From the Managing Editor

By Henry Muller

Walter Isaacson is what some people like to call a "hard-news" person. In his 13-year career at TIME, he has worked as a writer in Nation, a correspondent in the Washington bureau, and later editor of Nation. Named assistant managing editor in July, Walter presides over what we call the back of the book, the various departments that cover news in the sciences, society and culture. But that does not mean he now considers himself a "soft news" person. "The distinction between hard news and soft news has become irrelevant, even meaningless," he says. "News is whatever is current that affects our lives, interests us or provokes us to think about the world."

Actually, our co-founder Henry Luce thought the same way back in 1923, when he organized TIME as a magazine that would cover not only national affairs and foreign news but also religion, education, science, business and art. Among the first cover subjects were Joseph Conrad, Jack Dempsey and Ethel Barrymore. "TIME's conception of human nature . . . and TIME's value judgments run through all the fields of endeavor and all the categories of human aspirations and speculations," he said on the magazine's 40th anniversary. That philosophy is now more compelling than ever. Important social issues like date rape, the deterioration of the environment and the troubles of America's educational system are news; so are advances in medicine and cultural phenomena. "When the movie Thelma & Louise came out, it struck a chord," notes Walter, "so it became news for us as well as a review."

A graduate of Harvard and Oxford, Isaacson learned journalism the old way: as a police reporter for the New Orleans Times-Picayune, his hometown paper, and later for the London Sunday Times. He landed at TIME in 1978, contributed some memorable coverage of the 1980 presidential campaign, and has won three Overseas Press Club Awards for his writing. Co-author of The Wise Men, a collective study of six men who shaped American foreign policy during the cold war, he has written a biography of Henry Kissinger that is due out next fall.

"Walter is a voracious assimilator of information," says Jim Kelly, a friend and senior editor. "He's the kind of person who can discourse with equal intelligence on Cajun music, the Philby spy ring and medical ethics. His journalistic mind is at work at least 18 hours a day." All that energy is now at the service of readers who look to our back of the book for information and understanding.