I wanted to investigate that question through the prism of his growing up as a young conservative in the intellectually demanding and socially cosseted world of New York private schools—ironically, the same schools that educated Cohn. I have always been in situations where I had no problem being politically different. The observations of all the leaks we do have, and how they were responded to, point to direct involvement by the secret services.Excellent writing and work here.Judges giving harsh sentences to child witnesses and lenient sentences on perpetratorsIt's just keeps going and going.Now ask yourself, what is the one type of organization which can accomplish all of these things? 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.”“I was in shock,” Friedan recalled. Barr made his views known soon after he came to Horace Mann, then a rigorous all-boys private school in Riverdale, a leafy suburb in the Bronx.
Donald taught English at New School cesspool Columbia University, and he was headmaster for 10 years at the plutocrat class’ Dalton School in New York City before resigning over some controversy. 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. Turn it another, and they were absorbing the highest ideals of an enlightened education. Friedan is an architectural engineer and a senior partner in a major Philadelphia construction company, a career that almost never came to pass.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 professional class, drawn to its unusual style of education that is focused on creativity. (Betty Friedan died in 2006.) He would say things like, ‘If you guys get your way, we will be living under the Communist flag in no time flat.’ We sparred constantly. Donald Barr was an Office of Strategic Services agent, an American educator, and a writer. “Our next-door neighbor in our building was the acting president of Columbia,” William Barr would later tell an acquaintance. Bush’s attorney general, Barr participated in the Miller Center’s oral history of the administration. Donald Barr gave Epstein his first job as a math teacher in an elite, politically connected school, even though Epstein did not have any qualifications or even a college degree. Another former student noted: “I mentioned to him once that I wanted to learn Japanese. You may know all this but in case not, there you go, SHH. Among her innovations: no bells to signal class changes; individual labs set to the student’s own pace.Beck and his classmates never doubted Barr’s decency. “I immediately thought, This is Donald Barr. “When he was appointed by Trump, I thought, Trump isn’t getting the person he thought he was getting,” said Freedman, who respected Barr’s sincerity and his consistent positions on issues of law.
What’s more, Betty Friedan was a vocal member of a group of Dalton parents who were trying to have Barr dismissed.Years later, while working on a biography of Betty Friedan, writer Judith Hennessee confronted Barr about his possible role in her son’s college rejections. “There were frequent screaming matches at PTA meetings,” Sarah Crichton said.
When they came back, Barr was uncharacteristically quiet. Twenty years later, during the Iran-Contra crisis that rocked Ronald Reagan’s second 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. “It was a blessing in a way,” he told me.