Likes Leonardo.

Transcript context

…Walter, when I first got to know him, was just a great journalist who had written this book, The Wise Men. One of my funny social faux pas — I met him at a cocktail party at Harvard at a student group, which he belonged to when he was at Harvard and then I belonged to as a grad student, called the Signet Society. We were chatting about books, and somehow The Wise Men came up, and I puffed myself up as a graduate student and said, “Oh, I just reviewed that book for the American Scholar, the magazine of the Phi Beta Kappa.” I said, “I just reviewed that book.” He looked at me, and he said, “Yes, and I wrote it.” [laughs] I learned from him — you know, more than anything else, Walter had this wonderful ambition. I say wonderful because he was a journalist, but he decided he was going to write this book about American foreign policy, about the group of people after World War II who really charted the course of American foreign policy, charted the course of the American century. Then he decides to write a biography of Henry Kissinger. Then he decides to write a book about Einstein. I think, particularly when you’re trained as an academic, as I was, you get into silos and you think to yourself, “Well, I only know about this one thing.” Walter has this amazing breadth about him, where he’s willing to take on anything — Leonardo da Vinci — and he pulls it off. The books are amazing, I think, that sense of that breadth of ambition I’ve always loved. Yes, I like the Leonardo book. Now, you write your dissertation under Huntington, right? Correct.…

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