"One Damn Thing After Another," William P. Barr - A Review

                                                                  Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

“One Damn Thing After Another,” William P. Barr

May 7, 2022

 

“Getting him to accept good advice was like wrestling

an alligator. Whatever you did, it was never enough – 

his attitude was ‘What have you done for me lately?’”

                                                                                                                          One Damn Thing After Another, 2022

                                                                                                                           On dealing with President Trump

                                                                                                                           William P. Barr (1950-)

 

The French mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal once wrote: “I have only made this letter longer because I have not had the time to make it shorter.” That quote came to mind while reading Mr. Barr’s memoirs. It’s not because Mr. Barr bores the reader with long sentences and wordy paragraphs. His writing is straight forward, and his life has been fascinating, having served twice as Attorney General for two quite different Presidents, George H.W. Bush and Donald Trump. But one has the sense the book was rushed.

 

The book is 565 pages, with 400 of those pages devoted to the Trump years. Mr. Barr’s personal story is compelling. A Columbia graduate, he received his law degree from George Washington University in 1977, after taking night classes. Fourteen years later, at age 41, he was confirmed as President Bush’s Attorney General in. Nevertheless, I found the book somewhat light on who and what molded him as a young man; though he does tell us his paternal grandparents were Ashkenazi Jews from Ukraine and that he learned to play the bagpipes in his youth. He devotes most of his time to the two years he was Mr. Trump’s Attorney General, including the ups and downs of his relationship with the President, where I found his reflections dispassionate and truthful, as he praises and condemns Mr. Trump with equal measure.

 

Mr. Barr is a keen observer of the political scene and a conservative in the classic sense. He praises religion for its benign influence in our lives, but he also speaks to the importance of separation of church and state: “It is not the role of government to shape man in its own image. The government has the far more modest purpose of preserving the proper balance of personal freedom and order necessary for a healthy civil society to develop and individual humans to flourish.” In another chapter on tech companies and monopolies, he writes with relevance to today: “What the tech companies control, however, is the marketplace of ideas. They are privatizing the village green – the place where people receive and disseminate information…”

 

He concludes his story by writing of his vision for America:  a “nation founded on ideals…and establishing a distinct ‘People’ in a ‘Union’ with a government, borders and foundational law.” “We need leaders,” he adds, “not only capable of fighting and ‘punching,’ but also persuading and attracting – leaders who can frame, and advocate for, an uplifting vision of what it means to share in American citizenship.”

 

Like most memoirs, this is self-promotional. He tells his side of the story before more critical biographers emerge. That, however, is a caveat with which I can live. But I think his chapters on Russiagate, urban violence, borders, tech companies, religion and capital punishment would have been better presented in a separate book of essays, for their content is invaluable for anyone interested in the major issues of the last two years of the Trump Presidency. And I believe a shorter book, concentrating on his formative years and culminating with his interactions with Mr. Trump, would reach a broader audience who would benefit from his fair and balanced perspective of our controversial 45^th President.