When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.
—DONALD TRUMP
Perched above a sloping lawn and set beneath towering oaks, the home that welcomed Fred Trump after his grilling in Washington was the one house in Jamaica Estates, Queens, that could rightly be called a mansion. It occupied two full lots on a graceful parkway with a wide median for trees, shrubs, and flowers. An American conception of a nineteenth-century British garden suburb, Jamaica Estates was crisscrossed by streets with properly English names. The parkway where the Trumps lived was called Midland. The nearest cross street was Henley Road.
Built by Trump himself, the Colonial Revival house overwhelmed the land it occupied and stood out in a neighborhood of more modest Tudor-style homes. Its red brick exterior walls were topped by wide fascia boards decorated with dentils and a steep slate roof. The door was guarded by four massive columns, which supported a pediment that bore a plaque painted with an ersatz crest. Altogether, the design recalled a junior high in some new suburb where the school board wanted something that looked stolidly institutional. But instead of yellow buses, the driveway sheltered fancy cars. A Cadillac for him. A Rolls-Royce for her.
Visitors to the Trump home approached along a walkway flanked by two jockeys made of painted cast iron. Inside they found a foyer with a curved staircase leading to the second-floor family quarters. The stairway was impressive and formal looking, but none of the twenty-three rooms in the house were especially grand. Despite the decorations on the outside, this was a practical space, made to serve the needs of seven Trumps and their live-in housekeeper and chauffeur. Hence the nine bathrooms.
By the summer of 1954 the Trump family included five children—two girls and three boys—ages six to seventeen, who were shepherded by their mother, Mary Anne MacLeod Trump. Forty-two years old, Mrs. Trump was fair, tall, and slender with blue eyes and blond hair, and she spoke with a hint of a Scottish brogue. She was, in her quieter way, as tough, stubborn, and ambitious as her husband. “My mother was silently competitive,” recalled Donald Trump, long after his mother had died. “She was a very competitive person but you wouldn’t know that. She had a great fighting spirit, like Braveheart.” She also loved the kind of excess represented by the British monarchy. Donald would recall that his mother had been fascinated by the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II, in 1953. As a boy he had been impressed by his mother’s interest as she eagerly watched every minute of the live TV broadcast of the event. It was the first time that cameras had been permitted in Westminster Abbey.
The youngest of ten children, Mary Anne MacLeod was born in 1912 in her parents’ home in the village of Tong on the rugged Scottish Isle of Lewis, which is closer to Iceland than London. She was descended from two clans, the Smiths and MacLeods, with deep roots in the Hebrides. On the Smith side, Mary Anne’s forebears had been crofters who were forced off their tenant farms during the “clearances” of the nineteenth century. These mass evictions carried out by absentee landlords drove many rural families into poverty. One account from this time describes the landless people of Tong living in “human wretchedness” alongside arable land that was set aside for game preserves. The Isle of Lewis became poorer by the year, losing jobs, business activity, and population.
In 1917, virtually all of Lewis—683 square miles—was purchased by the soap magnate William Lever, who announced he would invest the equivalent of $500 million in 2015 dollars to turn the island into a paradise of industry, agriculture, and fisheries. A world-famous eccentric, Lever was a fresh-air fiend whose bedroom was open to the elements year-round. He was also a self-proclaimed social engineer, certain he could create the perfect way of life for great numbers of people, who would live as if they were his subjects, dependent on him for their employment, their homes, and their community life. Lever had made his vision real at Port Sunlight, in northwest England, where thirty-five hundred Leverites dwelled in his garden village and worked in his factories.
In Lewis, William Lever imagined another Port Sunlight, only bigger. In this Land of Lever, trained observers would circle the island in war-surplus planes, scanning the sea for shoals of herring. Boats sent to seize the catch would return to supply a giant cannery powered by a new electric plant, which would also energize spinners and looms in new textile mills. In the evenings all the spotters and fishers and spinners would go home to Lever-built homes where they would sup on foods produced by the lord’s farmers. On weekends everyone would enjoy recreation or entertainments sponsored by their employer and benefactor.
Local burghers were excited by Lever’s plan, which they hoped would end the privation that began with the clearances. However, two years after his arrival, Lever had made almost no progress. No factories. No jobs. No fish-spotting planes. Many islanders, most especially those descended from crofters, grew both restless and suspicious. On March 10, 1919, landless men occupied Lever properties in several villages, including Tong. The occupiers staked out plots and scraped at the land to prepare it for planting. Made a peer by George V two years prior, Lord Leverhulme called on powerful friends in government. A government man sent to mediate the conflict would say of Lever, “I never met a man who was so obviously a megalomaniac and accustomed to having his own way.” Nevertheless, the law was on Lever’s side and the squatters were persuaded to retreat and wait for the great man to fulfill his promise. He would die in 1925 before developing even one of his promised projects.1
With all of its conflict and poverty, Lewis would seem to have endured more than its share of suffering, but the worst involved not an act of man, but one of nature. Having sent more than six thousand men to fight in World War I and losing nearly a thousand, Lewis awaited the return of their surviving soldiers. On New Year’s Eve of 1918 a small ship called the Iolaire (Scots Gaelic for “eagle”) joined the regular ferry that served the port of Stornoway to bring men home from the mainland train terminus at Kyle. Approaching Stornoway at night and in a storm, Iolaire struck an outcropping of rocks called the Beasts of Holme and slowly broke apart. On a night when many said they saw wild deer near their homes—local lore held that such sightings were ominous—205 men died within sight of the shore. The grief that swept across the island lasted for many years.2
Against the backdrop of such hard times, Mary Anne MacLeod’s decision to leave Tong for America was as realistic as it was brave. Little work was available and marriageable men were in short supply on the isle. In 1930, at age eighteen, she boarded the three-funneled steamship Transylvania in Glasgow, bound for New York. A married sister already living in Astoria, Queens, welcomed her. The same sister would bring Mary Anne to the party where she met Fred Trump. The two married in January 1936 and honeymooned for a night in Atlantic City before returning to New York.
Fred and Mary Anne Trump’s first child, Maryanne, arrived in 1937. She was followed by Fred Jr. (1938), Elizabeth (1942), Donald 1946), and Robert (1948). Hemorrhaging after the last birth led to a hysterectomy, followed by life-threatening peritonitis and several more surgeries. After Mary Anne recovered, she resumed command of the household and plunged into charity work. Strong-willed and energetic, she was charming and unafraid to be the center of attention at a party—a bit of a performer. In this she was very different from her husband. Fred Trump never developed the ease and grace necessary to win friends and influence people in social situations, though he worked hard at it and even attended a Dale Carnegie course, “Effective Speaking and Human Relations.” Born Dale Carnagey in 1888, Carnagey changed his name to capitalize on the fame of the great tycoon and quit work as a salesman for Armour meat to pursue his dream of becoming a renowned writer and public speaker. Having studied the subject so intently, he made the art of public speaking the subject of his first book. In subsequent works he offered wide-ranging advice on everything from “how to make our listeners like us” to “the kind of smile that will bring a good price in the market place.”
In his eight-page dissertation on smiling, Carnegie urged those who would succeed to offer others “a real smile that says, ‘I like you. You make me happy. I’m glad to see you.’ … An insincere smile? No. That doesn’t fool anybody.” As he implored followers to use artificial means—study, practice, repetition—to cultivate a sincere smile, Carnegie affirmed the triumph of personality, even one that is manufactured, over character, hard work, and quality. This was the tragic fact of life in twentieth-century America that was communicated in Arthur Miller’s 1949 play, Death of a Salesman, in which Willy Loman declares, “Personality always wins the day.” It may have been to Fred Trump’s credit that he never mastered the Carnegie method.
Fred Trump made up for his social shortcomings by working exceedingly hard. He rarely went a day without conducting some sort of business, and he worked at home, by telephone, almost every night. A son or daughter who wanted his time would accompany him on a weekend trip to the office, or a tour of construction sites. He called it “making the rounds.” Along the way they would hear about the importance of ambition, discipline, and hard work. Trump wanted his children to believe that they could, and should, accomplish a great deal in life. The family code barred coarse language and between-meal snacks and required obedience and loyalty. Infractions would be reported upon Fred’s arrival home each evening, and he meted out the punishments.3
A gruff and demanding patriarch, Fred Trump required both his daughters and sons to work to earn their own money, but he was more keenly committed to training his sons for a life of fierce competition. “Be a killer,” he told them over and over. But he also indulged them in the way that a man with hard-won riches might. They attended private schools and vacationed in Florida in the winter and in the Catskills in the summer. When it rained or snowed, he let the boys deliver their newspapers via chauffeured limousine. “You are a king,” said Fred to Donald.4
Subject to this unusual combination of stern discipline, indulgence, and superiority, the five Trump children each reacted quite differently. The eldest, Maryanne, would develop into a studious young woman and realize an extremely successful career in law. Younger daughter Elizabeth would attend a small college, work in a bank, and eventually marry. Never suited to his father’s template, Fred Trump Jr. would fail as his father’s assistant and eventually have a career as an airline pilot. The youngest, Robert, would take a middle road through life, succeeding in business but without his father’s drive and his need to dominate. This left Fred Trump’s mantle available to his middle son Donald, who from an early age showed every sign that he was every bit the old man’s boy, and then some.
* * *
Erasers hurled at teachers and cake flung at birthday parties were notable examples of the problem-child behavior that separated Donald Trump from the other kids at the private Kew-Forest School, which he attended in the elementary grades. Kew-Forest had opened in 1918, as American educators shifted away from scholastic rigor and toward the child-centered approach advocated by psychologists John Dewey and G. Stanley Hall. Dewey and Hall believed that teachers should adjust the pace and content of their lessons to the students rather than simply demanding that they keep up. Kew-Forest became a training center for the children of the elite on the North Shore of Queens County, where wedding announcements often noted which brides and grooms had been educated there. A member of the board, Fred Trump had donated materials to construct a new wing for the school, which all of his children would attend.
At Kew-Forest, Donald Trump was a bit of a terror. He once said that he gave a teacher a black eye “because I didn’t think he knew anything about music.” According to Trump, he was then already the person he would always be. “I don’t think people change very much,” Trump would tell me. “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same. The temperament is not that different.”
Donald’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry would describe her brother as “extremely rebellious” in his youth. A classmate recalled Donald as a boy who tested the rules, and the teachers, to their limits. A camp counselor was impressed by young Donald’s “ornery” disposition, which compelled him to figure out “all the angles” so he could get his own way. His behavior wasn’t any better at Sunday school, or at home, where he stood up to his father at moments when his older brother, Fred, would have retreated. In time Donald would credit the respect he won from the old man to the fact that “I used to fight back all the time.”5
Father Trump liked that Donald was interested in the world of real estate development and construction. Every time Fred’s middle son got the chance, he tagged along as Fred toured his many properties and building sites to make sure things were running smoothly. Having done most of the jobs himself at one time or another, Fred Trump was adept at negotiating with plumbers and masons, electricians, and maintenance workers. As he pressed for the best work at the best price on the best schedule, Donald absorbed his father’s way of doing business. “He wouldn’t say, ‘Now listen to every word,’ but I’d hear him talking … and I picked it up very naturally,” Donald recalled. Much of what he “picked up” was the idea that a life of ambition and hard work was pleasurable. “He really liked his life, and yet he worked all the time.”
The Trump work ethic was part of what both men would come to regard as a genetically transmitted talent for success. According to this view, some people are born to win. Seeing this trait in Donald, Fred Trump let the boy know that he was destined for greatness. “My father expected tremendous success out of me,” Donald would put it later. But if Fred admired the child who was most like himself, it didn’t win Donald any reprieve from his father’s code of discipline. Fred Trump was especially bothered by the reports of bad behavior from Donald’s teachers. As complaints about his son accumulated, he learned that Donald had been sneaking into Manhattan on the subway and acquiring a small collection of switchblades. (He and a friend had been inspired by the Sharks and the Jets of West Side Story.) Concluding that he could no longer manage the boy’s behavior, Fred Trump decided that even though he was a trustee at Kew-Forest, seventh grade would be his boy’s last at the school. In the fall of 1959 Donald was delivered to New York Military Academy (NYMA), a school for boys on the Hudson River just eight miles from West Point.
Private boarding schools had long supported the nation’s elite. Located mainly in the Northeast, they provided places where the children of the rich and powerful could be trained, together, for their places in the world. Although they too served children from many of the same elite families, all-male military academies were more likely to receive boys who needed something sterner than Exeter or Andover. At these schools, cadets as young as six were required to don uniforms, obey orders, and submit to an intensely regimented way of life. Conservative in nature, military academies offered even more isolation from the outside world than ordinary boarding schools. The men who ruled these places believed in corporal punishment and discouraged individuality. They also required at least a display of respect, even from students who refused to grant them the real thing.6
At their best, old-fashioned military academies saved students from delinquency. At their worst, they drove boys to it by subjecting them to a culture that valued dominance, violence, and subversion of authorities. The experience is brilliantly told in Pat Conroy’s novel The Lords of Discipline, which depicts life at a military college similar to The Citadel in South Carolina. Although Conroy writes with both dismay and affection, others have offered a more scathing evaluation of these places. In his memoir, Breakshot, former mobster Kenny Gallo noted that his military boarding-school experience transformed him from “a disorderly brat into an orderly outlaw.” Recalling his career at Army and Navy Academy in California, Gallo writes, “I guess you could say my ‘normal’ social development stopped at military school when I was thirteen; I stopped developing as a healthy adult citizen and, first out of self defense and then out of pleasure, began honing my skills as a predator.”7
As a thirteen-year-old newcomer at NYMA, fair-haired, baby-faced Donald Trump soon found himself confronted by a screaming US Army war veteran named Theodore Dobias. A former NYMA cadet, Dobias had enlisted in the US Army when he was seventeen to fight in World War II. Assigned to the Tenth Mountain Division, he had marched up much of the Italian Peninsula in a campaign that saw nearly one thousand of his fellow soldiers killed. After the war, Dobias returned to the New York Military Academy with stark memories of “the foxholes, the blood, the screaming,” of combat. In Italy he had seen Benito Mussolini’s mutilated body, and six others, hanging from the metal frame of a gas-station awning in Milan. Below them were piled almost a dozen additional bodies. Almost seventy years later, this grotesque scene would remain vivid in Dobias’s mind when we met for an interview.
Dobias finished his education at NYMA then began a lifelong career at the school. From the start he was an active disciplinarian. For new arrivals, Dobias’s bark marked the moment when they realized the seriousness of their situation. “In those days they’d smack the hell out of you. It was not like today where you smack somebody and you go to jail,” said Trump decades later. “He could be a fucking prick. He absolutely would rough you up. You had to learn to survive.” Trump recalled that when he responded to an order from Dobias with a look that said, “‘Give me a fucking break,’ he came after me like you wouldn’t believe.”
At age eighty-nine Dobias was a bit stooped, but still sturdy, like a stout whiskey barrel on legs. In the spring of 2014 he scuttled around a house where a woodstove battled with the last chill of winter and a clock announced the hour with “Hey Jude” sounded by electronic chimes.
“The father was really tough on the kid,” recalled Dobias when I asked about the Trumps. “He was very German. He came up on a lot of Sundays and would take the boy out to dinner. Not many did that. But he was very tough.”
NYMA was in its heyday when Trump attended, and his fellow cadets included the sons of Wall Street bankers, Midwest industrialists, and South American oligarchs. The most homesick boy Dobias supervised in this time was the son of a Mafia boss. The grateful father sent boxes of cookies to the school at Christmas. Another dad sent cases of meat.
“I coached baseball and football, and I taught them that winning wasn’t everything, it was the only thing,” added Dobias, borrowing a cliché coined by Vince Lombardi, the pro football coach who became a paragon of mid-century manliness. “Donald picked right up on this. He would tell his teammates, ‘We’re out here for a purpose. To win.’ He always had to be number one, in everything. He was a conniver even then. A real pain in the ass. He would do anything to win.”
Describing a boy full of desire and drive, Dobias said Trump “just wanted to be first, in everything, and he wanted people to know he was first.” Dobias would never forget the Columbus Day parade in New York City where NYMA was supposed to be first in the order of march, with Donald Trump leading the corps. “We got there and there were all these Catholic schoolgirls lined up ahead of us. He said, ‘Maje, leave this to me.’ He went off and talked to somebody, and when he came back, they put us first. That was the way he was.”
A photographer sent by the school would snap a photo of Trump, smartly uniformed, down to his bright white gloves, right in front of Tiffany’s iconic store on Fifth Avenue. A few blocks farther south, the NYMA cadets were greeted heartily by Cardinal Joseph Spellman, who stood on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral.
The assertiveness Trump showed as he cleared away the Catholic schoolgirls pleased Dobias, who said he tried to instill in his boys certain tenets of manhood. Included were:
Respect for authority.
Set a good example in your appearance, your manners, and how you speak.
Be proud of your family.
Be proud of yourself.
“Trump was always proud of himself,” said Dobias. “He believed he was the best.” (When he reflected on this period, Trump would tell me, “I was an elite person. When I graduated, I was a very elite person.”)
Theodore Dobias didn’t tell the boys that they needed to accomplish anything significant in order to feel proud. It was enough to get in line with the program at the academy, present oneself well, and to appreciate one’s status as a member of the NYMA community. This status was, in part, compensation for the strict discipline imposed there. Though an adult, Dobias was himself constrained by the rules. As a young man he could not leave the campus without permission, which made courting his wife-to-be a difficult and drawn out campaign. In midlife, Dobias was offered a free trip to Slovakia to visit the grandparents who had raised him up to age thirteen. He had last seen them through tears, from the deck of the ship that had brought him to America in 1939. His commander refused him permission to go. Dobias obeyed without complaint.
Eventually promoted to a rank just below superintendent, Dobias spent his entire adult life on the campus at Cornwall, where he even occupied an academy house with his wife and children. (His one son was a cadet.) Students called him “the Maje”—which was short for “major.” Although, as he said, “sometimes I forgot there was an outside world,” on occasion it came to him. When the first black cadet enrolled at NYMA in the 1970s, it fell to Dobias to ease his adjustment to the school, which required almost nightly discussions about the culture of the academy, racism, and the young man’s struggles. “We had some really great talks.”
Years later a lawyer in Pennsylvania called Dobias to discuss this same man. She said he was on death row, after being convicted of multiple murders, and he wanted Dobias to come visit. By this time, the Maje had become so rooted, in every sense, that he couldn’t imagine traveling to Pennsylvania to see the former cadet. “It was far away,” he explained, “and I didn’t think I should get involved.”
Despite the rough beginning of their relationship, Donald Trump came to regard Ted Dobias as his first real role model, aside from his father. Dobias helped him to adapt and thrive in an environment where macho concepts of strength and masculinity prevailed. One of Trump’s fellow cadets, Harry Falber, would recall that the systematic bullying among the students was far more troubling than the discipline meted out by the staff. Though not quite Lord of the Flies, the culture at the school was “full of aggression,” said Falber, and a mob mentality sometimes prevailed. He once saw a large group of cadets, who were being overseen by school staff, attack a car that had arrived on campus. “It was full of girls and these guys just pelted it with rocks,” recalled Falber. “They took out at least one of the windows. Nobody stopped them. Discipline was very important there, but not always.”
The rules the cadets were supposed to follow were set out in a booklet called “General Order No. 6,” with the ominous subtitle “Scale of Punishment,” which every boy received on his first day at the academy. This code of conduct noted that a boy could be charged with demerits for anything from lint on his uniform to a phone call longer than five minutes to holding hands “with a young lady.” One major infraction, or an accumulation of small ones, would lead to an hour of military marching. Many offenses, including insubordination and “immorality” (assumed by cadets to mean homosexual acts) were so serious they could lead to a boy’s dismissal.
Donald Trump apparently thrived at NYMA. He felt comfortable in uniform—spit-shined shoes and belt buckles polished with Brasso—and adjusted to mess-hall meals. Isolated in an all-male military environment, far from his mother and father and siblings, the boy quickly learned that “life is about survival. It’s always about survival.” A good but not stellar student, he became one of Dobias’s favorites and absorbed the sense of superiority that was preached at NYMA with the consistency of a drumbeat. (Even the school catalog bragged that the academy was “superior” and “a school of distinction” where “each boy becomes familiar, through personal experience, with the problems of those who are led, and those who lead.”
Rigidly hierarchical and hypermasculine, the academy required physical sacrifice, and the cadets were denied a world of experiences and relationships enjoyed by friends back home. No moms and dads. No brothers and sisters. In school plays, female roles were played by boys in drag. All this was part of a plan of education devised to instill a sense of self-discipline and the ability to perform under duress. Athletes were revered, which was true at many, if not most, high schools in postwar America. As underpaid teachers struggled in overcrowded classrooms, football and basketball came to dominate the culture of secondary education, with marching bands and cheerleading squads adopting important supporting roles. All this and more was noted by Richard Hofstadter in a landmark book, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, which was published in 1963, as Donald Trump hit his stride during his junior year at NYMA.
Hofstadter devoted much of his book to the modern American mode of child rearing and education, and he offered much to worry a reader who hoped for a humane and just society. He observed that in the name of child development, greater emphasis was placed on personality and social adjustment while character and scholarship were neglected. Influenced by the “prophets of practicality in business,” wrote Hofstadter, teachers taught “not Shakespeare or Dickens, but how to write a business letter.” One district in New York State was so committed to preparing socially successful young people that every student was required to attend a kind of self-improvement course where they would learn about “clicking with the crowd” and “how to be liked.”8
At NYMA, educators strove to give cadets a feeling of confidence to match the military bearing—straight back, eyes forward, chin out—that would propel them through life with a sense that they deserved great success because the academy had made them better than everyone else. Donald Trump absorbed this lesson, rising to what he called “the top of the military heap” and excelling at baseball. (“Always the best player,” Trump would say of himself. “Not only baseball, but every sport.”) In his third year at the academy he earned a headline in the local paper—“Trump Wins Game for NYMA”—and the experience was almost electrifying. “It felt good seeing my name in print,” he said fifty years later. “How many people are in print? Nobody’s in print. It was the first time I was ever in the newspaper. I thought it was amazing.”
This first brush with fame could be seen as the spark of a fire that would eventually light all of Trump’s life. The notice in the paper made him real, and heroic to people who weren’t even at the game. Fame also established that Donald Trump was a special boy. His deep appreciation for the experience shows that he understood that a great many people wanted fame but almost all of them fail to achieve it. Trump succeeded because of his athletic skill and because he was coming of age in a time when fame had been democratized by the mass media. For centuries only true leaders such as kings and queens and people with significant accomplishments could hope to be noticed by the public. The modern press changed all of this, making fame, however fleeting, possible for whole new categories of people—athletes, performers, criminals, beauty-pageant winners—and even animals such as Mrs. O’Leary’s cow.
Trump would cling to his memories of athletic achievement and mention them in press interviews throughout his life. He believed that his ball-field experiences were formative because they made him locally famous and because they instilled in him the habit of winning. By his own estimate he was definitely “the best baseball player in New York,” and he would have turned pro except that “there was no real money in it.” In 1964 the median salary for a big leaguer was $16,000, which was the equivalent of $120,000 in 2015. It would double by 1970.9 This was more than enough to allow a young man who loved the game to test himself against the best players and, when the adventure was over, chase wealth to his heart’s content.
Was Trump in fact an elite player? Yes and no. In New York State, his high school contemporaries included Dave Cash, a future three-time National League All-Star from Utica and big leaguers Terry Crowley and Frank Tepedino. Crowley and Tepedino played high school ball in New York City, where the competition was fierce. NYMA, in contrast, battled against small private schools such as Our Lady of Lourdes in Poughkeepsie, which defeated the cadets 9–3 in Trump’s senior year, when the team finished with a losing record.
Sports memories grow more gilded with time. Little League home runs fly farther and high school strikeouts are forgotten. What matters more is how large the ballplayer identity looms in a man’s imagination. In Trump’s case, ball-field days are never far from his mind, and he’s keen to make sure others understand that he was a great first baseman and that as a golfer he has won eighteen club championships, which are “really like majors for amateurs.” This focus on athletic achievement is as much about establishing the man’s interest in competition as it is about a desire to communicate some verifiable record. Trump wants people to know that he always had the heart and the ability of a winner, and these claims come with certain proof. Trump can prove too that he has always been especially interested in attractive women. At the academy, where hand-holding was forbidden, the cadets nevertheless identified him as the official “ladies’ man” of his class in the academy yearbook, appropriately titled Shrapnel.
After NYMA came Fordham University in the Bronx, where Donald Trump distinguished himself by his military bearing and by his refusal to drink or smoke cigarettes, let alone experiment with the drugs that were increasingly evident on American campuses. (Like the teetotaler moguls of the Gilded Age, Trump would proudly claim abstinence his whole life.) The full extent of Donald Trump’s college-years rebellion involved fantasizing about a career in the theater or film. Hollywood and Broadway were caught between the feel-good fifties and the angst of the sixties. Mary Poppins and Dr. Strangelove played on the same screens. Hair took over the stage at the Biltmore Theater on Broadway when Barefoot in the Park ended its run. For a military-school grad whose creative passion was far exceeded by his drive for wealth and conventional success, film and theater were in such flux that a career in business made much more sense.
Certain that his future would at least begin in his father’s footsteps, Donald devoted much of his free time to working in the family business. He commuted to school from his parents’ home in Queens and spent weekends either in the office or visiting Trump properties. While he learned the basics of managing buildings from his father, he looked to another real estate man for lessons in style. William Zeckendorf was the first New York builder who could also be considered a showman. A garrulous character who cruised Manhattan in a shiny Cadillac—license tag WZ—Zeckendorf often announced plans that were just shy of fantasy. One proposal included an airport atop new commercial buildings on Manhattan’s West Side. Another was for a 102-story tower to be built over Grand Central Terminal.
Although his weight hovered around three hundred pounds, Zeckendorf was hyperactive and often in motion, both physically and mentally. His projects were daringly big, as in the case of the gigantic shopping development called Place Ville Marie in Montreal, which was built on an abandoned railroad yard and, with its sheer mass, shifted the center of the city in its direction. Zeckendorf’s creative energy also led him to find novel ways to wring profit out of properties. For example, he realized he could buy a building and then sell the land beneath it, the future rent payments from tenants, and even the tax-depreciation benefits of the structure, all to separate parties.
Zeckendorf was also known for his eccentricities. He worked in a perfectly round, windowless office, which was paneled in teak and illuminated by skylights. A system of plastic filters, controlled remotely, allowed him to change the color of the light to suit his mood. He kept several telephones on his desk, and at his busiest he took dozens of calls per hour, scratching notes and making doodles on notebooks that were collected and filed by his assistants. He often purchased properties he had never seen and dove into new businesses with great enthusiasm. After he got interested in Broadway, he produced thirty shows.
Always courting publicity, Zeckendorf hired the famous press agent John “Tex” McCrary to keep his name in the newspapers and made a point of showing reporters that he was furiously active and successful and lived quite lavishly. He invited them to lunch in a private dining room where his personal chef, Eugene, prepared a daily menu set by Zeckendorf’s wife that was served at a table set with the finest china and silver. Married four times, Zeckendorf’s fondness for women was about equal to his appreciation for food.
At the height of his success Zeckendorf employed an all-star lineup of architects including Le Corbusier, William Lescaze, and I. M. Pei to complete major projects across North America. In the early 1960s he likely controlled more real estate than anyone else in the United States, including New York’s Astor and Drake Hotels. However, he was often plagued by financial problems that required creative solutions. When he fell behind in his development of Century City for the Fox movie company in Los Angeles, he hired the movie star Mary Pickford to break a bottle of champagne over a shack that was to be demolished and thereby announced the start of construction. After the shack was bulldozed, nothing much happened at the site. However the publicity was so persuasive that Fox stopped pressuring Zeckendorf long enough for him to find a rich partner to help him move forward.
Zeckendorf’s resilience and flamboyance showed Donald Trump the glories that might come with a showy approach to business. Other men offered what he came to see as cautionary examples of the fate that awaits the shy and the humble. In November of Donald’s freshman year at Fordham, Trump père et fils attended the official opening of the grand Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. This outing, on a cloudless Tuesday before Thanksgiving, would offer a lesson young Trump would never forget.
For decades New Yorkers had flocked to ceremonies marking the completion of various public works projects—tunnels, highways, bridges—completed under the steely hand of construction czar Robert Moses. One of Moses’s last significant projects, the great bridge was seventy stories tall and more than a mile in length, which made it the largest suspension bridge in the world. Crossing the narrow point that marks the Hudson River’s outlet to the sea, the bridge connected Staten Island to Brooklyn. When it was proposed, Brooklynites who lived where the bridge would be anchored protested that it would ruin their neighborhood. By the time it opened this conflict had dissipated, and no one appeared to protest and spoil the municipal pageantry. Flags and patriotic bunting flapped in the wind. The Sanitation Department band played. The ocean liner United States passed beneath the roadway.
The general public was welcomed to stand and gape at the bridge-opening festivities, and one carload of young men earned some recognition by dressing up in tuxedos and parking at the tollbooth for a week, so they might be the first to cross. However, the honored attendees were invited to stand close to the speakers and to the ribbon cutters, who included the governor, the mayor, Italy’s ambassador to the United States, and the same Cardinal Spellman who had greeted the NYMA cadets from the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Columbus Day.
From a spot that was close enough to give him a good view of the platform, Donald Trump noted that the elderly designer of the bridge, Othmar Ammann, was overlooked as Moses invited the assorted dignitaries to receive some applause. (New York Times reporter Gay Talese, who would one day be an acclaimed author, noted the oversight too.) The lesson Trump took away was that somehow Ammann was to blame for being overlooked. Trump decided he would remember the incident because “I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
In the world of deals and schemes that Donald planned to inhabit, suckers were the ones who watched others get rich in a game that they didn’t understand. His father was nobody’s sucker. Denied access to federal programs because of the problems aired during the Senate hearings on the FHA, Fred had found another game called the Mitchell-Lama program, which had been created under the Limited-Profit Housing Companies act of 1955. Named for the New York State lawmakers who authored it, Mitchell-Lama allowed developers to build on land acquired by the government, supplied them with low-interest loans, and exempted them from certain taxes. Mitchell-Lama even guaranteed developers a 7.5 percent builder’s fee and a 6 percent annual profit.
In the months before the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge was opened, Fred Trump had finished a Mitchell-Lama project called Trump Village, where he had maneuvered to take most of the land previously reserved for a nonprofit developer so Fred could put up thirty-seven hundred apartments. (The sprawling site was assembled through the government’s condemnation of smaller properties. Those overseeing these condemnations, and setting the price paid for each parcel, were Brooklyn judges friendly to Trump.) Trump Village had served as a kind of operating-room theater for young Donald, providing him with an up close view of something few people ever saw. In countless conversations and many visits to the building site, he learned how government officials, politicians, contractors, and tradesmen could be managed and massaged. (Fred kept cigars in his pocket to offer at key moments.) Donald also saw how his father responded to an unexpected crisis.
Having never built anything taller than six stories, Fred Trump found himself operating beyond his area of expertise at Trump Village, where each building would rise twenty-three stories. His financial limitations and lack of experience with high-rise projects made it impossible for him to obtain a construction bond, which the state required as a guarantee for mortgage funding. Unable to proceed on his own, he turned to his advisers at a construction company called HRH. They obtained the bond and took over as general contractors. Under HRH, Trump Village was completed ahead of schedule and at a cost below original estimates. Though still technically the boss, Fred was only an observer at his biggest-ever project.
Though designed by the renowned architect Morris Lapidus, the completed Trump Village showed none of the style of his famous Fontainebleau and the Eden Roc hotels in Miami. Instead Lapidus, working under constant pressure to reduce costs, produced spare, modernist structures with big windows and slots where residents could install their own air conditioners. The few design flourishes could be seen in the building interiors, where splashes of colored tile and bright paint relieved the monotony of brick and glass. Some of the furniture Lapidus designed for the lobbies at Trump Village was so artful it wound up in a museum.
The only project Fred ever put his name on, Trump Village became both his crowning achievement and a long-term headache. As his son Donald left Fordham in 1966 to finish his undergraduate degree (he majored in real estate) at the University of Pennsylvania, state officials began looking into the string-pulling Trump Sr. had practiced as he acquired both the land for his project and the government’s help, which included $50 million in low-cost financing and valuable tax breaks.
As a scandal brewed, Donald worked at Trump Village on weekends and during school breaks, making apartments ready for occupants and responding to tenant complaints. Slender, with blue eyes and longish, blond hair, the fashionably dressed Donald stood several inches taller than his father, who still wore a fedora and a mustache that was clipped with razor precision. Fred had become so self-conscious about his German heritage that he had begun to tell people he was Swedish. Donald approached everyone he met with an easy confidence. But as different as father and son were in style, they were the same when it came to their ambitions and desires. Neither man seemed much interested in human pleasures such as fine food or art. And if they harbored any burning political or moral ideals, they were not in evidence, although privately they identified with the Republican Party and they both very much admired the Reverend Norman Vincent Peale.
Born and raised in the Midwest, Peale became pastor of the Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan in 1932. In New York he worked with the aptly named psychoanalyst Smiley Blanton to develop a philosophy Peale called “the power of positive thinking.” After soliciting financial support from luminaries such as Thomas Watson of IBM and Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers, he built a one-man industry of exhortation to spread his ideas via books, magazines, and broadcasts. He reached 30 million Americans via his radio programs, and his 1952 book, The Power of Positive Thinking, sold 2 million copies in twenty-four months. It would remain in print for more than fifty years and became the foundational document in Peale’s cult of success.
Peale’s message could be boiled down to the proposition that self-confidence and visualization would overcome almost any obstacle life might place in your way. For a Christian minister, he devoted precious little attention to the Bible or to God, preferring instead to tell stories about individuals who followed his techniques to overcome everything from alcoholism to poverty. When God did appear in Peale’s writings and sermons, He was often portrayed as a sort of life coach or an object of meditation. “I know that with God’s help,” wrote Peale, “I can sell vacuum cleaners.”
Much of what Peale preached echoed the teachings of Napoleon Hill, whose Think and Grow Rich appeared in 1937 and counseled, “You can never have riches in great quantities unless you can work yourself into a white heat of desire for money.” Peale was gentler in his prescriptions, urging meditative techniques borrowed from the theories of a famous French hypnotist named Émile Coué, who instructed his subjects to practice “autosuggestion” by repeating the phrase “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” Coué’s book Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion was published in America in the year Peale was ordained as a Methodist minister. The author supported it with a much-publicized speaking tour that raised $16,000 (equivalent to $220,000 in 2015) for the founding of a Coué institute in New York. Its board would include a Vanderbilt, a Methodist bishop, a California socialite married to an Italian count, and a former city police commissioner.
Like Coué, Peale told believers to imagine themselves as they wanted to be and to overcome doubt by repeating such phrases as “God gives me the power to attain what I really want.” These phrases and others should be repeated at least half a dozen times per day, wrote Peale, to “crowd your mind.” His religion was, above all else, practical and useful in the pursuit of “power and efficiency.” Peale rarely touched on Christian concepts of sin, suffering, or redemption. He preferred instead to preach that followers “be free of a sense of guilt” about their misdeeds. Speaking to the insecurities and anxieties of the people in his vast congregation, Peale noted, “Every normal person wants power over circumstances, power over fear, power over weakness, power over themselves.” He said they would achieve this power through prayer, visualization, and action that would “actualize” their dreams of “prosperity, achievement, success.” He wrote, “Learn to pray big prayers. God will rate you according to the size of your prayers.”
Peale was as controversial as he was popular. Theologian Reinhold Niebuhr regarded Peale’s various organizations as a cult. When leading psychologists criticized Peale—some warned that his methods could promote mental disorders—Smiley Blanton refused to defend him and barred Peale from using Blanton’s name. Peale also ran into trouble when he opposed John F. Kennedy’s presidential bid, saying, “Faced with the election of a Catholic, our culture is at stake.” Amid the furor over this statement, Peale’s congregation offered him almost unanimous support, but he quickly expressed regret and withdrew from a group of anti-Kennedy ministers. After Kennedy won, Peale’s sin was quickly forgotten. By the following spring he was being celebrated for his forty years of service in the pulpit, and the elite of New York’s business community were crowding the Easter service at Marble Collegiate Church.
Peale would remain a prominent figure and corporate America’s favorite preacher as he offered both a moral argument for capitalism and inspiration for vacuum salesmen. In 1961, managers at more than 750 firms purchased subscriptions to his Guideposts for their employees. (In one year U.S. Steel alone spent $150,000 on the magazine.) In New York, Peale’s Fifth Avenue congregation grew from six hundred to five thousand, and his services attracted bankers, political figures, executives, and business operators such as Fred and Donald Trump.
As nearly perfect practitioners of the power of positive thinking, they both wanted to achieve the kind of wealth and status that would elevate them above other men. In Peale they found a pastor who taught them that God wanted the same thing for them and that the “infinite forces of the universe” were available to them if only they used positive thinking and trained their minds “to think victory.” Donald would demonstrate positive thinking throughout his life, as it became a true habit of his heart. His projects and creations would always be, in his words, “the best” and “the greatest,” and when reminded of failures or inconsistencies in his claims, he would respond with phrases like “Yeah, whatever” and race on to describe another of his achievements. Positive thinking all the way.10