I have never met Harlan Crow, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas’s billionaire best friend, but I have peered through the fence surrounding his estate late at night, and once I went inside and snooped around for a couple of hours. Last year, Crow and his wife, Kathy, put on an event to honor two Dallas humanitarians, and I was invited with about 100 others for cocktails and canapés in the Crows’ cavernous library—a Texas-scale wood-paneled room with a walk-in fireplace and a collection of art and memorabilia worthy of a Bond villain. Recent reporting by ProPublica has suggested that that is what Harlan Crow in fact is: a sinister Croesus meddling in world affairs, chiefly by corrupting Clarence Thomas with gifts of private-jet flights and bottles of pricey French wine.
Crow also owns Nazi memorabilia, including paintings by Adolf Hitler, a signed copy of Mein Kampf, and a set of swastika-emblazoned napkins. I don’t think table linen is the first sign that you’re in the presence of a Nazi. Others, however, have expressed alarm. Philip Gourevitch of The New Yorker scoffed at the idea that Crow bought a signed Mein Kampf because he “hates what it stands for.” His colleague Jane Mayer only insinuated what Elie Mystal, a correspondent for The Nation, said outright, which is that Crow is a “Nazi sympathizer.”
Falsely accusing someone of being a Nazi is a contemptible, gutter pastime, and anyone with more than a casual acquaintance with Nazism knows how grotesque it would be to dilute the evil of the Third Reich by attributing it to someone who hasn’t earned it. So I devote this column to recounting what I have seen in the Crow mansion, to help my fellow journalists assess the target of their speculation.
The Crow mansion is on Exall Lake. The lake’s western shore and immediate environs are lined with the estates of tycoons, heirs, and Trimalchios. Cowboys owner Jerry Jones lives just south of Crow; a series of oilmen and financiers (Edwin L. Cox, John Muse) have lived up the shore in Versailles-style palaces. Their estates were visible to me, a sansculotte, when I used to jog on a path on the other side of the lake. Another pedestrian path abuts the southern edge of the lake and the Crow residence. That’s where I like to peek through the metal bars of his fence to see one of my favorite sites in Dallas: Crow’s sculpture garden, known as the Garden of Evil.
When the foliage isn’t dense, one can make out statues Crow has collected from countries ravaged by political violence: Nicolae Ceaușescu, the general secretary of the Romanian Communist Party; Lenin and Stalin; Enver Hoxha of Albania; the Hungarian Communist Béla Kun. These authentic specimens were harvested from the wreckage of collapsed tyranny, and they are kept in the condition in which they were found—in one case, dismembered and abandoned after being toppled by a jubilant mob. (The statue of Ceaușescu has been lightly restored or at least pressure-washed: It arrived caked in human feces.)
These are on his grounds’ periphery. Nearer to his office, away from the silent outer darkness, are statues of Margaret Thatcher and other political and cultural figures whom he honors rather than reviles. And inside, near the entrance to the Crow library, is the largest bust of Winston Churchill I have ever seen. It looks big enough to crush its wooden pedestal. Down the hallway, I saw paintings by Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush. Bush is a friend of Crow’s, and one of his paintings depicts Crow in conversation with an elderly African man. It is labeled Father to Father. In the main hall, one of the most prominent paintings is a portrait of Clarence Thomas in his robes. Thomas is also visible in a few vacation photographs framed in Crow’s office. The Hitler paintings were, I am told, in the library somewhere—but they occupied no exalted space, and the Crow collection consists mostly of items from American history, chiefly relics of those who advanced the cause of freedom. It includes signatures from all the signers of the Declaration of Independence, as well as the desk of Abraham Lincoln.
I am reminded of the old joke about the man at the bar who complains about his reputation, “I build 1,000 bridges, but do they call me ‘McGregor the Bridge Builder’? No! But I screw one goat …” (You can watch Paul McCartney tell the joke.) Somewhere in the Crow library, there’s a signed Mein Kampf. And for some people, collecting a little Hitler memorabilia is like a one-night stand in a Scottish glen. It forever marks you as disreputable, suspicious, and—if you also fund conservative think tanks and befriend Charles Murray—a crypto-Nazi.
What is it about Nazism that makes these people lose all reason and sense of proportion? I guess it’s the industrial slaughter of Jews, Gypsies, people with disabilities, and homosexuals, and the nearly successful attempt to conquer the planet. So I can see why someone might freak out over Hitler memorabilia. But everyone understands that his likenesses of Che Guevara, Hermann Göring, and Ceaușescu are not there for veneration (how could one venerate them all?) and that Crow is not America’s last surviving Hoxhaist. The accusation that he is a Nazi is similarly unwarranted.
Last year, a close friend of Crow’s described his politics to me as “Romney Republicanism,” in contrast to the puerile madness that has seized the modern GOP. Crow supported Representative Liz Cheney, the Republican vice chair of the House January 6 investigation, who lost her seat over her unwillingness to exculpate Donald Trump. It simply isn’t possible to be a Nazi, crypto or otherwise, and simultaneously be an Abe Lincoln and Liz Cheney fanboy—let alone to conceal from your dearest confidants, among them Black and Jewish people, your preference for the master race.
Lavishing a sitting Supreme Court justice with vacations, cigars, and free parking for his Winnebago could still be a mistake. Crow showed extravagant kindness to a friend. But that friend is not just any friend. He sits in an office whose dignity needs more fastidious safekeeping than just about any other in government. Being a friend and a good citizen entails helping him keep that dignity intact by not leading him into temptation, by splitting the check, and in general by keeping his private life so dull that not even ProPublica cares about it.
Being a Supreme Court justice should mean forgoing certain higher pleasures, such as fancy wines and yachts. I would go further and say that to accept this awesome responsibility—a permanent one-ninth share in the throbbing hive mind that interprets American law—you should have to decline friendships with powerful and political people entirely. Better yet, the justices should be suspended in a warm goo, like the precogs in Minority Report, their physical needs met and their precious brains isolated from social interaction and mined for the public good for the duration of their service. Until the federal judiciary can figure out how to implement this system, the justices should live quiet lives within their means, and keep to themselves.
Crow’s politics are not mine. But in the matter of his pastimes, he is blameless. Billionaires have their hobbies, and to me, his are among the more relatable. If I had a burdensome amount of inherited wealth, I would absolutely unburden myself of some of it by collecting cool stuff—books and historical curios, fine art, a performance space where I could host friends and strangers for concerts and lectures. I would buy one of those gold dinars, the official currency minted by the Islamic State, and I would show it off to my intimates. Some strangers might suppose that because I own such repugnant items, I must have secretly pledged my soul to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. But my friends would know otherwise, because they are not morons. That is why they are my friends.
