120 VANITY FAIR DECEMBER 2019
presidential
campaign, former president Bill Clinton
hopped from the private jet he was on at a
Phoenix airport to the private jet used by
Loretta Lynch, then the U.S. attorney gen-
eral. They spoke inside Lynch’s jet for about
20 minutes, giving the Trump campaign
plenty of ammunition to wonder what they
were talking about and to conclude they
must have been trying to rig the election
somehow for Clinton’s wife, Hillary. It cer-
tainly was an awkward meeting at best. “I
would have much preferred a story that the
attorney general turned a former president
of the United States away on the tarmac,”
Melanie Newman, then the Justice Depart-
ment’s head of the Office of Public Affairs,
told the department’s inspector general.
“But...she doesn’t make mistakes, and she
was not pleased with herself for making this
kind of high-stakes mistake.”How did we get to this place, where a pri-
vate jet is the ultimate aspiration? Accordingto Shawn Vick, the chairman and CEO of
Global Jet Capital, which provides financ-
ing for companies and individuals buying
private jets, the concept of private-jet travel
began to emerge after World War II, when
scores of people had seen firsthand how
productive and efficient aircraft could be,
“whether it’s moving goods, supplies, parts
or cargo, or mail,” creating an “exponen-
tial increase in productivity and in capa-
bilities.” The early pioneers could be found
in the 1950s and 1960s with Bill Lear, the
founder of Learjet (now owned by Bombar-
dier), Lockheed, and Hawker de Havilland,
a British manufacturer. Vick likes to remind
people that the Wright Brothers made their
first successful flight in 1903, that the first
nonstop transatlantic flight was in 1919,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 author-
ity 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 sec-
ond 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. (Presi-
dent Bill Clinton’s impeachment had been
warranted, in Barr’s estimation, because
Clinton had violated the law.) Then, after
Trump appointed Barr as attorney gen-
eral, his stiff-arm summary of the Muel-
ler 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 Rus-
sian 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 presi-
dent 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 his-
tory 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 admin-
istration. 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 asthe president.” One can only wonder: Does
he now feel the same about his tenure with
Donald J. Trump?Dan Freedman remembered an encoun-
ter 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 Coun-
sel. 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 Freed-
man, 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.”William Barr
Private Jets
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