dark and started berating us, saying we would never get the beauty of this sort of thing. I saw the intensity of his personality, and I came away liking him. When I became editor of Time , and then at CNN, he was my good friend for two days a year when he had a new product out. So there was that relationship. I got a phone call when I went to the Aspen Institute in 2004. He said he wanted to take a walk. I said, "Sure." I didn't know that taking a walk was the way he had meetings. I'd written a book about Benjamin Franklin. I was just finishing up a biography of Albert Einstein. He said, "I want you to do my biography next." My initial reaction was "Yeah, okay, Ben Franklin, Albert Einstein, you ..." I wondered, half-jokingly, whether he saw himself as the natural successor in that sequence. I said, "Maybe in 20 or so years, when you retire." Later his wife said to me, "If you're going to do a book on Steve, you had better do it now." By then it had become public that he was sick. She said, "He didn't want people to know, but he called you right before he was operated on for cancer." Fortune managing editor Andy Serwer interviews Walter Isaacson and John Huey at the Global Summit for the Closely Held in September 2012. Serwer : John, what about you with Sam Walton? How did you