar are beginning now, especially with hundred dollar a barrel oil, to start being profitable.

But we also need to create more nuclear power, I think, in this country, and many, many of the environmentalists in Aspen came around to that position. As you’ve noticed, the people who had fought atomic power for many years, many of them are coming over. And so I think you need what I would call a bipartisan compromise, so that we’ll have a lot more domestic sources of energy. Perhaps coal sequestration technologies, as well as nuclear energy, as well as alternative sources of energy. It’s also for me, and I saw this a lot in the Middle East, because I was not only in the Palestinian territories, but in Jordan and Egypt. We have to wean ourselves off Persian Gulf oil for national security reasons as well.

Question 2: Hello. You spoke about New Orleans and your belief that those houses or areas that are below sea level should not be rebuilt. I assume that you’re saying that the Ninth Ward, being one of those areas, should not be rebuilt. What do you suggest should happen to those inhabitants of the Ninth Ward that want to come back to New Orleans and will not have, if your way is followed, places to go back to in the Ninth Ward?

Isaacson: That’s a very good question. Of course, you put your finger on a controversy, and I’m glad to know that here someone pronounce New Orleans correctly, so I know you’re familiar with the city.

I have been very involved with parts of the Ninth Ward that I think have to come back first, which, as you know, since I assume you know the city well, from St. Claude Avenue up to the river, would sometimes called the Holy Cross area, all the way from the industrial canal to Jackson Barracks, is higher ground and above sea level. You could probably even take Clayborn Avenue to the river, and that’s high enough, and I think can be protected by good levees.

I think as you get further into New Orleans east, where you get into that bowl and wetland and swamp, I personally think it’s very difficult. I also thinks it’s very difficult to rebuild parts of Lake View and Lake Wood, I can’t remember all the names of all the suburbs that are also the white suburbs near Lake Pontchartrain that were built in the Sixties on low-lying ground. So I hope it’s never perceived as a racial issue.

As you go back to New Orleans and you look at this higher ground in the Holy Cross area, and I saw Evan Thomas, I think, I’ve taken him there, and I’ve a friend in a group that we’ve started called Operation Comeback, which is to bring people back to that safer part of the Ninth Ward because, as you say, the Ninth Ward has become a political issue and we want to defuse that. So we say, let’s rebuild this good, great higher ground historic part of the Ninth Ward first.

Secondly, there’s the upper Ninth Ward, which is, as you know, where Wynton Marsalis and his dad are doing the musician’s village, and many other people are doing. Thirdly, I think you can bring parts of Gentilly back that are in the Seventh Ward, that have a lot of area for people to live. I mean, there’s a lot of space for people to come home to.

Our problem is not that we don’t have room for people to come home; it’s that we’ve got a lot of vacant houses and vacant lots. So I’m hoping we can make sure everybody feels that they’re wanted, that we need them to come home, and that there’s room for them without having to rebuild in that newer part of the Ninth Ward between Clayborn Avenue and Lake Pontchartrain.

And I will mention my next biography, if I can get a plug. I wanted to do something about the diversity creativity of New Orleans, when it really brought people together. And I figured what biography could I do that… help me do that, and I’m doing a biography now of Louis Armstrong, because I used to play jazz in the Seventh Ward and in Central City, which is where my family home is, and that’s were he lived and grew up. And I played jazz with some of the people who played with him, and that notion of the creativity of New Orleans depending on its diversity is the core reason we do have to bring everybody home. So I really hope my statements about that part of the really low-lying parts of the Ninth Ward don’t indicate that I, you know, am resistant to everybody finding a place back in New Orleans. People who have lived there are going to be drawn back. Does that answer it?

Question 2: Thank you very much.

Lloyd: Thank you, to the front.

Question 3: Hi, what are your views on evolution and creationism?

Isaacson: What are my views… I was about to do a biography of Charles Darwin because of that question and I switched to doing Louis Armstrong, so I’ve put aside… I obviously, well I shouldn’t say obviously, I believe in evolution. I believe in the scientific study of how species evolved. I also tend to believe, as Einstein would, that… you can believe strongly in evolution and still believe in some hand or design that helped set it up. I don’t like the phrase intelligent design, because that’s been captured by a faction of the debate, but I think you know what I’m talking about. But I’m not an expert on evolution. I’m sure somebody else up here will do that better.

Lloyd: Thank you. To the back.

Question 4: Hi. You mentioned your frustration with cable and I was just… It seems that more and more people now are getting their primary news from cable news, and with you being in such a high up position at CNN, could you speak a little bit to being able to affect change within the cable news, or what do you kind of see as the future?

Isaacson: Well, I’m the person least able to talk about evolution but most able to talk about how hard it is to effect change in cable television news. I was able to fail miserably at that attempt. I mean… I’ll give you a little anecdote, which is one of the favorite parts of my Benjamin Franklin research, was about God, as a matter of fact. Which is, when they’re in Philadelphia, and they’re doing the Declaration of Independence and they appoint a committee of three people to help write the declaration—the Continental Congress—it was the last time, I think, Congress appointed a good committee, but the committee has Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin on it. And Jefferson writes the first draft, and he writes that famous sentence, “We hold these truths to be sacred…” and Franklin crosses it out with his printer’s pen in the first draft and says, “We hold these truths to be self-evident…”

And he was trying to show that we’re creating a new type of nation in which our rights don’t come from the dictates or dogma of one particular religion, but come from the consent of the governed. But then, you see, the sentence go on and it says, “…and they’re endowed with certain inalienable rights.” And you see in John Adams’ handwriting, “…endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.” So there you see the balance our founders are striking and pulling… and using religion to bring us together rather than pull us apart, and that very day, I was writing that I got into the CNN morning meeting, and I was told that Judge Moore in Alabama had put the Ten Commandments on the steps of his courthouse, a federal judge had ordered him to remove it, he wouldn’t, they were sending in the… It was big controversy.

And I said, “Great, we have a Crossfire. Who’s for the Ten Commandments, who’s against the Ten Commandments.” And I felt horrible, because here we were, our politicians and those of us in the media, using the Ten Commandments to pull us apart, just as I was studying how the founders had used religion to bind us together.

And so I feel there is a natural tendency, when you’re going after a passionate audience on cable or on the internet, to be polarizing, and we have to, as a society, find ways to be less polarizing. I despair that cable TV will be the way to lead us out of this wilderness of polarization. I believe that the internet and perhaps some other technology, certainly in my daughter’s generation, they don’t watch TV very much, they’re always on the internet. Perhaps we’ll find new technologies that unite us rather than tear us apart.

Lloyd: Great. One more question.

Question 5: You were going to talk about identifying values, and so I’m curious about what you use as a personal guide. Theologians argue that religion is the source of our ethics, but what do you use as a personal guide when there is a value for a particular situation that you’re searching for?

Isaacson: As I said, I think there’s a balance of values which is harder than finding one lodestone. And we at the institute use a compass, where you balance the various good values we have as society, and how you have to keep them in harmony. However, in all religions, as both Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein said, there’s one basic value from which our ethics arises that’s both religious, but also Immanuel Kant can derive it just philosophically, which is to love they neighbor as thyself. It’s called the greatest of commandments, I think Jesus calls it, in at least three of Gospels, talks about it as being the one commandment that, in loving thy God, that you build your foundations of morality upon.

Certainly, that’s true in the New Testament as well. And if you grapple with the notion of loving thy neighbor as thyself, you get to all sorts of moral implications that you’re going to do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, and that can be a lodestone in… when you balance the various conflicting values, such as the role of community, the role of the individual, that become more complex. And I think that when Benjamin Franklin died he was asked about, you know, his particular religious, you know, doctrinaire beliefs, and he said, that is the one belief that I have come out in all of my study of religion, but also all my study of society. And whether it’s in the Palestinian territories or in New Orleans, these are our neighbors, and I think we should try to love them as we love ourselves.

Lloyd: Was there one more quick question in the back? Can you do it very briefly?

Question 6: Yeah. Hi. You spoke about the rise of charter schools in New Orleans. D.C. has also experienced an increase in charter schools, but it’s also had some negative effects, in that it’s drawn the best teachers and students from the rest of the public school system. So I was wondering if you’d talk about how the charter school system has affected the rest of the public school system in New Orleans.

Isaacson: And in D.C., you meant, or in New Orleans too?

Question 6: Just in New Orleans.

Isaacson: Okay, well I’m going to mention D.C., if I may, as well, but I’ll start with New Orleans, which is, we basically have an all charter school system, so we don’t have that problem. As I said, almost 85 percent of the schools will be charter schools. The ones that aren’t are on the west bank, which wasn’t hit by the storm, and there’s maybe one or two magnet schools that are run by a central district. But even there Paul Vallas, the superintendent, is decentralizing authority, so you won’t be able to tell the difference between a public school and a charter school.

In each case the leader of the school, the board that gets formed in the school, can try to attract whomever they want as teachers. I believe that a competition for good teachers is a good thing, not a bad thing, which gets me to Washington. I think approximately thirty percent of the schools in this town are now charter schools. Michelle Rhee is an awesome chancellor. We really should be glad we have her. She was involved with an organization that I love and am involved with, called Teach for America. She was a core member of Teach, she was a leader of Teach for America, and what Teach for America does, is try to bring the best people to be teachers.

Teach for America and many others are now coming to Washington, not only because the charter schools, but because all schools have to compete for good teachers, and when we talk about loving thy neighbor as ourselves, we can’t create a two-tiered education system, where some people get good teachers, whether they be at National Cathedral School or a particular charter school, and some people get bad teachers. We have to make sure that every kid gets a decent shot and starts off with an equal opportunity to learn and succeed, and that too is at the core of the loving they neighbor issue. Whether it’s a Palestinian kid or New Orleans kid or kid in Northeast or Southeast D.C., everybody deserves that decent shot at a good education.

Lloyd: I hate to stop this conversation, and we have been ranging over an amazing variety of topics. I hope you’ll come to be with us next week when Diane Rehm, one of the best voices on National Public Radio, will be our conversation partner for the Forum.

We hope you’ll stay for the worship service that begins at 11:15, and for now there’s some coffee on in the back, and our guest, Walter Isaacson, will stop by coffee for a few minutes. Please join me now in thanking our wonderful guest.

Isaacson: Thank you.