TWO FORTUNES DIVERGE
WHILE MCCAIN WAS A PRISONER OF WAR?
Donald Trump, left, shows an architect’s model of City Hall Plaza in New York in 1977. Sen. John McCain, right, then an air force pilot, recovers in a Hanoi hospital in 1967 after he was held by the North Vietnamese army. Following Trump’s recent remarks about McCain, the Washington Post examines how the real estate mogul’s path compares to that of McCain.
Presidential candidate was busy amassing a fortune
It was the spring of 1968 and Donald Trump had it good.
He was 21 years old and handsome with a full head of hair. He avoided the Vietnam War draft on his way to earning an Ivy League degree. He was fond of fancy dinners, beautiful women and outrageous clubs. Most important, he had a job in his father’s real estate company and a brain bursting with money- making ideas that would make him a billionaire.
“When I graduated from college, I had a net worth of perhaps $ 200,000,” he said in his 1987 autobiography Trump: The Art of the Deal, written with Tony Schwartz. “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 12,000 kilometres away, John McCain sat in a North Vietnamese prison cell. The Navy pilot’s body was broken from a plane crash, starvation, botched operations and months of torture.
As Trump was preparing to take Manhattan, McCain was relearning how to walk.
The stark contrast in their fortunes was thrown into sharp relief Saturday when Trump belittled McCain during a campaign speech in Iowa.
“He’s not a war hero,” Trump said. “He’s a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But he didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News. “Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, many people were insulted.
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John Kerry said in a statement. “He served and bled and endured unspeakable acts of torture. His captors broke his bones, but they couldn’t break his spirit, which is why he refused early release when he had the chance. That’s heroism, pure and simple, and it is unimpeachable.”
If Trump doesn’t think that’s heroic, then what is admirable in his eyes? And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in a jungle dungeon?
The answers reveal deep divides in their lives and claims to leadership.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. His role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the war hero turned president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes, as he wrote in his autobiography, Faith of My Fathers.
Growing up in Queens, N. Y., Trump’s role models were more ... theatrical.
“Two of the people I admired most and who I kind of studied for the way they did things were the great Flo Ziegfeld, the Broadway producer, and Bill Zeckendorf, the builder,” he told The New York Times in 1984.
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hardcharging, penny- pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U. S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, Md., McCain was known as a “tough, mean little ( expletive)” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s The Nightingale’s Song.
McCain enlisted in the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out.
But the similarities stopped there. Despite a successful stint at the military school, Trump doesn’t seem to have been eager to enlist. It was 1964 and the Vietnam War was escalating.
He took economics courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. While at school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
Meanwhile, McCain was about to become one of its most high- profile casualties.
The lieutenant- commander had been flying for months, conducting targeted strikes on North Vietnam.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain destroyed two enemy MiG fighter planes parked on a runway outside Hanoi. He begged to go out the next day, too.
But as he flew over Hanoi Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
A Russian missile blew the right wing off the plane, he noted in a 1973 account of his ordeal.
“It went into an inverted, a most straight- down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when he landed in a lake. North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. They stripped him to his underwear, and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused to talk.
And as Trump drove around Manhattan in his father’s limo, McCain was refusing to mention his dad for fear of handing valuable intelligence to the enemy.
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own his father was an admiral. They moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations — without Novocain, he later wrote.
That Christmas, as Trump was celebrating with his family, McCain was starving in a prison camp.
He survived, slowly regaining his strength. By the spring of 1968, he had taught himself to walk again. Not that there was anywhere to walk. He was in solitary confinement in a stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, had already made a small fortune — US$ 200,000 ( almost $ 1.4 million today) — working for his father.
In his autobiography, he describes these early years as fraught with danger. “I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best,” he wrote. The danger? Collecting rent. Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators re- broke his mended bones — he was battling everything from dysentery to hemorrhoids.
The prisoner of war survived on watery pumpkin soup and scraps of bread. He saw several prisoners beaten to death, yet he refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release.
Trump was living large. He ate in New York’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in a prison dubbed the Hanoi Hilton.
If Trump was used to dining well, the only decent meal McCain had during his five years in prison was the night before he was released in 1973.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go on to build a fortune in the billions.
The much decorated McCain became a U. S. senator and unsuccessful presidential candidate.
His captors broke his bones, but they couldn’t break his spirit, which is why he refused early release when he had the chance.