Alice Mayhew at Simon & Schuster has been a diligent editor and gracious friend for twenty years and, now, three books. Her detailed notes and valuable edits on all my manuscripts are treasured possessions. She has always been rigorous about, among other things, shaping a logical narrative, and her energy in handling this book was unflagging and deeply appreciated. Amanda Urban at ICM has likewise been a valued friend and agent for all these years. She read my earliest drafts and offered good suggestions and warm encouragement, as well as an occasional guest room in which to work.
To help ensure that my facts were as correct as possible and that I did not inadvertently fail to give due citations, I hired Carole Le Faivre-Rochester to vet my manuscript, sources, and credit notes. For twenty-four years, she worked at the American Philosophical Society, which Franklin founded and which has done great work in preserving his papers, and she retired as the editor of that society in 2001. She was industrious in digging out material and making useful suggestions.
One of the joys of working on Franklin was meeting the generous and humorous Claude-Anne Lopez, who was a longtime editor at Yale compiling his papers and is the author of many delightful books and articles about him. She graciously agreed to read parts of the manuscript and edited the three chapters on his years in France, about which she is both an expert and an enthusiast.
Ms. Lopez suggested that I try to dig out information about Edward Bancroft’s spying activities on Franklin. To help in that task, I hired Susan Ann Bennett, a researcher in London who, among other things, wrote “Benjamin Franklin of Craven Street” when she was a curator at the RSA (formerly, the Royal Society of Arts). I am very grateful for her diligent work, transcriptions, and intelligent sleuthing at the British Library, where some of Bancroft’s reports in code and invisible ink are stored.
I am also grateful to the editors at Yale who continue the task of producing what I think must be the greatest collection of anyone’s papers ever. Their thirty-seventh volume, which goes through August 1782, is due out at the same time as this book and should be bought by everyone interested in Franklin. They were gracious in letting me study their manuscript of that work as well as their early drafts of volumes 38, 39, and 40. I particularly enjoyed a vibrant lunch I had in New Haven with Ms. Lopez and some core members of the current team, including Ellen Cohen, Judith Adkins, Jonathan Dull, Karen Duval, and Kate Ohno.
Also at that lunch was the justly venerated Edmund Morgan, retired Sterling Professor of History at Yale, who had written his own wonderful book analyzing Franklin and his papers. Professor Morgan has been kindly, beneficent, generous, and exceedingly helpful in the tradition of our subject. He graciously offered to read parts of my manuscript, and he provided suggestions and encouragement about my theme and concluding chapter. I tried to take a different approach from his by writing a chronological narrative biography, but I do not pretend to have matched his insights. Those who find my book interesting, and more important those who don’t, should buy and read his, if they haven’t already.
Márcia Baliscano is the director of the Franklin House on Craven Street in London, soon to be (we all hope) a fitting museum. With enormous skill and intellectual rigor, along with a diligence that would have dazzled even Franklin, she painstakingly dissected my entire manuscript and made scores of invaluable suggestions. In addition, she was very helpful in hosting me on Craven Street, and she did her duty by energetically enlisting me and others to her cause. One of her board members is Lady Joan Reid, a great repository of Franklin information. I deeply appreciate her willingness to volunteer for the arduous task of reading my manuscript and being both meticulous and unflinching in her crusade to separate facts from lore. In doing so, she expended not only an enormous amount of time and intellectual energy, but also a huge pile of colored Post-it notes filled with suggestions. Someday, I hope, she will write a book about Franklin’s London circle of friends.
Part of the pleasure of writing about Franklin is meeting his aficionados. Foremost among them is a group called the Friends of Franklin, based in Philadelphia, which hosts lunches, organizes seminars, and publishes the delightful Franklin Gazette. (To join, go to www.benfranklin2006.org) I want to thank Kathleen DeLuca, the executive secretary, for her hospitality. The group is working with the Franklin Institute, the American Philosophical Society, the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania, and the Pew Charitable Trust to organize a celebration and exhibition, under the direction of Connover Hunt, that will culminate with Franklin’s three hundredth birthday in January 2006.
I am deeply indebted to Strobe Talbott, who has long been a friend and inspiration. He helped to shape and carefully edit both The Wise Men, which I coauthored in 1986, and a biography of Henry Kissinger that I published in 1992. This time, he volunteered again to read my manuscript, and he came back with a wealth of helpful suggestions and comments. Stephen Smith, one of the most deft editors I have ever known, also read the entire manuscript and offered useful perspectives and ideas. Evan Thomas, my coauthor on The Wise Men, spotted some mistakes I made about John Paul Jones, about whom he has written a great book. Steven Weisman read a draft and provided very insightful suggestions. Many other friends have given wise counsel, among them: James Kelly, Richard Stengel, Priscilla Painton and Tim Smith, Elisabeth Bumiller, Andrew and Betsy Lack, David and Sherrie Westin.
Elliot Ravetz, my former assistant at Time, helped me get started by giving me my first collection of Franklin papers, inspired me later with a bust of Franklin, offered comments on my manuscript, and has been an earnest compatriot. I am also grateful to Tosca Laboy and Ashley Van Buren at CNN, who are both truly wonderful people.
My father and stepmother, Irwin and Julanne Isaacson, also read and edited my manuscript. They are, along with my late mother, Betsy Isaacson, the smartest people I have ever known.
Most of all, I am grateful to my wife, Cathy, and daughter, Betsy. Cathy read through what I wrote with enormous care and was invaluable in sharpening the themes and spotting some problems. But that is merely a tiny fraction of what she did as my partner in this book and in life. As for Betsy, after a bit of prodding, she faithfully plowed through some of the manuscript. Parts of it she admitted were interesting (as befitting a 12-year-old, she liked the section on ballooning) and other parts (like that on the Constitutional Convention) she declared boring, which I guess was a help, especially to readers who were thus treated to shortened versions of a few of these sections. They both make everything not only possible but worthwhile.
None of these people, of course, deserve blame for any errors or lapses that I have undoubtedly made. In a May 23, 1785, letter to his friend George Whatley, Franklin said about his life, “I shall not object to a new edition of mine; hoping however that the errata of the last may be corrected.” I feel the same of this book.