"I have a strong emotional respect for Steve"
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“I have a strong emotional respect for Steve” is biographer-speak for a very particular kind of closeness: intimate, but policed. Walter Isaacson isn’t claiming friendship, devotion, or awe. He’s choosing a phrase that sounds warm while staying professionally armored. “Strong” signals intensity without specificity. “Emotional” admits that the relationship exceeded mere intellectual appraisal. “Respect” keeps it safely on the side of judgment rather than attachment. It’s a sentence designed to communicate access and affection without surrendering authority.
The subtext is a tightrope walk every high-profile writer must perform when the subject is both charismatic and combustible. In Isaacson’s case, “Steve” almost certainly lands as Steve Jobs, whose myth is built on contradiction: visionary and tyrant, minimalist and maximalist, monkish in taste and lavish in appetite for control. Saying he has “emotional respect” suggests Isaacson felt Jobs’s gravitational pull, but wants readers to trust that he didn’t become a disciple. It’s an inoculation against the two critiques biographers fear most: being too harsh (and thus petty) or too enchanted (and thus captured).
Context matters because Isaacson’s brand is institutional credibility: he writes the canon of modern genius with a measured tone that courts mainstream legitimacy. This line quietly tells us how the canon gets made. Not by pure objectivity, but by a negotiated proximity where admiration is acknowledged, framed, and then made acceptable for publication. The sentence is less a confession than a credential: I was close enough to feel it, disciplined enough to call it respect.
The subtext is a tightrope walk every high-profile writer must perform when the subject is both charismatic and combustible. In Isaacson’s case, “Steve” almost certainly lands as Steve Jobs, whose myth is built on contradiction: visionary and tyrant, minimalist and maximalist, monkish in taste and lavish in appetite for control. Saying he has “emotional respect” suggests Isaacson felt Jobs’s gravitational pull, but wants readers to trust that he didn’t become a disciple. It’s an inoculation against the two critiques biographers fear most: being too harsh (and thus petty) or too enchanted (and thus captured).
Context matters because Isaacson’s brand is institutional credibility: he writes the canon of modern genius with a measured tone that courts mainstream legitimacy. This line quietly tells us how the canon gets made. Not by pure objectivity, but by a negotiated proximity where admiration is acknowledged, framed, and then made acceptable for publication. The sentence is less a confession than a credential: I was close enough to feel it, disciplined enough to call it respect.
Quote Details
| Topic | Respect |
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