homosexuals. He never smoked pot behind the gym.” When
Beck got into trouble for wearing that peace button to class,
Barr brought him a gift—a button with a jet bomber depicted
inside a peace sign. The caption: “Drop it.” “I took it as wit
between friends,” Beck said. “Billy’s humor was always there.”
In the 1967 Horace Mann yearbook, Barr had already been
tagged with his future persona: “a staunch conservative on
political issues,” a master of “facial contortions,” and a brilliant
mimic of his Catholic school priests. Often, he rode the sub-
way home with another classmate, Barry Scheck, who would
become an attorney and eventually cofound the Innocence
Project, using DNA evidence to free wrongly convicted pris-
oners. “We would argue all the way down from school and all
the way back,” Scheck said.
Barr and his three brothers revered their father, spending
countless hours at the dinner table discussing philosophy and
politics. Before attending Horace Mann, all four siblings had
gone to Corpus Christi, a nearby parochial school where he was
in class with many Irish, Hispanic, and black students. William
Barr was the privileged son of an intellectual. In first grade,
he made a speech in class supporting Republican Dwight D.
Eisenhower for president. At age eight, Barr told his parents
that he wanted to learn to play the bagpipes. His father not only
encouraged him but located a former Scottish pipes major in
the British army and for years personally escorted his son up to
168th Street for Tuesday-night classes. At one point, the young
Barr even declared to his Horace Mann adviser that when he
grew up, he wanted to become head of the CIA.
Horace Mann was another environment entirely: complete-
ly secular, with a large Jewish contingent. A few who knew the
Barr boys came to call them “the bully Barrs”; the siblings,
these former classmates claimed, could be intimidating. The
fact that his father was born Jewish was not a factor in Bill Barr’s
upbringing. While he knew he had Jewish relatives, he never
discussed the specifics with his father. “He had become more
Catholic than the Catholics,” he said to those who asked.
The school was an enclave of conservative privilege that
had educated New York Times columnist Anthony Lewis, his-
torian Robert A. Caro, and Si Newhouse Jr., the late owner of
Condé Nast (the parent company of Vanity Fair). The head of
the history department, Alfred Briggs, lectured on the evils of
communism and Red China, and lavished praise on Horace
Mann’s most notorious graduate, Roy Cohn. “We need more
Roy Cohns in the world,” Briggs frequently said. “Roy was my
best student of all time.”
Sixties conservatism was often under fire from Establish-
ment Republicans on the right and the nascent countercul-
ture on the left. And, as it turned out, the class of ’67—my own
class as well—would be the last to graduate in the shadow of
World War II’s Silent Generation. During Barr’s final semester,
Johnson ramped up the draft, Muhammad Ali refused military
service, Aretha Franklin released “Respect,” and Israel won
the Six-Day War. As school let out, San Francisco was envel-
oped by the Summer of Love.
In the face of all this turbulence, Barr went off to Colum-
bia, which erupted his freshman year. The campus strikes and
shutdowns, he would later admit, were absolutely crucial in
focusing his priorities. When student protests shuttered college
buildings, he used the word anarchic to describe the face-off,
furious that the demonstrators—with whom he tangled at the
time—were interfering with his ability to enter the library for
his classwork in Chinese studies.
Soon after graduation, Barr joined the CIA as a China ana-
lyst while attending George Washington law at night and mar-
ried Christine Moynihan, a librarian. They would raise three
daughters, all of whom would become attorneys. (A devoted
family man, Barr would take a leave from work when his young-
est daughter, Meg, had a recurrence of lymphoma, staying with
her for months as she was isolated after a stem-cell transplant.In first grade, he made a speech in class supporting Dwight
Eisenhower for president. At eight, he took up the bagpipes.
ON THE MARCH
Women’s rights activist Betty Friedan at a New York
City demonstration, 1970.DECEMBER 2019 VANITY FAIR 83