The
year before, [Dalton headmaster Donald] Barr had made it clear how livid he was about the Columbia
riots. His son William had been a freshman there, and in a column for
Vogue, the elder Barr decried the middle-class students who “go to
demonstrations by taxi,” dismissing the protests of Columbia’s radical
Students for a Democratic Society and their opposition to a
quasi-segregated gym the university wanted to build in Harlem. Donald
Barr expressed his rage in print, noting that he was frightened of the
anarchy and the mob tactics of the New Left as well as their moves at
Columbia to try to stop ROTC funding from going to national defense.
“Parents,” he wrote in a McCall’s essay, “are directly financing the New
Left revolution and the drug cop-out, and indirectly they are
supporting the black militants.” At the height of the Black Power
movement, Barr came out against “the black militants…who are tired of
asking for a little share and are going to take a big share of Whitey’s
good life and education.”
Barr’s opposition to the chaos wrought
by the protesters was echoed by his son. “Our next-door neighbor in our
building was the acting president of Columbia,” William Barr would later
tell an acquaintance. “He tried to take a tough stand and came under a
lot of pressure from the attackers. I felt: If the leaders had taken a
stronger stance, up front, it would not have degenerated so much. That
year, 1968, was formative for me.”
The draft lottery, announced
in 1969, had traumatized families with sons in college—including the
Barrs. “Billy’s mother told me how upset she was that he might be going
to war,” Semel remembered. “It was a time of body bags and students
moving to Canada,” Friedan said.
Freedman, the editor of the
Daltonian in 1970, tangled with the headmaster over the political slant
of the school paper. “We had called for a strike in support of the
moratorium,” Freedman said. “I was called into Barr’s office and he
began to read me my college recommendation—this was before I applied.
‘Danny is not such an exemplary student but he is a real leader,’ Barr
read in a tone that was both condescending and menacing. I pushed back
and said he could threaten me, but I wasn’t calling off the strike. Then
I ran out of his office and found the social studies teacher. I cried
in his arms. I was that upset.”
“I would be called in
periodically by Headmaster Barr,” Edelman remembered. “I would be
interrogated about any number of things. I was having to constantly
remind him that students had constitutional rights. There was a constant
monitoring of our student press and of outside activities that involved
going to demonstrations or organizing for demonstrations. One time, at
the end of a harangue, he said, ‘Well, Marc, I would rather have a
little Lenin like you than some of these little Timothy Learys we have
got here.’ That was his way of saying that I was pretty terrible but at
least I didn’t seem to be a big druggie.”
In November, Friedan
and his friends took off for the Vietnam War moratorium, sleeping on
church floors. When they came back, Barr was uncharacteristically quiet.
Their college applications were in the mail. Friedan and Slon had
assumed that as A students with superior SATs, they would have their
choice of schools in the Ivy League. Their parents had been under the
same impression. But how naive could they have been? It was a moment in
America when colleges, worried about campus unrest, carefully vetted
applications for would-be agitators. What’s more, Betty Friedan was a
vocal member of a group of Dalton parents who were trying to have Barr
dismissed.
In April, Jonathan Friedan, who had applied to eight
schools, was rejected from each and every one, including his safety
choices. Slon, the valedictorian, was admitted only to Swarthmore and
one of his safety schools. The Slons and the Friedans immediately
suspected Barr had sabotaged the boys’ applications, flagging their sons
as agitators who had incited their peers.
“I was in shock,”
Friedan recalled. “And Barr immediately called me into his office. He
read me a glowing recommendation letter. The first thing he said was,
‘It wasn’t me.’?” Had Barr felt remorse? Did he worry about his own
liability—or the school’s—and therefore want to deflect possible legal
action? “My mother [Betty Friedan] worried that it was her fault—that her big opinions
and personality had frightened the colleges. It was a traumatic period.
My parents were going through a divorce, and my father wanted to sue
Dalton.”
One of Friedan’s extracurricular activities had involved
organizing an antidrug program, affiliated with Columbia. That summer,
the university agreed to admit him, and though he attended for two
semesters, he dropped out, thrown off his axis by what had happened to
him at Dalton. He spent what he called a few “wandering years” working
as a carpenter and a commercial fisherman in the Pacific Northwest. “It
was a blessing in a way,” he told me. “I was able to confront life
without the scrim of all the privilege I had grown up with.”
Later,
Friedan went back to Columbia, where he finished his engineering
degree, but his mother was determined to find out what happened. “A
Harvard trustee somehow was able to penetrate the admissions office—at
least this is what my mother told me,” Friedan said. (Betty Friedan died
in 2006.) And what he discovered was shocking. “There was a long letter
Barr had written accusing me of being a rabble-rouser and a
troublemaker. He said I was ‘a latent homosexual’ and ‘could be a danger
to the school.’?”
Years later, while working on a biography of
Betty Friedan, writer Judith Hennessee confronted Barr about his
possible role in her son’s college rejections. At first he denied it.
Then he admitted that, in fact, he had had some input that was
“laudatory.” Jonathan Friedan, looking back at the exchange between
Hennessee and Barr, felt that Barr was trying to suggest that “it was
Betty who had made all the trouble, meddling in the admissions offices.
But my mother? Calling eight admissions offices? Out of the question.”
Stories about the alleged sabotage circulated within the Dalton
community. But by then, many of the parents, board members, and alumni
had had enough. The man who had brought such prestige and robust
innovation to Dalton had become insular, autocratic, and tone-deaf to
the competing needs of the stakeholders in the school. It took Dalton
parent Richard Ravitch—a real estate titan who later became the head of
the city’s transit authority—to devise a strategy to get Barr out.
Ravitch,
the head of the trustees, polled the parents and teachers and
discovered, he would tell me, “a pattern of behavior that was troubling.
I came on to run the board after Barr had won the right to stay at the
school by a single vote. Many on the board resigned over it. The
teachers hated him. The parents disliked him.” Barr, at the time, was
backed by at least one influential trustee, a sympathetic litigator who
challenged the bylaws of the school, discovering a loophole that allowed
him a seat on the board. The mandate of the PTA was taken away. There
were legal maneuvers meant to call into question the very authority of
the board. “This actually went to court,” Ravitch recalled. “The head of
the PTA was in favor of Barr and they litigated: Did the PTA have the
right to impeach the PTA president? The courts said yes, they did.”
“There
were frequent screaming matches at PTA meetings,” Sarah Crichton said.
“One night,” Semel recalled, “all of these well-mannered parents were
stomping their feet and pounding the floor.”
Ravitch recounted
the denouement. “I brought in the dean of the Harvard School of
Education and the head of Teachers College to evaluate Barr. They came
back and said that Barr was not the right headmaster for Dalton.” It was
a humiliating end to Barr’s years at the school. “I fired him. It took
years to get him out, but we did it.”
Barr, as part of an
arrangement, announced his resignation; the Dalton yearbook, playing
nice, had this to say: “The whole of Dalton owes a great debt to Donald
Barr…. We are all greatly saddened by his leaving.” Barr found a new job
running Hackley, a more conservative private school in Westchester
County. In an interview with the New York Times, he said, “Kids up here
are…better-natured and less bitchy.” It was a relief, Barr insisted, to
be liberated from the “ego display and radical chic of private-school
kids in Manhattan.”
William
Barr was very much aware of the Dalton scandal; his father’s concerted
campaign to save his job was covered widely in the Times and elsewhere.
One can only speculate how much this saga affected Bill Barr in later
life—or helped solder his father-son fealty.
Soon after Donald
Barr left Dalton, he surprised many who knew him by publishing Space
Relations, an odd sci-fi novel which imagined the kingdom of Kossar, a
hellscape where power, drugs, and boredom have turned the ruling caste
into vicious sexual predators. The hero, John Craig—“a rising young
Earth diplomat” who is captured and enslaved—eventually triumphs,
restoring virginity and monogamy to the colonized.
William Barr
recently confided to an associate that he has never read the book, even
as he pointed out that it was part of his father’s personality to be a
renegade, often using earthy phrases to provoke—such as “the sneeze of
the genitals.”
Barr was also said to have noted that of all the
lessons he learned from his father, the most overriding one was the
fierce pride he took in being a contrarian. Barr would later tell one
colleague, “My father once said to me that we have been used to being
different and it doesn’t bother us at all. I have always been in
situations where I had no problem being politically different. I don’t
govern my life by polls or by what other people think about what I do.”
Indeed.
This, then, is the same Bill Barr who once argued that President
Johnson, not Congress, had the overriding authority to determine the
military course of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War. Twenty
years later, during the Iran-Contra crisis that rocked Ronald Reagan’s
second term, Barr, then a White House policy adviser, voiced the view
that administration members should be granted pardons for their roles in
the ill-fated arms-for-hostages deal. As assistant attorney general and
then A.G. under George H.W. Bush, Barr pushed back against a proposed
independent probe of Bush insiders, earning the epithet
“Coverup-General” Barr.
In June 2018, he wrote a voluminous memo,
unsolicited, that made the case that as chief executive, Donald
Trump—if he had not committed crimes—should not be investigated for
obstructing justice. (President Bill Clinton’s impeachment had been
warranted, in Barr’s estimation, because Clinton had violated the law.)
Then, after Trump appointed Barr as attorney general, his stiff-arm
summary of the Mueller Report was firm and categorical—and consistent
with his past stances. He cast aside the nuanced findings of the special
counsel and declared that even if the Russian government had tampered
with the U.S. presidential election, the nation’s chief executive and
his team had basically been cleared of any complicity or wrongdoing. And
finally, Trump’s depiction of Barr and Rudy Giuliani as his “personal
envoys” (as described in the whistle-blower’s account) appears to be the
coup de grâce: the president characterizing his attorney general and
personal lawyer as conduits for foreign governments assisting Trump
against his political enemies.
For Barr’s schoolmate Garrick
Beck, there is no question how much Alfred Briggs—Horace Mann’s high
school history teacher—would have approved of Trump’s Justice
Department, which has seen defections of career federal lawyers who have
refused to serve at the whims of a truculent president who publicly
defies the rule of law, spews racists tropes, and shatters judicial
norms. It was Briggs, after all, who was known to say, “We need more Roy
Cohns in the world.” One statement of Barr’s from the 1990s bears
repeating here. After a stint as George H.W. Bush’s attorney general,
Barr participated in the Miller Center’s oral history of the
administration. At one point, he spoke eloquently about the president
that he and his cohorts had served, someone they considered to be “a man
of honor, a man of character, and a man they were actually proud to
have as the president.” One can only wonder: Does he now feel the same
about his tenure with Donald J. Trump?
Dan Freedman remembered an
encounter he’d had 20 years after he’d graduated from high school: the
day he met William Barr, who was then George H.W. Bush’s head of the
White House Office of Legal Counsel. At the time, Freedman was reporting
for Hearst newspapers. “Barr,” he recalled, “had already written a
famous legal memo asserting that presidents could not be indicted. I
thought, This is Donald Barr’s son! I walked in to interview him and I
said, ‘Your father was my enemy and we fought each other tooth and
nail.’ He deadpanned and said, ‘I hope that won’t influence your
coverage of the Justice Department.’ He was a straight shooter—and I
respected him.”
The two would interact from time to time; Barr
was once Freedman’s guest at the White House Correspondents’ Association
dinner. “When he was appointed by Trump, I thought, Trump isn’t getting
the person he thought he was getting,” said Freedman, who respected
Barr’s sincerity and his consistent positions on issues of law. “Now, I
am not sure what to think.”
Freedman shared one final memory. On
the day in 1991 that William Barr was sworn in as attorney general,
Freedman was invited to the ceremony. There, he encountered Donald Barr,
then in his 70s. It was the first time he had seen him since their
Dalton days.
“Enough time had gone by,” Freedman recalled. “I
went up to him and shook his hand. I said, ‘You must be very proud of
your son.’ He looked at me and said, ‘I am very proud that all the
things I stood for have come to fruition. Now the executive branch has
finally embraced my way of thinking.’ It was clear to me that Donald
Barr felt completely vindicated.”
The quote is long, the VF item much longer. While less the sheer bastard of a man
in New York when Fred and Donald were represented by Roy Cohn with the
suit settled, Donald Barr was a man with his own pride, pitfalls, and
prejudices - such as against the Vietnam era Columbia U protest events.
? Lafayette Park civil demonstration worming under the AG skin much as dad had been afflicted over Columbia U being an earlier site of citizen unrest, openly expressed, to the dismay of some, dad included.
