118 VANITY FAIR DECEMBER 2019
I had a sense that there was to be a crisis of
discipline.... To the modern liberal mind, the
word has an almost pornographic sound. But
discipline is necessary to freedom.... Though
discipline and freedom seem antithetical,
each without the other destroys itself.... In
government, order without dissent stagnates
and rebellion without law makes chaos, and
both are despotic.
Barr had tense standoffs with Dalton par-
ents who either disagreed with his politics
or took issue with his management style or
brusque personality. He could be peevish
and small-minded as he identified enemies,
real or imagined. He could also be impul-
sive, Semel remembered: “You would go
into your mailbox in the morning and there
would be a directive. And at 3 p.m. there
would be another memo telling you to put
the original policy back in place.”
William Barr was still in high school as
trouble started to swirl around his father.
Even though the elder Barr had supporters
on the Dalton board, it was apparent that
the headmaster and his antagonists had
begun to take up their positions. And then
things started to get ugly.
On the day last June when William Barr
was first threatened with contempt of Con-
gress charges—for his refusal to respond to
subpoenas related to the Mueller investiga-
tion—I phoned Jonathan Friedan. He was in
his car, driving across the Chesapeake Bay.
Friedan is an architectural engineer and a
senior partner in a major Philadelphia con-
struction company, a career that almost
never came to pass.
Private schools in New York have never
been democratic citadels. In the ’60s and
’70s and for nearly a generation after, elite
institutions of higher learning routinely
filled a disproportionate share of slots with
students from privileged, competitive bas-
tions like Dalton. And at no time was their
complicated favor system more apparent
than during the college application crunch,
when the raised eyebrow of a headmaster
could sway the chances of even the most
promising student. In this environment,
what happened to Friedan—a straight-A
class president with near-perfect college
board scores—was astonishing, even by
New York standards.
Low-key and polite, Friedan was one of
three siblings to go to Dalton. “When my
family first met Barr,” he told me, “he was
still running the Columbia program. My
older brother, Daniel, who is really bril-
liant”—he’s a physicist today—“was part
of his Columbia gifted science program.”
When Daniel decided that higher education
did not necessarily suit him, Barr lured him
to Dalton to teach.
It was considered a coup for Barr when
Betty Friedan, the pioneering feminist,
chose to send her other kids to Dalton.
Friedan’s seminal study of the housewives of
America, The Feminine Mystique, had recent-
ly set off a revolution among middle-class
women in America. Often on TV, she had a
confrontational style that some considered
abrasive, but her intellect was formidable.
In 1968, Jonathan Friedan’s sophomore
year at Dalton, Columbia students began
what turned out to be a wave of protests and
the campus shut down. Friedan was sympa-
thetic to their cause. Part of a group of four
Dalton friends who were high achievers—
and the school’s most committed activ-
ists—he was adamant in his opposition to
the Vietnam War, which placed him in the
crosshairs of the headmaster. These Dalton
students’ most vocal supporters were their
parents, including Betty Friedan, whose
public personality grated on Barr.
One of the four friends was Steven Slon,
later the class valedictorian. Along with
Jonathan Friedan and classmates Marc
Edelman and Dan Freedman, Slon helped
mobilize many Dalton students to political
action. Their meetings typically took place
at the Friedans’ town house on East 93rd
Street; the four remain close friends.
Friedan, the most diplomatic of the
group, was deputized to negotiate with
Barr. “Our first action came when we were
sophomores,” he remembered. “It was a
sympathy high school strike after Martin
Luther King was killed and Columbia shut
down.” There were riots all over the city,
including one in front of Dalton. “Barr was
furious,” recalled Edelman, “and he yelled
at Jonathan for disrespecting the school”
by encouraging impressionable kids to fol-
low the lead of older college-age rebels who
were engaging in acts of civil disobedience.
“There were two issues which really sent
him into orbit,” Edelman continued. “The
dress codes and the Vietnam War.”
All through high school, the gang of four
battled with Barr on these and other issues.
As riots continued to seethe at Columbia
and across the country, Dalton’s student
activists spoke out in support, sometimes
joining the marchers.
In the fall of their senior year, the Viet-
nam War moratorium was announced, a
massive demonstration that was to be held
in Washington, D.C. At that very moment,
seniors Friedan and Slon were busy trying to
meet their college application deadlines—a
fact that did not escape Barr’s attention.
“Just as everyone was going nuts around
the country, so too were we,” said Slon.
“From the ninth grade, we were the group
who was anti-war. Barr opposed our going
to demonstrations. Or having time off. And
was opposed to any leftist public display of
anti-war materials.”The year before, 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 want-
ed to build in Harlem. Donald Barr expressed
his rage in print, noting that he was fright-
ened of the anarchy and the mob tactics of
the New Left as well as their moves at Colum-
bia 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 acquain-
tance. “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 moth-
er told me how upset she was that he might
be going to war,” Semel remembered. “It
was a time of body bags and students mov-
ing 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 morato-
rium,” 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 orga-
nizing for demonstrations. One time, at the
end of a harangue, he said, ‘Well, Marc,William Barr