“Meg’s illness changed our family,” he told journalist Judith
Miller, “and it changed me.”)
Fast-forward to 2019. Today, Beck and other classmates
are mystified that Barr has appeared to bend, time and again,
not to some clear-cut legal principle but to the will of Donald
Trump. “I think it is an American tragedy,” Beck said. “You
start off on one road in life and you go further and further from
where you were, and you lose yourself.” Others contend that
Barr has ample precedent, operating in the style of a long line
of attorneys general—Robert Kennedy, John Mitchell, Alberto
Gonzales, and Eric Holder —who were accused of acting as
the president’s de facto defender. According to James Zirin,
the legal commentator and former federal prosecutor, “Barr is
from the school of L’état, c’est moi—I am the state.”
A man, in the end, not unlike his father, Donald Barr.
L
ast May, Susan Semel was at her country house
in Hudson, New York, when she heard a familiar
voice drift up the stairs. Decades earlier, Semel, a
Dalton School graduate, had been hired by DonaldBarr to teach social studies—and remained for 25 years. She is
now a professor at City College. The sound coming from the
Senate hearings pulled her toward the TV. It was a voice that
she had lived with for a generation. “The tone of over-knowing
moral superiority, that is what I heard,” she said. She came
downstairs to see William Barr, as rumpled and stern as his
father had once been, with the same granite expression that
had vexed her during her early teaching career.
“You seem to have been the designated fall guy,” Senator
Richard Blumenthal, the Connecticut Democrat, said to Barr.
“History will judge you harshly.” His face remained impervi-
ous. “His reaction and his voice were so similar, it was eerie,”
Semel remembered. “I immediately thought, This is Donald
Barr. He has the same glasses. He was trying to turn the clock
back in time—just like his father once did. He was the Danish
king, Canute, trying to hold back the waves.
“The same tone, the way he moved,” Semel went on, pon-
dering the impact of the attorney general’s relationship with
two father figures. “Donald Barr and Donald Trump—the
same chaotic style of management and rule by ukase. I thought
immediately, This man cares deeply about his place in history.
Billy has a score to settle.”
That day, Dalton graduates began to message one another
through their Facebook pages. “Can you fucking believe this?”
“Are we back in high school?” For some in this group of pro-
fessionals in their 60s, long removed from the terrors of high
school, Barr’s appearance triggered curiously primal memo-
ries. At home in Pomona, New York, the filmmaker Jonathan
Slon was listening to New York Public Radio’s Brian Lehrer
Show when the host asked a guest, “Who is William Barr?” “I
threw a book at the radio,” Slon told me. In London, the psy-
chologist Ann Pleshette Murphy, a Dalton grad, tuned in: “The
apple does not always fall far from the tree. Barr could have
gone through life in opposition to his father. But you could not
have watched him at the Senate and not thought, This is Don-
ald Barr.” In Brooklyn, book editor Sarah Crichton said she
“went into spasms” when she saw Barr testify, remembering
the moment the headmaster called an assembly and decried
the women students who were seeking permission to wear
slacks to class. “The rule was that you could not wear pants
unless it was below 20 degrees outside,” she said. “Mr. Barr
stood up and told the assembled high school, ‘Your desire to
wear slacks is masturbatory ego gratification.’ ”
Dalton, a tall, narrow red-brick building situated then, as
now, at the corner of Park Avenue and 89th Street, had always
attracted the sons and daughters of artists and the elite profes-
sional class, drawn to its unusual style of education that is focused
on creativity. As Bill Barr started his sophomore year at Horace
Mann high school in 1964, his father was hired to up the stan-
dards at Dalton, a school started in 1919 by the experimental edu-
cator Helen Parkhurst. Among her innovations: no bells to signal
class changes; individual labs set to the student’s own pace.
“Barr was brought in to put Dalton on the map,” Semel
recalled. “Many people thought he was a genius and a mad-
man. The school was going nowhere. Barr was installed to give
it a mandate.” Pleshette Murphy explained, “The values in the
1960s were not about money. They were trying to educate the
next Jackson Pollocks.” Dalton parent Jacob Javits, at the time
a Republican senator from New York, came to Semel’s fifth-
grade class to talk about his experience growing up. So did
Dalton parent Norman Podhoretz, editor of the left-leaning
Commentary magazine, who, by the 1970s, would transform
into a leading neo-con. How better to teach 10-year-olds thanBIDEN TIME
William Barr, center, at his 1991 nomination hearing,
with Senators Joseph Biden and Patrick Leahy.On watching William Barr testify: “I thought, This man cares
deeply about his place in history. Billy has a score to settle.”
84 VANITY FAIR DECEMBER 2019
PHOTOGRAPHS: LEFT, BY JOHN DURICKA/A.P. IMAGES/SHUTTERSTOCK; RIGHT, FROM
THE ASAHI SHIMBUN/GETTY IMAGES