William Pelham Barr | Biography

William Pelham Barr served as U.S. attorney general from 1991 to 1993. Prior to his appointment, he served as a key legal advisor to President George Bush and a policy advisor to President Ronald Reagan.

Barr was born on May 23, 1950, in New York City. He graduated from Columbia University in 1971 and completed a program in Chinese Studies at Columbia in 1973. Barr then moved to Washington, D.C., where he joined the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as an intelligence officer. While working at the agency, Barr enrolled at George Washington University Law School as a night student. He graduated in 1977 and then clerked for one year with a federal court judge.

In 1978, Barr went to work for a prominent Washington, D.C. law firm but left in 1982 to serve on President Ronald Reagan's Domestic Policy Council. Though he returned to his old law firm two years later, Barr's stay was relatively brief. In 1989, President Bush appointed him assistant attorney general to head the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. In this position, Barr issued several controversial advisory opinions, including one that supported the capture of Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega on drug charges.

Barr's rise to the top was meteoric. He was promoted to deputy attorney general in 1990 and in June of 1991 he became acting attorney general when Richard Thornburgh resigned to run for the U.S. Senate. Later that fall, President Bush appointed Barr attorney general.

Barr's first months in office went smoothly. He launched an internal investigation into how the department had handled the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) scandal. Bank regulators had closed BCCI in 1991 for serious financial and criminal irregularities. Depositors lost billions of dollars when its assets were seized. However, Barr's investigation bogged down and Congress criticized him for failing to shut down BCCI sooner.

Barr became embroiled in politics when he refused a congressional request that he ask for an independent investigation into alleged Bush administration cooperation with Iraq prior to its invasion of Kuwait. Despite these criticisms, Barr took unpopular positions and stuck with them. For example, he supported the deportation of a person wrongly accused of being a Nazi concentration camp guard because the man had lied about his Nazi connections when he applied to immigrate to the United States after the war. In 1993, Barr returned to his old law firm and later became vice president and general counsel for GTE Service Corporation.