Life & Wisdom Quote by Walter Isaacson

Isaacson’s line is a quiet indictment dressed up as a mild personal recollection, and that understatement is the point. “I don’t think there was enough skepticism” sounds like an editor’s note, not a confession of civic failure. The passive construction (“there was”) and the soft hedge (“I think,” “kind of,” “perhaps even”) mimic the way pre-war certainty was socially manufactured: not through one decisive lie, but through a fog of plausibility in which doubt starts to feel impolite, even irresponsible.

The most revealing word is “us.” Isaacson isn’t talking about an abstract public; he’s implicating a professional class that includes journalists, policy insiders, and credentialed interpreters of events. The subtext is less “we were misled” than “we helped build the conditions to be misled.” By framing belief as the default setting (“most of us… believed”), he captures how consensus can function like anesthesia: it dulls the reflex to interrogate sources, incentives, and gaps in evidence.

Context does the heavy lifting here. Post-9/11 America was primed to treat worst-case scenarios as prudent realism, and the Iraq WMD narrative exploited that emotional infrastructure. Isaacson’s phrasing recalls the era’s rhetorical escalation: biological, chemical, and then the gravitational pull of “perhaps even” nuclear, the ultimate trump card that collapses debate into urgency. The intent isn’t to relitigate the intelligence; it’s to name a cultural failure of skepticism, one that thrives when fear, patriotism, and elite groupthink align.