By this point Adams loathed Hamilton, and suddenly George Washington, the great political untouchable, is saying, “I’m not going to take this job unless Alexander Hamilton can be my major general,” which is what happened. And that really stuck in Adams’s craw.
DR: Adams ran for reelection in 1800, and he was running, in effect, against Thomas Jefferson, his vice president. What role did Hamilton play in helping Jefferson get elected?
RC: Enormous. However strange it sounds now, under the rules of the time there were not separate elections for president and vice president. Thomas Jefferson and Aaron Burr were ostensibly on the same ticket—that is, everyone understood that Jefferson was the presidential candidate and Burr was the candidate for vice president. But there was only one election, and they tied.
At that point, Aaron Burr thought, “Well, it might be very nice to be president of the United States instead of vice president.” The vote went to the House, which was still controlled by the Federalists.
And Hamilton did something that Aaron Burr would never forgive and that may have cost Hamilton his life. He advised the Federalists in the House to vote for Jefferson, even though Jefferson had been his bitter enemy. He said, “It’s better to have Jefferson, who has the wrong principles, than Aaron Burr, who has no principles,” which Burr never forgave.
DR: So Jefferson became president and the vice president was Aaron Burr.
RC: Yes. But Jefferson felt that during that period when the election went to the House for a vote, Burr had angled to become president. Even though he was forced to have Burr as vice president for four years, when Jefferson ran for reelection in 1804, he dropped him from the ticket.
Burr then went back to New York—both Hamilton and Burr were from New York—and ran for governor, and Hamilton again blocked Burr in his attempt to win office.
If you were Aaron Burr, Alexander Hamilton stopped you from becoming president, then stopped you from becoming governor of New York. I think that was really the political context of the duel.
DR: Hamilton was having a conversation with somebody. He said something negative about Aaron Burr, as if he needed to say more than he’d already said. This got put in a letter, and the letter was read by Burr. What happened?
RC: There was an Albany dinner party, and someone reported, in a letter that was published in a newspaper, that Alexander Hamilton had uttered a despicable opinion about Aaron Burr. Historians for two hundred years have been trying to figure out what the despicable opinion was. I came up dry, unfortunately, like all my predecessors.
As strange as it sounds, very often politicians in those days had duels as a way of trying to rehabilitate their careers. So Aaron Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel.
Hamilton’s son had died in a duel, also in New Jersey, about three years earlier. Because of that episode, Hamilton on the one hand had a principled objection to dueling, but on the other hand he felt that, as a political figure and a military man, if he was challenged to a duel and spurned it, he would look like a coward. This would destroy his political and military usefulness.
I think this was more in his head than in other people’s: How could he resolve this conflict? He decided he was going to go to the dueling ground in Weehawken, New Jersey. He would show his bravery by showing up for the duel, but then, when they squared off, he was going to waste his shot.
DR: At the time they often had seconds who would be negotiating to avoid the duel, but the seconds were unable to negotiate a resolution this time. They were in New York. Why did they go across the river to New Jersey?
RC: Dueling, on paper, was illegal in both New York and New Jersey, but it really wasn’t prosecuted vigorously in New Jersey, so duelists would row there across the Hudson—although after Burr killed Hamilton, he was wanted for murder in two states.
In fact, it’s a bizarre story. He was wanted for murder in New York and New Jersey, so where did he flee? He fled to Washington and, because he was still vice president, he presided over the impeachment trial of a Supreme Court justice in the U.S. Senate, even though he was wanted for murder in two states. Strange.
DR: What happened in the duel was that Hamilton put up his gun and shot first but didn’t try to hit Burr?
RC: One of two things could have happened. Hamilton’s second said that Burr fired first. If Burr fired first, what must have happened was that Hamilton, who had the pistol in his hand, as the bullet hit reflexively squeezed the trigger. Because Hamilton’s bullet went about twelve feet high, it hit tree branches above Burr.
If Hamilton fired first, he must have aimed in the air because, again, it went many feet above Burr, and Hamilton had been a soldier, so he was a decent shot. Either way, there is evidence that Hamilton did not aim his pistol at Burr, who may have aimed to kill.
DR: Hamilton didn’t die instantly. They rowed him back to Manhattan. What happened? Everybody came to say good-bye?
RC: It was an extraordinarily dramatic scene. He was rowed back to the Bayard Farm, in what’s now the West Village of Manhattan.
Hamilton was lying in the bed, and he asked his wife, Eliza, to have all of the children line up in a row at the foot of the bed. And he took one last look at them, and then he shut his eyes. It was heartbreaking. We have a lot of descriptions. There were people on their knees weeping and gnashing their teeth. It was an incredible moment.
DR: Is the home that Hamilton built and lived in in his later years in New York still there?
RC: Yes, it’s called the Grange. It’s now in Harlem, or what’s called Hamilton Heights.
DR: After his death, his wife tried, with his family, to perpetuate his image. How much longer did Eliza live?
RC: She lived another fifty years, to the age of ninety-seven. One of the most touching things, for me, about the later years of Elizabeth Schuyler Hamilton is that she not only did everything in her power to try to honor her husband but Washington as well.
In 1848, she attended the laying of the cornerstone for the Washington Monument. She’d become very close friends with Dolley Madison, even though their husbands had been political opponents. And in the crowd that day with Eliza Hamilton and Dolley Madison was a one-term congressman from Illinois named Abraham Lincoln.
It was an amazing moment. It’s the only moment of that sort I’m aware of where the founding generation touches the Civil War generation.
DR: Can you explain why the ten-dollar bill will not have Hamilton on it?
RC: I can’t. I pray to God that he’ll stay on the ten. I feel it has been his claim to fame. I’d love to see a woman on the currency, but on the twenty. I think maybe it’s a good time for Andrew Jackson to retire. [The Treasury Department ultimately decided to keep Hamilton on the ten-dollar bill; as of spring 2019, Jackson remained on the twenty after the U.S. Treasury Department announced that replacing him with Harriet Tubman would be delayed until at least 2026.]
Hamilton doesn’t have an obelisk near the White House. He doesn’t have a temple on the Tidal Basin. There’s a tiny little statue of him behind the Treasury Department that I think maybe one visitor in a thousand sees.
DR: After Alexander Hamilton, you subsequently wrote a book on George Washington, which won the Pulitzer Prize. In it you say, in effect, that Washington is the indispensable man to the beginning of the country. Where do you think Hamilton stands in that pecking order?
RC: I would also call him an indispensable man. Remember, this is somebody who created the first fiscal system, the first monetary system, the first accounting system, the first tax system, the first central bank, the first mint, on and on and on and on.
He was uniquely qualified to do it, because the first treasury secretary had to be someone with extraordinary financial sophistication. Hamilton had that. It had to be someone who was a great legal scholar and could argue that the Constitution permitted these activities. He also had to be a great enough technocrat to craft these policies, and then he had to be a great enough political theorist to see them as consi
stent with the American Revolution and the Constitution.
DR: Who is your next book on? What great American are you working on?
RC: Ulysses S. Grant.
DR: And how many more years will that take you?
RC: I’m hoping it will be out in a couple of years. But I’ve been a little distracted by a certain show. [Chernow’s Grant was published by The Penguin Press in 2017.]
In spite of his many contributions to the nation, including the creation of its first fiscal system, Hamilton does not have a monument in Washington, D.C. His final resting place is in the Trinity Church Cemetery in New York City.
5 WALTER ISAACSON
on Benjamin Franklin
“The Founders are the greatest team ever fielded. You have somebody of great, high rectitude: George Washington. You have a couple of really brilliant people: Madison, Jefferson. You have very passionate visionaries: Sam Adams, his cousin John. And then you have somebody who can bring them all together: Ben Franklin.”
BOOKS DISCUSSED:
Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (Simon & Schuster, 2003)
Kissinger: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 1992)
Einstein: His Life and Universe (Simon & Schuster, 2007)
Steve Jobs (Simon & Schuster, 2011)
The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution (Simon & Schuster, 2014)
Leonardo da Vinci (Simon & Schuster, 2017)
The phrase “Renaissance man” is not used to describe many individuals today, for there are so few who, in the era of specialization, can do many different intellectually challenging acts in an enviable way. In the modern era, one such man is Walter Isaacson: Rhodes Scholar, member of the Harvard Board of Overseers, former editor of Time magazine, past president of CNN, past president of the Aspen Institute, a member of the Tulane Board of Trustees, the founding chairman of Teach for America, and the author of best-selling books on Henry Kissinger, Albert Einstein, Steve Jobs, and Leonardo da Vinci, among others.
One of Isaacson’s books is about America’s first, and perhaps most gifted, Renaissance man—Benjamin Franklin. During his era, Franklin was America’s best-known and most admired person, in the colonies as well as in Europe: publisher, printer, political theorist, humorist, author, scientist, inventor, postmaster, signer of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and the Treaty of Paris (the only person to sign all three), university founder, library creator, friend of kings and government leaders, the colonies’ overseas representative and negotiator, prominent figure of the day in science and literature and the arts, and, of course, skilled raconteur and well-known lover of life.
Perhaps it takes a Renaissance man to fully understand and write about another Renaissance man. That may account for the insightful, hard-to-put-down biography that Walter Isaacson wrote about Benjamin Franklin.
I have worked with Isaacson on a variety of Aspen Institute matters over the years and have interviewed him in various settings about most of his books. His admiration for Franklin, as well as his appreciation of Franklin’s flaws, comes through in this interview. A reader of it would be hard-pressed to not also read the entire biography. I hope some skilled author will, not long from now, write the biography of Walter Isaacson.
In our conversation, Isaacson first addresses the fascination he has with Renaissance men or “geniuses.” He enjoys trying to understand how the creative mind really works, and what enabled some individuals to think outside of the box so creatively that they could develop theories of relativity, create the iPhone, or discover electricity.
But he notes that even the greatest of geniuses have usually been building on the earlier work of others, and many have had partners to enable them to make their “genius” breakthroughs.
Franklin is in that category. An inventor and a creator of enormous breadth and scope, often he was working with others or building on the work of others. Still, as Isaacson points out in the interview, however Franklin did what he did, the scope of his creations in the sciences, and in so many other areas, made him the country’s best-known individual before the Revolutionary War. He was also the most admired American in Europe, where he lived for nearly two decades, in London and in Paris, representing various colonies and ultimately the new country as it sought to negotiate the end of the war.
Isaacson did note one of Franklin’s secrets: he could spend much of his long life (he lived to the age of eighty-four) without having to work for a living.
Although born poor and educated only for two years, Franklin was able to retire from his successful printing operation in his early forties, having his employees and his common-law wife continue to run the business throughout much of the rest of his life. That provided him with income as well as the freedom to create, think, negotiate, and charm.
Part of the charm was the homespun wisdom often seen in Poor Richard’s Almanack, an example of an exceedingly popular and profitable Franklin venture. And part of the charm was due to Franklin’s ability to appear as a common man, for instance, not wearing the kind of wig favored by aristocrats to cover their baldness.
His flowing long hair became his trademark. Little could he have imagined how, centuries later, that look would adorn the most commonly printed U.S. paper currency—the hundred-dollar bill.
* * *
MR. DAVID M. RUBENSTEIN (DR): Walter, thank you very much for doing this. Is this one of those rare times that you’re not writing a book?
MR. WALTER ISAACSON (WI): Correct. It’s great to be here at the Library, because you can see the back of Ben Franklin’s head when the sun is coming through the window in the Great Hall, and there’s the bust of him. And let me also say that David Rubenstein has invented patriotic philanthropy, and this is all part of it. So thank you, David.
DR: Thank you very much. Walter, you have tended to write books about people that others would say are more or less brilliant people—Henry Kissinger, Benjamin Franklin, Steve Jobs. Oh, and Albert Einstein. Why did you pick geniuses as kind of a theme? Of those geniuses, who do you think was actually the smartest?
WI: Einstein was the smartest. That one is easy. He was the smartest because he had that quality of genius that allowed him to think out of the box, to be totally imaginative. But he was also somebody who knew what was in the box better than anybody. He was a great physicist.
I like the life of the mind and how the creative mind works. Some people write about great military heroes or sports heroes or literary people. To me, somebody who can think creatively, be imaginative, that’s an interesting thing to wrestle with—somebody like Franklin.
DR: Is it easier to write about a dead genius or a living one?
WI: When I did Henry Kissinger, who of course is a genius, as he will tell you and probably has told you—
DR: A few times.
WI: Right. And he actually was.
He comes up with this whole balance-of-power theory for how to extricate the U.S. from Vietnam and play Russia and China off against each other. But having dealt with him, when the book was over, I got nine letters in one day, hand-delivered by his assistant Paul Bremer, who went on to be viceroy in Iraq. [In 2003–04, Bremer led the Coalition Provisional Authority, which ran the country after the U.S. invasion.]
This was so difficult, in some ways, to deal with that I said, “I’m going to do somebody who’s been dead for two hundred years.” And that’s why I did Franklin.
But there are challenges when you do someone who is in the far past such as Ben Franklin. Let’s take the most ingenious thing he did, which was the kite-flying experiment that led to figuring out the single-fluid theory of electricity. [One popular theory at the time held that electricity was composed of two fluids that worked together to produce a charge.]
Franklin described his famous electrical experiments in a series of letters that became a highly influential scientific textbook.
We have one newspaper article, one letter to Peter Collinson [a Fellow of
the Royal Society in London who corresponded with Franklin about electricity], and one textbook written about ten years later that tells you about it. [Franklin’s Experiments and Observations on Electricity, Made at Philadelphia in America, was published in 1751.]
With Steve Jobs, if we were doing the iPad, he would tell me for an hour how he made the curve in the chamfer [the curved edge where the two sides of the computer meet]. So you know a thousand times more from somebody living.
DR: After the Kissinger experience, you wrote about some dead geniuses, Franklin and Einstein. Why did you then pick a person who at the time was living, Steve Jobs? How did that come about, and how difficult was it to write that book?
WI: Partly it came about because I had done the Ben Franklin book, just finished Einstein, and Steve gave me a call. And he said, “Do me next.” My reaction was: “Sure, you arrogant—” Never mind.
I had known him since 1984. We are about the same age, and when he was doing the original Mac computer, he used to come to Time magazine where I worked and show it off. I said, “I’ll do you in twenty or thirty years when you retire.”
But then somebody close to him said, “If you’re going to do Steve, you have to do him now.” I said, “I didn’t realize he had cancer.” And this person said, “He had been keeping it secret. But he called you the day after he was diagnosed.”
So I thought about it. We don’t often write about great business leaders, people who take technology and business and design and art and combine them. We very rarely get up close to somebody like that. We do politicians, presidents. You see them every day. I realized I had an opportunity to get very close to Jobs for two years, at times almost living with him, and to say, “How does a business/technology/engineering/artistic mind work?”
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