Volume 45, Number 15 · October 8, 1998

Bill & the Emperor

By Garry Wills

In 1992, I asked Bill Clinton what book (other than the Bible) had most influenced him. After pausing for thought, he answered, 'the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius,' a fairly austere book for so genial a man. Perhaps he took the Roman emperor as a pattern for the intellectual as ruler, a kind of second-century JFK, since Marcus the warrior was also a Stoic philosopher.



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