DECEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 119I 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 agita-
tors. 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 sus-
pected 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 recommenda-
tion 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 pos-
sible legal action? “My mother
worried that it was her fault—that
her big opinions and personal-
ity 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 activi-
ties had involved organizing an antidrug
program, affiliated with Columbia. That
summer, the university agreed to admit
him, and though he attended for two semes-
ters, 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 com-
mercial 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 some-
how 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 biogra-
phy of Betty Friedan, writer Judith Hen-
nessee confronted Barr about his possible
role in her son’s college rejections. At first
he denied it. Then he admitted that, infact, he had had some input that was “lau-
datory.” Jonathan Friedan, looking back
at the exchange between Hennessee
and Barr, felt that Barr was trying to sug-
gest 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 circu-
lated within the Dalton community. But
by then, many of the parents, board mem-
bers, 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 ofthe 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 chal-
lenged 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 author-
ity 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 scream-
ing 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 denoue-
ment. “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 arrange-
ment, announced his resignation;
the Dalton yearbook, playing nice,
had this to say: “The whole of Dal-
ton owes a great debt to Donald
Barr.... We are all greatly saddened
by his leaving.” Barr found a new
job running Hackley, a more con-
servative private school in Westchester
County. In an interview with the Ne w 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 cam-
paign 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 publish-
ing Space Relations, an odd sci-fi novel whichUPPER HAND
Barr is the one senior administration official toward whom the
president does not project a public attitude of superiority.PHOTOGRAPH BY DAVID BUTOW/REDUX