With frontrunner Donald Trump‘s having staked out prime real estate at the table for the first Republican debate tomorrow, it’s time for me to dust off a 41-year-old story of my personal encounter with The Donald, then known as “Young Donald.”
While working on a 1974 NY Times article in the Sunday Real Estate Section on the shifting rent patterns in New York City, I interviewed Donald in his limo. He had kindly offered me a ride back to Manhattan, after learning that to get from my Bronx apartment to the Trump Organization’s offices on Avenue Z, in the nether reaches of Brooklyn, I had endured what still holds the record for the longest subway ride I’ve ever taken.
Donald had been assigned to talk to me because the reigning Trump, his father Fred, head of the Trump Organization, had business more pressing than talking to some inexperienced reporter he’d never heard of.
I remember only two things from our encounter: The Trump scion decided to take the wheel, consigning his driver to the back seat and inviting me to sit shotgun. (For the record, he was a careful driver.)
And as the majestic Manhattan skyline loomed into view, he swept his hand across the windshield and pompously proclaimed:
I’m going to be big there one day!
“Yeah, sure Donald,” I thought derisively, showing an unfortunate lack of prescience.
After he dropped me off at a more convenient subway stop, The Donald wasn’t done with me. With his pathological penchant for publicity already fully developed, he contacted me by phone and mail afterwards, pushing for favorable NY Times coverage. Self-important cub reporter that I was, I punished him for hounding me, giving him scant space (without naming him) in my long piece:
The Trump Organization, which supplied the Brooklyn-Queens data for destabilized apartments, emphasized that any evaluation of its rents [which had unusually large increases after restrictions were eased] should take into account that substantial improvements, such as new refrigerators, air-conditioners, stoves and bathroom facilities, were made in most of Trump’s destabilized apartments.
Needless to say, I was astonished to read that “Mr. Trump…says he is publicity shy” in a 1976 NY Times profile of the then ascendant Donald by the estimable Judy Klemesrud (who seemed to have left behind her reportorial skepticism in his chauffeured limousine). She didn’t challenge that astonishing self-characterization. This could be the first and last times that the words “publicity shy” and “Donald Trump” have ever been associated with each other. (The Klemesrud profile is referenced and linked to in David Dunlap‘s then recent NY Times piece on Trump.)
Klemesrud also bought Trump’s assertion that he was Swedish, whereas this NY Times appreciation of his father, who died in 1999, set the record straight:
He [Fred Trump] was of German background; indeed, with his piercing eyes and heavy eyebrows, he looked like a Wagnerian hero. But you didn’t want to look German in sales in New York around the war years. Indeed, a certain mystification developed about Trump’s background. People thought he was Swedish or Dutch.
(His mother was Scottish.)
UPDATE: One more Trump myth that Klemesrud bought: At Wharton (where he got a B.A., not M.B.A.), “he graduated first in his class in 1968.” William Geist‘s 1984 profile for the NY Times Magazine set the record straight:
Just about every profile ever written about Mr. Trump states that he graduated first in his class at Wharton in 1968. Although the school refused comment, the commencement program from 1968 does not list him as graduating with honors of any kind.
My guess is that Trump’s self-promoting pronouncements in tomorrow’s debate will give journalistic fact-checkers quite a workout.