midnight
He believed in great books . And so on the night that his son was being graduated from college he sat in his room at the hotel -- cheap room in a mediocre hotel ; he had never learned to feel at home in the rich ones -- reading Marcus Aurelius . But his hand as he turned the pages trembled as the hand of a very old man . At midnight some reporters came in to ask him what he thought of his son 's oration . They wanted a statement from him . He told them that he had never believed the sins of a parent should be visited on a child , and that it was even so with the thought . He had always contended that a man should do his own thinking .