Trump Revealed

by Michael Kranish

  Far from joining the hundreds of thousands of young American men who were in the jungles of Southeast Asia, Trump was already spending nearly as much time working for his father in New York as he was in class in Philadelphia. “He sniveled every Monday about having to go home on the weekends to New York and work for his dad,” said classmate Terry Farrell. “He was a rich whiner.” Trump may have felt like a prince of Queens, but he was by no means the wealthiest student in his class or even in his major. The real estate department, with about six undergraduate majors in each class, was stocked with scions of some of the country’s titans of property development, including Gerald W. Blakeley III, whose father ran Boston’s venerable Cabot, Cabot & Forbes; and Robert Mackle, whose father and uncles were prominent in postwar Florida real estate.

  Trump was eager to get going in his field, and he spent many hours looking to buy apartments near the West Philadelphia campus to rent them to students. Trump recalled being focused on acquiring property, but his name does not come up in searches of real estate transactions during that period. Some classmates said he was equally interested in being seen with beautiful women. “Every time I saw him, he had a pretty girl on his arm,” said classmate Bill Specht.

  Candice Bergen, the actress and model, had left Penn before Trump arrived on campus, but she recalled a blind date with him: “He was wearing a three-piece burgundy suit, and burgundy boots, and [drove] a burgundy limousine. He was very coordinated. . . . It was a very short evening.” Trump’s recollection is different: “She was dating guys from Paris, France, who were thirty-five years old, the whole thing. I did make the move. And I must say she had the good sense to say, ‘Absolutely not.’ ”

  In the years after Trump graduated, Wharton became synonymous with financial success. Many of its graduates grew rich, and Penn’s endowment soared. Alumni gave generously, their names emblazoned all over campus. But although Wharton’s place in Trump’s biography expanded, his contributions to the school did only rarely. In the 1980s, a Penn development officer said Trump had given the school more than $10,000, but declined to elaborate. “I don’t know why he has not supported the school more,” Wharton’s associate director for development, Nancy Magargal, said then. One of the only places his name appears on campus is the Class of 1968 Seminar Room plaque in Van Pelt Library, donated at his class’s thirty-fifth reunion. Classmates and former university officials believe the contribution was in the $5,000 range. Despite Trump’s professed love of Penn and boasts of his financial success, university fund-raisers tired of asking for large donations. One sizable gift came in 1994, when he gave enough to be listed as a “founder” of the Penn Club’s new location in midtown Manhattan. The minimum gift for that category was $150,000. Two autumns later, Donald Trump Jr. arrived at the leafy campus. In all, three of the four older Trump children—including Ivanka (transferring after two years at Georgetown) and Tiffany—would attend Penn, making the school almost an inheritance, a family emblem.

  In May 1968, William S. Paley, founder of CBS and an alumnus, delivered Wharton’s commencement address. Standing with Fred Trump, Donald posed for a photograph in his black gown, a gold sash bordering his collar. Father and son beamed, their hands posed similarly by their sides. Donald’s commuting days were over. Wharton had been a footnote, a pit stop on the way to the career he had announced to classmates as soon as he arrived on campus. Walking down Spruce Street during graduation festivities, his classmate recalls Trump yelling, “Hey, Louis, wait up!” Calomaris turned to his new girlfriend and future wife and said, “Linda, you’re about to meet the next Bill Zeckendorf of Manhattan.”

  3

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  Father and Son

  For years, Donald Trump had spent summers with his father, touring developments, learning the basics, but now Fred asked his college graduate son to join him full-time in Brooklyn, where Trump Management had a modest office on Avenue Z, near the timeworn Coney Island boardwalk. There, the capstone of Fred Trump’s career now dominated the skyline: Trump Village.

  For close to a century, Coney Island had been a thriving urban resort; hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers crowded the beaches and queued up for the amusements. But over the years, the area had declined, and city officials were anxious for redevelopment. They condemned a forty-acre parcel, authorized demolition of existing buildings, and gave Fred Trump permission to build near the site of the famous Parachute Jump, the 250-foot-high “Eiffel Tower of Brooklyn,” which once let riders plunge, safely, to the ground. The elder Trump seized the opportunity in the early 1960s and, for the first time, put the family name on a development.

  As Donald drove his Cadillac from Queens to Coney Island to join his father, he could see his father’s greatest accomplishment. Trump Village was no bucolic refuge, as its name implied. It was a gargantuan series of seven twenty-three-story high-rises dwarfing the Parachute Jump and all that stood around it, built in a utilitarian style—thirty-eight hundred apartments near the beachfront, the largest rental complex in Brooklyn at the time. The apartments, nobody’s idea of grand or elegant, were nonetheless a proud step up for the striving middle-class families, many of them Jewish immigrants or their children, who left the city’s badly aging, cramped row houses to enjoy the ocean breezes and live a few blocks from Nathan’s hot dog stand and Mrs. Stahl’s Knishes on the boardwalk.

  Fred had insisted Trump Village be built as cheaply as possible, with the least expensive brick and few architectural niceties. He carried the frugality to his nearby office, shag carpeted, strewn with metal furniture, and decorated with cigar-store wooden Indians. This would now be Donald’s office as well. Just a few years out of Wharton, around the time he turned twenty-five in 1971, Donald became president of Trump Management, while Fred took on the role of chairman. Donald’s ascendancy was both an extraordinary gift and a great responsibility. He now oversaw fourteen thousand apartments throughout the outer boroughs, including those at Trump Village. It could be rough work. Tenants came and went by the hundreds. Some missed payments. The city pressured the Trumps to accept lower-income families, who sometimes fled when bills were due, leaving the apartments wrecked. Donald later told tales of standing to the side of the door after he knocked, fearing someone might greet him with a gun. This cost was all part of running large apartment complexes in such neighborhoods, familiar to Fred but a culture shock for his son.

  Fred, in his midtwenties at the start of the Depression, worried about his financial condition and shouldered as little personal risk as possible. He said he was successful because he squeezed nine days out of a seven-day week and made sure every penny was spent wisely. He liked to say that he could turn a lemon into a grapefruit. These were the lessons he hoped to convey to Donald: work hard, be humble and thankful, and stick to the winning formula of building middle-class housing in Queens, Staten Island, and Brooklyn.

  “There is no secret” to success, Fred explained years later in accepting the Horatio Alger Award, given to people who overcame adversity. “There are just two things. One, you must like what you do. You must pick out the right business or profession. You must learn all about it . . . so you become enthusiastic about it. Nine out of ten people don’t like what they do. And in not liking what they do, they lose enthusiasm, they go from job to job, and ultimately become a nothing.” Such was the challenge Donald faced as his father’s son: he was given everything at the start—and thus never able to qualify for the Horatio Alger Award—and he wanted to avoid failing in his father’s eyes and becoming a nothing.

  Fred made his millions with care and frugality, but also with more than a little help from government housing programs. As Fred became more successful, he increasingly faced questions about how he ran his business. The first big fight had come in 1954, when Donald was eight years old, and Fred was called to testify before Congress. A congressional committee was investigating whether Fred had misused a government-insured loan on a Brooklyn apartment project called Beach Haven. He had borrowed $
3.5 million more than he needed, according to a Senate report. Trump angrily responded that the allegations had done “untold damage to my standing and reputation.” He testified that he built apartments for less than the loan amount because of reduced costs, not because he was trying to make an illicit profit. No charges were brought against him.

  Then, in 1966, Fred faced allegations that he netted a “windfall” of $1.8 million in building Trump Village through a state program. New York investigators said that Trump’s project costs had been inflated, and that he had blocked the appointment of a government official who might have opposed his plans. Trump, as he had in the Senate hearing, dismissed the complaints as nonsense, saying the profits were “peanuts, compared to a sixty-million-dollar job.” Again, no charges were brought.

  Fred Trump could proudly point to tens of thousands of working-class residents of Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island who lived in houses that he built or apartment complexes that he managed. Countless New Yorkers, including many immigrant families, got their start in the city in the housing on which Trump had made his fortune. Many apartment complexes were in gritty neighborhoods, often divided by race. The federal government, which helped finance many Trump projects, bore some of the blame for this balkanization; the Federal Housing Administration had all but sanctioned segregation, advising against what were euphemistically called “inharmonious” projects.

  One Trump tenant disturbed by the de facto segregation was the Oklahoman Woodrow Wilson Guthrie—or Woody, as the folksinger was known. He had moved to New York City in 1940, the same year he wrote one of the nation’s most revered ballads, “This Land Is Your Land.” Ten years later, he had moved to Beach Haven, the Trump complex a few blocks from the Coney Island beachfront. Guthrie later wrote a number of verses that suggested Fred Trump was responsible for steering blacks away from the property: “I suppose / Old Man Trump knows / Just how much / Racial Hate / He stirred up / In the bloodpot of human hearts / When he drawed / That color line / Here at his / Eighteen hundred family project.”

  For years after Guthrie left Beach Haven, Fred’s company faced allegations of discrimination. Every now and then complaints would be filed with local agencies, and the Trump company would agree to rent to someone who had allegedly been denied admission, and the matter was settled. But by the time Donald joined the business, investigators were again monitoring the company for racial discrimination. Local activists suspected that rental agents steered black applicants away from buildings that were mostly occupied by whites. That had been a common practice in many parts of the country for years, but it had been outlawed by the Fair Housing Act of 1968. The legislation was passed during the Johnson administration at a time when many whites were relocating to the suburbs, and minorities often moved into the city properties that whites had vacated. Concern about the issue peaked following race riots that broke out across the country after the 1968 assassination of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. In 1971, after a major New York City landlord settled a case alleging discrimination, undercover testers stepped up their focus on Donald and Fred Trump. They quickly found evidence of what they believed to be racial discrimination.

  On March 18, 1972, Alfred Hoyt, a black man, heard about a vacancy at a Trump apartment complex on Westminster Road in Brooklyn. When he sought to rent the place, he was told by the superintendent that no two-bedroom apartments were available. The following day, his wife, Sheila Hoyt, who is white, was offered an application to rent a two-bedroom apartment at the same complex. Unbeknownst to the superintendent, Sheila Hoyt was a tester for the New York City Human Rights Commission, a city agency that investigated housing discrimination. Two days later, she returned to sign the lease. What the superintendent didn’t know was that she had brought along her husband and a housing commissioner, who had been waiting outside and now entered the apartment. The commissioner demanded to know why Alfred Hoyt had been denied an apartment offered to Sheila Hoyt. Hoyt said the superintendent told her he was “just doing what my boss told me to do. I am not allowed to rent to [black] families.” The commissioner placed a placard at the building that said no business could be transacted there, per order of the Human Rights Commission. Then the superintendent brought the Hoyts and the commissioner to the Trump office on Avenue Z. Sheila Hoyt couldn’t recall if she met Donald, but said that after the group met at the Trump office, Alfred Hoyt was allowed to rent the apartment for himself and his wife.

  The initial refusal to rent to Alfred Hoyt helped set off a chain of events that would lead to one of the most controversial and defining moments in Donald Trump’s early years. More testers secretly made the rounds of Trump buildings. In a July 1972 test at Shore Haven Apartments in Brooklyn, a superintendent told a black woman, Henrietta Davis, that nothing was available. A white woman, Muriel Salzman, a tester for the Urban League, followed Davis into the office, and the same superintendent told Salzman that she could “immediately rent either one of two available apartments.”

  The tests revealed a pattern. White testers were encouraged to rent at certain Trump buildings, while the black testers were discouraged, denied, or steered to apartment complexes that had more racial minorities. After local activists realized the scope of their findings, they alerted the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which was looking for housing cases to pursue.

  • • •

  THE TRUMP FILE LANDED on the desk of an idealistic young Justice Department lawyer named Elyse Goldweber. It was a fateful moment, and she seized it. One of Goldweber’s clearest childhood memories had been taking a ferry in southern Virginia to visit her grandparents. Two signs greeted her as she came on board: WHITE and COLORED. As the ferry reached Newport News, Virginia, Goldweber’s parents vowed the family would not patronize stores that practiced segregation. Growing up on Long Island, she watched reports of blacks being chased by police dogs and pushed back by spray from high-powered water hoses; she decided she wanted to work for the government as a civil rights lawyer.

  For years, the Justice Department had sought Ivy League law school graduates to represent the US government. Goldweber graduated from Brooklyn Law School and figured she had little chance to fulfill her dream. But just as she graduated, the Justice Department said it wanted to expand its pool of job candidates, and a number of lawyers had left the housing division to join the presidential campaign of Democrat George McGovern. Goldweber won a plum spot from the start.

  When the allegations against the Trump company arrived at the Justice Department office in Washington, the file came to Goldweber, whose bosses had given her jurisdiction over New York cases. She went to New York and talked to housing activists and Trump company workers, learning that in a sampling of ten Trump buildings, only 1 to 3.5 percent of the occupants were minorities, far below the rate of the local population. This was as strong a case as she had seen. She recommended that the Justice Department file suit against Fred and Donald Trump and their company.

  Two former Trump employees, a husband and wife, said they were told “by Fred Trump and other agents” that the company only wanted to rent to “Jews and Executives” and “discouraged rental to blacks.” The couple said “a racial code was in effect, blacks being referred to as ‘No. 9.’ ” Other rental agents employed by the Trumps told the FBI that only 1 percent of tenants at the Trump-run Ocean Terrace Apartments were black, and that Lincoln Shore Apartments had no black tenants. Both were on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. Minorities, however, were steered to Patio Gardens, a different complex on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, where the tenant population was 40 percent black. One black woman was turned away at a heavily white complex but was told she should “try to obtain an apartment at Patio Gardens.”

  Phyllis Spiro, a white woman, went undercover in 1973 at Beach Haven, the same property that Woody Guthrie had lived in and written about two decades earlier. She told investigators that a building superintendent acknowledged to her “that he followed a racially discriminatory rental policy at the direction of
his superiors, and that there were only very few ‘colored’ tenants” at the complex. More than four decades later, Spiro remembered the case vividly and said she and her fellow housing activists found “a constant pattern and practice of discrimination” at Trump buildings.

  Goldweber’s bosses had heard enough. Citing the experiences of the Hoyts, Spiro, and many others, the Justice Department announced the filing of one of the most significant racial bias cases of the era: United States of America v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump and Trump Management, Inc. On the morning of October 15, 1973, a Justice Department official reached Donald Trump on the phone. This courtesy call was to let the twenty-seven-year-old developer know the federal government was suing him and his father. Within minutes, the Justice Department issued a news release that said the Trumps had violated the law “by refusing to rent and negotiate rentals with blacks, requiring different rental terms and conditions because of race, and misrepresenting that apartments were not available.” The news media promptly picked up the story. Trump later said the first time he heard the news was when he turned on the radio in his Cadillac, not from the Justice Department official’s phone call. The following morning, Trump was on the front pages, including a New York Times story headlined “Major Landlord Accused of Antiblack Bias in City.” Trump was livid, saying the charges were “absolutely ridiculous. We never have discriminated.”