It is now election year and it is time to look closely at the biography of the dominant candidate. This piece on the fate of his older brother speaks volumes. It also reflects deep wells of personal discipline which brooks well. There was a reason he took alcohol and cigarettes off his to do list. And it really takes a tale like this to do it.
Otherwise Donald did go through a military style high school experience. This provides all the benefits of the military experience and deftly skips the obvious negatives. I managed to do much the same for much the same reason and perhaps just as consciously. The benefits are actually immense. It is just that at a certain point you must go past what can be called the line. You want to avoid all that.
It is quite obvious that our Donald dodged that line as well. That was certainly a conscious decision. At the same time he made it into the higher ranked schools which eluded his brother. Thus his university experience was no sham either. All this informs that he is a formidable intelligence and that the media's attempts to paint him as a lesser light is wrong headed.
It is the nature of a creative intelligence to do the implausible because it puts the initiative in hand. Donald has proven this over and over again. He has often moved in against a wall of failure and fear. That he has not only wrested control of the Republican Campaign, but has also steadily led it is astounding. I do not think he can be beaten and he is certainly up for the task..
For Donald Trump, Lessons From a Brother’s Suffering
One evening in the 1960s, Donald J. Trump,
still in college but eager to make it big, met his older brother,
Freddy, for dinner in a Queens apartment complex built by their father.
Things went bad fast.
As
Freddy, a fun-loving airline pilot with a gift for imitating W. C.
Fields, joked with his best friend at the table, his younger brother
grew impatient. Grow up, get serious and make something of yourself in
the family business, Donald scolded.
“Donald
put Freddy down quite a bit,” said Annamaria Schifano, then the
girlfriend of Freddy’s best friend, who was at the dinner and recalled
Donald’s tendency to pick fights and storm out. “There was a lot of
combustion.”
For
Mr. Trump, a presidential candidate whose appeal is predicated on an
aura of toughness, personal achievement and perpetual success, the story
of Freddy, a handsome, gregarious and self-destructive figure who died
as an alcoholic in 1981 at the age of 43, is bleak and seldom told.
In
a telephone interview last week, Mr. Trump said he had learned by
watching his brother how bad choices could drag down even those who
seemed destined to rise. Seeing his brother suffering led him to avoid
ever trying alcohol or cigarettes, he said.
But
the painful case of Freddy Trump, eight years his brother’s senior and
once the heir apparent to their father’s real estate empire, also serves
as an example of the dangers of failing to conform in a family
dominated by a driven, perfectionist patriarch and an aggressive younger
brother.
In
the upwardly mobile Trump family, Donald was the second and favorite
son, the one who got into the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton
School, relished the combat of New York real estate and ultimately made
the Trump name an international brand. Freddy was the disappointment,
who lacked the killer instinct and drifted so far from his father’s
ambitions that his children were largely cut out of the patriarch’s
will.
Freddy,
as he was known, “was caught sort of in the middle as somebody who
didn’t really love it, and only because he didn’t really love it, he
wasn’t particularly good at it,” Mr. Trump said. “My father had great
confidence in me, which maybe even put pressure on Fred.”
Asked
whether Freddy’s experience in the family business, which friends
described as miserable, contributed to the drinking that ultimately
killed him, Mr. Trump said: “I hope not. I hope not.”
From
the beginning, Freddy stood out as different from his authoritarian,
workaholic father. As Fred Sr. became one of the master builders of the
New York boroughs, his mischievous son drank Cokes, and eventually
beers, with friends in the family recreation room.
Less quick-witted than his older sister, Maryanne Trump Barry, now a federal judge, he was also more welcoming of outsiders than his father.
When
Ms. Schifano moved to Jamaica Estates, Queens, the wealthy enclave
where the Trumps lived, Freddy confided to her that his parents had
panicked because, as Italians, the Schifanos were “the first ethnic
family to move into the neighborhood.” But Freddy was less concerned
with ethnic distinctions. When he enrolled at Lehigh University in
Pennsylvania, the boy with blond hair who had attended an Episcopalian
boys’ preparatory school on Long Island joined a Jewish fraternity.
“It
may have been Freddy’s first attempt to make his own statement to his
father,” said his best friend at Lehigh, Bruce Turry, who, like several
other former fraternity brothers, remembered Freddy claiming that his
father, the son of German immigrants, was Jewish. (He was not.) “Freddy
was a classic illustration of someone who had a father complex.”
The
Jewish fraternity brothers kidded Freddy about his middle name, Christ.
He found the ribbing, like much else in life, hysterical.
In
his junior year, he and Mr. Turry called themselves the “mysterious
two” and went through the fraternity house short-sheeting beds. But
Freddy was also generous to his fraternity brothers.
He
gave Mr. Turry, who was saving to buy his girlfriend an engagement
ring, a stock tip and left notes for him about his improving investment.
“Your eighth of a carat is up to a quarter-carat,” he wrote.
It
eventually became apparent to his fraternity brothers that Freddy, who
wore Brooks Brothers clothes that draped his thin frame, was wealthy. He
drove a Corvette and owned a Century speedboat. Sometimes he would take
his little brother Donald, then a student at an upstate military
academy, onboard for summer fishing expeditions off Long Island.
“I
hope you don’t mind, I have to take my pain-in-the-ass brother Donald
along,” another fraternity brother, Stuart Oltchick, recalled him
saying.
At
the time, Donald looked up to his brother and kept a photograph of him,
standing next to an airplane, in his dorm room at military school.
But
he also looked toward a future without him in the way. According to
“The Trumps: Three Generations That Built an Empire,” by Gwenda Blair,
Donald told his roommate that Freddy’s decision to be a pilot rather
than run the family business had cleared a path for him to succeed his
father.
Freddy
developed his passion for aviation at Lehigh’s flying club, where he
flew under electrical lines and raced storms home. But as his 1960
graduation neared, his father began building Trump Village, an enormous development on Coney Island and the first to bear the family name. Freddy was eager to make his mark.
“He
was going to make the Trump name known,” as his father dreamed, Mr.
Turry said. “We were going to live in one of his father’s apartments and
have a ringside seat at the Copacabana.”
It
didn’t work out. While working on Trump Village, Freddy was berated by
his father for installing expensive new windows instead of repairing old
ones. Mr. Trump said that their father “could be unyielding,” and that
Freddy had struggled with his abundant criticism and stinginess with
praise.
“For me, it worked very well,” Mr. Trump said. “For Fred, it wasn’t something that was going to work.”
Mr. Oltchick said Freddy had “complained that he didn’t get his appreciation.”
As Freddy stumbled, Mr. Trump said, “I watched him. And I learned from him.”
Freddy
left real estate to pursue his passion for flying, working for Trans
World Airlines, which gave him some good years. In 1962, at age 23, he
married Linda Clapp, a stewardess. They had two children, whom they
named Fred and Mary, after Freddy’s parents.
The
family settled in Queens and spent free time with Freddy’s childhood
best friend, William Drake, also a pilot, and his wife, Ms. Schifano.
The
couples went deep-sea fishing and ate clams on the half shell. Once,
when they spotted a Soviet trawler in international waters off the coast
of Montauk, Freddy circled it as his friends jeered, “Do svidaniya!” —
Russian for “goodbye.”
But
as he reached his mid-20s, he began drinking heavily. And Donald, then
in college, did not approve, haranguing his older brother about wasting
his time on frivolous pursuits and telling him to come back to real
estate.
“I
was too young; I didn’t realize,” he said. “Now I give speeches on
success, and I tell people, ‘You’ve got to love what you’re doing.’ ”
Mr.
Trump said he had eventually come to recognize that his brother was a
talented pilot and belonged in the clouds, not amid bricks and mortar.
But by the time Donald had graduated from college in 1968 and had begun
ascending at Trump headquarters on Coney Island, Freddy’s drinking was
out of control.
Ms.
Schifano recalled that the last time she saw Freddy, one night in the
late 1960s, he looked gaunt. Even though she prepared his favorite food,
roast beef, he barely ate.
The
years that followed were unkind. He got divorced, quit flying because
he knew his drinking presented a danger and failed at commercial fishing
in Florida. By the late 1970s, he was living back in his parents’ house
in Jamaica Estates, working on one of his father’s maintenance crews.
By
then, Donald had broken into the Manhattan real estate market and the
city’s celebrity culture. A younger brother, Robert, had followed in
Donald’s footsteps, joining the family company and eventually becoming a
top executive there.
In
1977, Donald asked Freddy to be the best man at his first wedding, to
the Czech model Ivana Winklmayr, an honor Donald said he hoped would be
“a good thing for him.” But the drinking continued, and four years
later, Freddy was dead.
Over the next decades, Donald put the Trump name on skyscrapers, casinos and planes.
In 1999, the family patriarch died,
and 650 people, including many real estate executives and politicians,
crowded his funeral at Marble Collegiate Church on Fifth Avenue.
But
the drama was hardly put to rest. Freddy’s son, Fred III, spoke at the
funeral, and that night, his wife went into labor with their son, who
developed seizures that led to cerebral palsy. The Trump family promised
that it would take care of the medical bills.
Then
came the unveiling of Fred Sr.’s will, which Donald had helped draft.
It divided the bulk of the inheritance, at least $20 million, among his
children and their descendants, “other than my son Fred C. Trump Jr.”
Freddy’s
children sued, claiming that an earlier version of the will had
entitled them to their father’s share of the estate, but that Donald and
his siblings had used “undue influence” over their grandfather, who had
dementia, to cut them out.
A week later, Mr. Trump retaliated by withdrawing the medical benefits critical to his nephew’s infant child.
“I was angry because they sued,” he explained during last week’s interview.
At
the time, he attributed their exclusion from the will to his father’s
“tremendous dislike” for Freddy’s ex-wife, Linda. She and Fred III
declined to comment on the dispute.
Mr.
Trump said that the litigation had been settled “very amicably” and
that he was fond of Fred III, who works in real estate, though not for
the Trump organization. He also said that, at 69, he had grown to
appreciate his brother’s free spirit.
“He
would have been an amazing peacemaker if he didn’t have the problem,
because everybody loved him,” he said. “He’s like the opposite of me.”
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