One Damn Thing After Another

Memoirs of an Attorney General

William P. Barr

• Publisher: William Morrow
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780063158627
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

The former attorney general provides a candid account of his historic tenures serving two vastly different presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald J. Trump.

William Barr's first tenure as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush was largely the result of chance, while his second tenure under President Donald Trump a deliberate and difficult choice. In this candid memoir, Barr takes readers behind the scenes during seminal moments of the 1990s, from the LA riots to Pan Am 103 and Iran Contra. Thirty years later, Barr faced an unrelenting barrage of issues, such as Russiagate, the COVID outbreak, civil unrest, the impeachments, and the 2020 election fallout. One Damn Thing After Another is vivid, forthright, and essential not only to understanding the Bush and Trump legacies, but also how both men viewed power and justice at critical junctures of their presidencies.

Part I

Early Years

Chapter 1

Planning Ahead

I grew up in the Columbia University neighborhood on the Upper West Side of New York City. My parents, Donald and Mary Barr, were on the Columbia faculty, and we lived in a stately apartment building owned by the university on Riverside Drive at 116th Street. From our living room window, we looked out directly over Riverside Park, with a panoramic view across the Hudson River to the cliffs of the New Jersey Palisades on the other side.

My father grew up on the same block. His father, Pelham Barr, had been born in London and immigrated to the United States with his mother and father at the age of fifteen. His parents were shopkeepers—Ashkenazi Jews who fled Ukraine to settle first in England and eventually in America. Pelham graduated from Columbia University in 1916 and worked as an economic consultant in New York City. In his last year at Columbia, he married a mailman’s daughter, Estelle De Young, a Barnard College graduate who went on to practice as a psychologist. Estelle’s parents were both from Dutch Jewish families. Pelham and Estelle had two children. Their daughter died of leukemia in her twenties. Donald, my father, was born in 1921 and graduated from Columbia University in 1941. Soon afterward, he was drafted into the army.

My mother was Irish Catholic. Her father, William Ahern, was born into a struggling farming family in County Cork, Ireland. His parents were native Gaelic speakers and could not read or write. He immigrated as a young man, and settled in Hartford, Connecticut, working for the Colt gun factory as a drop press operator. In 1917 he married Catherine (“Katie”) Flynn, from County Clare, the oldest of eleven children in a farming family. She had immigrated as a young woman and found work as a nurse’s aide in Hartford. William and Katie had their first child the following year, 1918: my mother, Mary Margaret Ahern. She graduated in 1939 from St. Joseph College, at that time the Catholic all-women’s college in West Hartford, and then—uncommon for a woman in those days—went on to Yale University to receive a master of arts degree in English literature.

Like many in my generation, World War II brought my parents together. In 1942, before the Allied invasion of Italy, the army had sent my father to learn Italian at the University of Missouri, in Columbia. One day he was walking through a classroom building and spotted a beautiful young woman teaching an undergraduate class on Shakespeare. This was Mary Ahern in her first teaching job since leaving Yale. Transfixed, my father hung by the classroom door watching her teach. After class, he walked her home. He tried for months to get her to go on a date with him. She refused.

In later years, my brothers and I teasingly pressed our mother on why she put off Pop for so long. When she said she was worried “he was a New York wolf,” we all erupted in laughter—including my mother.

Pop was manifestly far from a “wolf.” Flesh-toned, horn-rim glasses; benign, boyish face; gentle temperament—he was the bookish, intellectual type. The real reason for my mother’s resistance was that, as a committed Catholic, she found it hard to imagine marrying a secular Jew raised without any religion. But my father was persistent, wrote her poetry, and impressed her with his broad erudition. She saw he had a genuine respect for Catholicism, and he pledged that, if they ended up together, he would raise their children as Catholics. She relented, and, before long, they were engaged. My father, meanwhile, had transferred to the recently established US Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). When he returned from Europe at the end of the war, he and Mary Ahern were married in New York City. They remained devoted to each other for fifty-five years, parted only by death.

For the first fifteen of those years, they struggled. Four sons arrived in close succession: Christopher in 1947, me in 1950, Hilary in 1952, and Stephen in 1953. My mother worked as an editor for a variety of women’s magazines, which allowed her often to work from home. My father taught English at Columbia while studying for his doctorate. He got his master’s degree the year I was born, but the demands of his growing family derailed his plans for a PhD. To make ends meet, he expanded his teaching assignments at Columbia and supplemented his income by teaching night courses at Pace College and City College of New York (CCNY)—teaching at all three colleges during the same school year. Our apartment was crammed with stacks of “blue books” from the three institutions. I remember my father telling me that all his income together amounted to “less than the pay of a New York City garbageman.” It wasn’t hyperbole.

We had the largest family but smallest apartment in the building. It had only two bedrooms. My older brother, Christopher, and I slept in one, and my parents briefly rented the other to a foreign grad student to generate a little extra income. They converted the dining room into their bedroom—an odd arrangement, but it worked. When Hilary and Stephen came along, the foreign student had to leave. Because the dining room was otherwise occupied, our family usually ate dinner together in the kitchen, but we also used a section of our large living room when needed for formal dining.

Our apartment had a solitary bathroom for all six of us—a fact that effectively enforced the Golden Rule. When one of us boys urgently needed access, we had to rely on the goodwill of the other to relinquish possession. Fights and ill will among brothers could not be carried too far, since each knew that, before long, he’d be shifting from foot to foot outside the bathroom door pleading with his antagonist to “please hurry!” The principle of “mutually assured destruction” moderated sibling conflict in the Barr household.

At five years old, I was a scrawny, pale child and collapsed one day on the street while walking to kindergarten. When tests showed I was anemic, I was admitted to nearby St. Luke’s Hospital for evaluation. Some doctors thought the X-rays showed a growth on my heart and wanted to conduct exploratory surgery; others thought it was just a shadow. I was going into my second week of tests, when my Irish-born grandmother arrived from Hartford, as did a priest, also from Ireland, who was close to my mother’s family. Quickly pooh-poohing any idea of an operation, they instead prescribed at least eight ounces of Guinness stout a day. I was discharged from the hospital, and, until I was twelve years old, I drank a glass of stout every day—much to my brothers’ envy. Treatment was discontinued when it became apparent that I had become anything but scrawny.

My mother was a good match for my father intellectually, but she was more practical. When any problem emerged, her approach was to grab the bull by the horns and wrestle it to the ground as quickly as possible. She ran the household with a hawk eye and a firm hand—a necessity with four rambunctious boys. Fortunately, she had charge of the finances, and I remember her sitting at the kitchen table every evening reconciling her budget journal, keeping track of every penny that came in and went out. I still have some of those journals. They show how she juggled bills and looked for every opportunity to cut costs just to get through each month.

My mother was gregarious, with a great sense of humor and a ready laugh. But as a child of the Great Depression, she was always anxious that the bottom was about to fall out and always thinking about how she could make provision against things going wrong. She called it her “Celtic gloom” and told me I’d inherited it. To a degree, she was right. That little voice in my head always warning me of what could go wrong and how I needed to protect against it is my mother’s voice. For a lawyer, it is a great trait, since that is what good lawyers do: anticipate what could go wrong.

The difference between my father and my mother showed itself whenever any of us would ask for help on homework—usually a math question. My mother would get right to the question at hand and explain quickly whatever we needed to know to solve the precise problem. My father would put down the book he was reading, grab a yellow pad, draw a line across the page, and say: “Now, let’s start with the number line.” An hour later, he’d be just getting into the mysteries of long division, and we’d be ready for bed. My brothers and I referred to this as getting the “number line” treatment.

My efforts to learn about the birds and the bees ran afoul of this treatment. I was about ten and had already picked up a few tantalizing shreds of information from neighborhood buddies. I was having my hair cut by my mother in the kitchen and started to pump her for more information. Things reached an impasse when I asked, “Exactly how does a man ‘fertilize’ a woman?”

“You have to ask Pop about that.”

As usual, my father pulled out a yellow pad and started drawing pictures of . . . cells. He started talking about protozoa. Uh-oh, I thought, this is going to be a long night. He worked his way through the division of cells and had gotten to DNA and chromosomes, when I tried to move things along.

“When are you going to get to, um, sticking it in?” I asked.

“Oh!” he said, surprised that I would want to miss hearing the good stuff about haploid gametes. At that point, he rushed through a thirty-second explanation of intercourse heavy on ten-cent words I did not understand, like tumescence. It was disappointing. It was back to the gutter for me, where at least I could get a straight answer.

For my parents, education was a priority, and they sacrificed happily to give us the best education they could. But for them, the primary educational arena was the home. Both my parents were natural teachers who loved explaining things and answering our questions—on history, or current events, or religion. Reading to us each evening was a routine. When we were little, my mother took the laboring oar, but as we got older, my father would give bravura readings of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and other great novels, performing all the parts in different voices and dialects to great dramatic effect.

The main forum for education, however, was the dinner table. And the Barr family dinner table was a loud free-for-all. There was little small talk. We liked discussing the issues of the day, and, as we grew older, debate got more robust. In debates, our father’s word on a topic was dispositive. As his number-line approach revealed, he loved expounding on matters, and, given his broad erudition, we considered him the font of wisdom on almost everything. While our arguments could get heated sometimes, more often our dinners were marked by hearty laughter. Everyone in the family had a good sense of humor. My father had an interesting style when he expounded on a subject. He would use an elevated, scholarly, and refined delivery, but then punctuate it with earthy and rougher language to drive home his point. The contrast was quite effective. He was far from a prig, and as we all got older, he was willing to use more off-color language, which my mother always felt obliged to respond to with mock horror.

When it came to parenting, my parents were old-school. They were not our chums—they held the offices of father and mother, and there was never doubt as to who was in charge. They believed that a child-centered home led to a self-centered child. We knew they would sacrifice unstintingly for our good, but they also understood that saying no can be as much an expression of love as saying yes. They believed that, if a child was to develop self-control, it was essential that parents set clear limits and enforce them dependably. They never made idle threats. When they mandated something under penalty of punishment, you were guaranteed to meet with the promised penalty if you defied them. Close in age, and living at close quarters, the four of us boys could be boisterous, and physical fights were not uncommon. Keeping order sometimes required a good spanking, but more often a credible threat of force was enough to bring peace. My father would calmly enter the room where offenses were under way and hang his army belt on the doorknob, look at us severely, and then walk out. We all knew what that meant.

For elementary school, we all went to the Catholic parochial school at Corpus Christi Church, the parish for the Columbia University neighborhood. Then under the pastorship of the great liberal champion Father George Barry Ford, the parish was renowned for three things: the beauty of the church, the magnificence of its liturgical music, and the excellence of its school. Over the years, I have come to realize that, apart from the role of my parents, my time at Corpus Christi had the most profound formative influence on my life.

Tucked away on West 121st Street just off Broadway, Corpus Christi’s neo-Georgian building housed the church, the school, and a convent for the nuns who taught there. All the Barr children were altar boys. With three Masses a day on weekdays and four on Sunday, it was a rare day that one or more of us was not on duty, frequently paired together. These were still the days of the old Tridentine Mass—said entirely in Latin, with the priest’s back to the congregation. The parish’s liturgical prowess was most on display in its majestic High Masses, where the school choir was joined by a strong professional choir singing Gregorian chant, Renaissance polyphony, or Baroque choral music. Except for memories of family life, my most vivid childhood memories are of participating in these ceremonies. I think what fastened me to my faith in those early years was not just the appeal of its teachings to mind and heart, but also the splendor of its worship. The flowing chants in a strange language, the smell of incense, the solemn silences, and the angelic voices weaving a sumptuous tapestry of sound—all this made a profound impression on me. It wasn’t just the external aesthetics; it was that sense of transcendence and mystery stirred within me. These rituals spoke truth to me.

The school was ethnically diverse, drawing heavily from neighborhoods bordering on West Harlem. The students were mainly Hispanic and working- and middle-class Irish American. Not many Columbia faculty sent their children to Corpus Christi. In my class of thirty-two, there were only four students from Columbia households or more affluent families. Yet despite the differences, there was no ethnic tension and an easygoing affinity among the students.

The Dominican nuns who taught at Corpus Christi provided a superb education. The famous comedian George Carlin went to the school before me. He rejected the faith and was a scathing critic about almost every aspect of the Church, but he always extolled the virtues of the school and the nuns who taught there, saying that they gave him the independence and tools to think for himself. That was my experience, too. One teacher I adored was Sister Lucinda, whom I had for both fourth and fifth grades. After I left the school, she had been assigned elsewhere. Over the years, I wondered where she had ended up and thought about trying to reconnect with her but did not know how to go about finding her.

One day in 2009 I was having lunch with Edward Cardinal Egan, who had just retired as archbishop of New York. Knowing that my parish had been Corpus Christi, he said in passing, “I was taught by the Sinsinawa Dominicans also.” I interrupted him. “The Sinsin—what?” It turned out the cardinal knew all about the order that had taught at my school and that their motherhouse was in Sinsinawa, Wisconsin. I later went on the Internet, found their website, and sent an e-mail to the order’s archivist, inquiring about a Sister Lucinda. It turned out she was still alive at ninety-three and living at the motherhouse.

I wrote her a long letter. “Over the years,” I told her, “I have realized that, of all the teachers in my life, you have had the greatest impact, and I owe the most to you.” I went on: “You always gave me kind and gentle encouragement. You instilled a love of learning and gave me confidence in my abilities. You taught me not to shrink from upholding what I thought to be right and not to hesitate to lead. Your example of faith and charity helped give me a strong religious foundation, which has been the greatest gift of all.”

I went to visit my old teacher in 2010, and it was a joyous reunion for both of us. Surprisingly, Sister Lucinda remembered me well and could recount details about my parents and siblings. After lunch with her and other members of the community, we spent a long time talking. I established a computer lab at Corpus Christi dedicated to her and sent her a photograph of the plaque in the lab honoring her. I visited her again two years later. She died not long after. I was grateful I had the chance to thank her.

My father did not formally convert to Catholicism until his late seventies. He struggled with moderate skepticism. Nonetheless, he seemed to know more about the faith than most theologians. Whenever I or any of my brothers went to him for guidance, he could effortlessly cite the precise teachings of various Church councils or doctors of the church. In discussing current religious controversies, he would always espouse the orthodox position. He admired the Church deeply and did all he could to encourage our faith. Because he was a master Catholic apologist, my brothers and I were long puzzled why he had not yet been baptized. My mother never pushed him and told us to leave him alone. After we were grown, my father became a little more open with us about his own thoughts. If there is a God, he told me, he had no doubts that Jesus is the Son of God and that Catholic doctrine is the truth. The question for him was God’s existence. This required, he said, a measure of faith, and he prayed daily for that faith.

At the beginning of 2000, he ca...