My interest in the Fortune magazine and Aspen Institute conference, just held at the institute’s Bauhaus-style retreat at Aspen Meadows, had not a little to do with my continuing and over-the-top interest in Walter Isaacson. Isaacson, you may recall, ran CNN and, before that, Time magazine, and then, this past spring, became the director of the international-problem-solving think tank, as—in my blue-sky view—a prelude to becoming secretary of State under the next Democratic president. What’s more, he’d just published a biography of Benjamin Franklin in an orchestration of promotion and cross-marketing (including, in one of the great corporate going-away presents,...