Songbird - Wow. He chose to stay but if he would have been released early he would have been exposed. Why just him. Very interesting tape. If Trump had seen that before making those remarks that could explain where he was coming from. There again, Trump's deferments don't give him an edge either. McCain has remained pretty quiet and this tape could be one of the reasons why.
This is a pretty brutal take down of Trump
[h=1]What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war[/h]
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.
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid 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 trying to relearn 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 of McCain.
...
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.
[h=1]What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war[/h]
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.
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid 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 trying to relearn 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 of McCain.
...
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.
Now than the Trump detractors have given up on the hope that his illegal immigrant remarks would
derail his campaign they are pinning there hopes on his 'McCain is not a hero' rants or somehow his
student deferments or him being born with a silver spoon in his mouth will somehow turn the folks
to sour on him. Not likely.
Because McCain whose father & grandfather were Navy Admirals he received a legacy appointment to Annapolis.
He finished 894th out of 899 and still got promoted ahead of all but two of his 898 other classmates.
Promoted to squadron commander of the air field named after his own grandfather immediately after
crashing his third airplane. If anyone had an edge because of his family station it was McCain not Trump.
derail his campaign they are pinning there hopes on his 'McCain is not a hero' rants or somehow his
student deferments or him being born with a silver spoon in his mouth will somehow turn the folks
to sour on him. Not likely.
Because McCain whose father & grandfather were Navy Admirals he received a legacy appointment to Annapolis.
He finished 894th out of 899 and still got promoted ahead of all but two of his 898 other classmates.
Promoted to squadron commander of the air field named after his own grandfather immediately after
crashing his third airplane. If anyone had an edge because of his family station it was McCain not Trump.
[h=1]What Donald Trump was up to while John McCain was a prisoner of war[/h] By Michael E. Miller and Fred Barbash July 20 at 5:43 AM
Left: John S. McCain, USN, is shown in this undated photo lying injured in North Vietnam wearing an arm cast. He was held prisoner during the Vietnam War. (AP)
Right: Donald Trump in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
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. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid 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 trying to relearn 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 of McCain.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
[McCain makes his first public comments since incident: Trump should apologize to military families]
Watch Donald Trump say John McCain is 'not a war hero'(1:05)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese. (C-SPAN)
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But The Donald didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News in reference to his already infamous Iowa speech. “It was wonderful to see. Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, a lot of people were insulted.
[The Take: Trump’s comments mark a turning point for him — and the GOP]
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John F. 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 that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in the infamous prison that POWs sarcastically dubbed the Hanoi Hilton?
The answer reveals deep divides in the two men’s lives and claims to leadership. They may similarly embrace free enterprise, but when it comes to character, the two GOP presidential hopefuls could hardly be more different.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. He has said his role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the barrel-chested, bear-hunting war hero turned president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes, too, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life.”
Growing up in Queens, 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. “They created glamour, and the pageantry, the elegance, the joy they brought to what they did was magnificent.”
Nine people and groups Donald Trump has denounced
View Photos
Not one to back down easily from controversial statements, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s disapproval list continues to grow.
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hard-charging, penny-pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain was known as a “tough, mean little f——” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.”
McCain entered the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out after his own youthful transgressions. ”He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father told the Times in 1983.
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 considered going to film school in California. “I was attracted to the glamour of the movies,” he said in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” adding that he “admired” Hollywood’s “great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Instead Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“If I would have gotten a low [draft] number, I would have been drafted. I would have proudly served,” he told ABC News. “But I got a number, I think it was 356. That’s right at the very end. And they didn’t get — I don’t believe — past even 300, so I was — I was not chosen because of the fact that I had a very high lottery number.”
As Trump was enjoying the Ivy League and avoiding the war, 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. He had already been injured in an aircraft carrier fire that killed 134 fellow sailors. And he had already made a name for himself as a pilot.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had 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 into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
John McCain in a Hanoi, Vietnam, hospital as a prisoner of war in the fall of 1967. McCain spent 20 years in the Navy, a quarter of it in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp after his jet was shot down over Hanoi during a bombing mission Oct. 26, 1967. The Navy pilot nearly gave up during his captivity but his memory of books and movies helped him survive. (AP)
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote. “Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison.
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.
Defiant Trump unapologetic over McCain remarks(1:32)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump refuses to apologize for saying that Sen. John McCain is "not a war hero." (Reuters)
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving in a prison camp called “The Plantation,” a satellite POW site near the Hanoi Hilton.
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, 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 inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger: a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent.
Left: Donald Trump stands next to a model of the D.C. convention center he hoped to develop in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
Right: John McCain is welcomed be President Richard Nixon in 1973. (U.S. Navy)
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators rebroke 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 fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans. He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
“The turning point came in 1971, when I decided to rent a Manhattan apartment,” he wrote. “It was a studio, in a building on Third Avenue and 75th Street, and it looked out on the water tank in the court of the adjacent building…. I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side…. I got to know all the good properties. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs. As far as I was concerned, I had the best of all worlds. I was young, and I had a lot of energy.”
That energy went into signing some of his first real estate deals — and into partying.
“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive — like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy 75-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
“It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”
He was so good looking, he said, that the manager of the club “was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that.”
As McCain remained in solitary confinement, tapping messages on the filthy walls to his fellow POWs in Morse code, Trump was out partying at legendary nightclubs.
Several years later, Trump was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,” Trump told O’Brien. “I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.”
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in Hoa Lo Prison, a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton.
And as McCain continued to refuse special treatment, Trump actively courted it.
“The other thing I promoted was our relationship with politicians, such as Abraham Beame, who was elected mayor of New York in November of 1973,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Like all developers, my father and I contributed money to Beame, and to other politicians. The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer.”
McCain refused to meet with most visitors for fear of being used as a puppet by the North Vietnamese. But back in the United States, Trump was too eager to manipulate the press.
“At one point, when I was hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere, a big New York real estate guy told one of my close friends. ‘Trump has a great line of s—, but where are the bricks and mortar?’” he wrote. “I remember being outraged when I heard that.” (Expletive deleted by The Post, not by Trump.)
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.
It was March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in the United States a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
“The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,”’ according to the New York Times. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”
Trump at first resisted signing a consent decree, according to the Times. He hired his friend, Roy Cohn, the lawyer and former right-hand man to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. “Mr. Trump said he would not sign such a decree because it would be unfair to his other tenants,” the Times reported. “He also said that if he allowed welfare clients into his apartments … there would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants but the communities as a whole.”
But ultimately the company came to terms with the government.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go on to build his fortune to its present day tally of $4 billion.
McCain, in contrast, received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He would become a U.S. senator and run for president.
Whether Trump can triumph where McCain came up short remains to be seen.
Left: John S. McCain, USN, is shown in this undated photo lying injured in North Vietnam wearing an arm cast. He was held prisoner during the Vietnam War. (AP)
Right: Donald Trump in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
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. (That’s about $1.4 million in 2015 dollars.) “I had my eye on Manhattan.”
More than 8,000 miles away, John McCain sat in a tiny, squalid 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 trying to relearn 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 of McCain.
“He’s a war hero because he was captured,” Trump said sarcastically. “I like people that weren’t captured.”
[McCain makes his first public comments since incident: Trump should apologize to military families]
Watch Donald Trump say John McCain is 'not a war hero'(1:05)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump said Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), a decorated Vietnam war veteran, was not a war hero because he was captured by the North Vietnamese. (C-SPAN)
Trump’s comments drew scorn from his fellow Republican presidential contenders. But The Donald didn’t back down.
“When I left the room, it was a total standing ovation,” he told ABC News in reference to his already infamous Iowa speech. “It was wonderful to see. Nobody was insulted.”
In fact, a lot of people were insulted.
[The Take: Trump’s comments mark a turning point for him — and the GOP]
“John McCain is a hero, a man of grit and guts and character personified,” Secretary of State John F. 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 that’s heroic, then what, exactly, is admirable in his eyes?
And what was he doing while McCain was locked up in the infamous prison that POWs sarcastically dubbed the Hanoi Hilton?
The answer reveals deep divides in the two men’s lives and claims to leadership. They may similarly embrace free enterprise, but when it comes to character, the two GOP presidential hopefuls could hardly be more different.
McCain famously followed his father and grandfather — both admirals — into the Navy. He has said his role model was Teddy Roosevelt, the barrel-chested, bear-hunting war hero turned president. He also saw his grandfather and father as heroes, too, as he wrote in his autobiography, “Faith of My Fathers.”
“My grandfather was a naval aviator, my father a submariner. They were my first heroes, and earning their respect has been the most lasting ambition of my life.”
Growing up in Queens, 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. “They created glamour, and the pageantry, the elegance, the joy they brought to what they did was magnificent.”
Nine people and groups Donald Trump has denounced
View Photos
Not one to back down easily from controversial statements, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s disapproval list continues to grow.
McCain grew up in a military household. Trump grew up in a home dominated by his hard-charging, penny-pinching businessman father.
Both young men had rebellious streaks. At the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis, McCain was known as a “tough, mean little f——” who “was defiant and flouted the rules” but never enough to get kicked out, according to Robert Timberg’s “The Nightingale’s Song.”
McCain entered the Navy in 1958. Around the same time, Trump was sent to the New York Military Academy to straighten him out after his own youthful transgressions. ”He was a pretty rough fellow when he was small,” his father told the Times in 1983.
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 considered going to film school in California. “I was attracted to the glamour of the movies,” he said in “Trump: The Art of the Deal,” adding that he “admired” Hollywood’s “great showmen. But in the end I decided real estate was a much better business.”
Instead Trump attended Fordham for two years before transferring to the University of Pennsylvania, where he took economics courses at its famed Wharton School. (According to a book by Gwenda Blair, Trump was allowed to transfer into the Ivy League school because of family connections, and has exaggerated his performance at Penn.)
During his time in school, Trump received four student deferments from the draft.
“If I would have gotten a low [draft] number, I would have been drafted. I would have proudly served,” he told ABC News. “But I got a number, I think it was 356. That’s right at the very end. And they didn’t get — I don’t believe — past even 300, so I was — I was not chosen because of the fact that I had a very high lottery number.”
As Trump was enjoying the Ivy League and avoiding the war, 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. He had already been injured in an aircraft carrier fire that killed 134 fellow sailors. And he had already made a name for himself as a pilot.
On Oct. 25, 1967, McCain had 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 into Hanoi again on Oct. 26, his jet’s warning lights began to flash.
John McCain in a Hanoi, Vietnam, hospital as a prisoner of war in the fall of 1967. McCain spent 20 years in the Navy, a quarter of it in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp after his jet was shot down over Hanoi during a bombing mission Oct. 26, 1967. The Navy pilot nearly gave up during his captivity but his memory of books and movies helped him survive. (AP)
“I was on my 23rd mission, flying right over the heart of Hanoi in a dive at about 4,500 feet, when a Russian missile the size of a telephone pole came up — the sky was full of them — and blew the right wing off my Skyhawk dive bomber,” he wrote in a 1973 account of his ordeal. “It went into an inverted, almost straight-down spin. I pulled the ejection handle, and was knocked unconscious by the force of the ejection.”
McCain regained consciousness when his parachute landed him in a lake. The explosion had shattered both arms and one of his legs. With 50 pounds of gear on him and one good limb, he struggled to swim to the surface.
North Vietnamese dragged him to shore. Then stripped him to his underwear and began “hollering and screaming and cursing and spitting and kicking at me.”
“One of them slammed a rifle butt down on my shoulder, and smashed it pretty badly,” he wrote. “Another stuck a bayonet in my foot. The mob was really getting up-tight.”
He was interrogated for four days, losing consciousness as his captors tried to beat information out of him. But he refused.
As the voluble Trump was already making a name for himself sweet-talking deals for his dad’s real estate developing company, McCain was clamming up in his filthy prison.
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.
Defiant Trump unapologetic over McCain remarks(1:32)
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump refuses to apologize for saying that Sen. John McCain is "not a war hero." (Reuters)
McCain might have died from his injuries had the North Vietnamese not found out on their own that his father was an admiral. Instead, they moved him to a hospital and performed several botched operations on him. They sliced his knee ligaments by accident and couldn’t manage to set his bones.
“They had great difficulty putting the bones together, because my arm was broken in three places and there were two floating bones,” he wrote. “I watched the guy try to manipulate it for about an hour and a half trying to get all the bones lined up. This was without benefit of Novocain.”
That Christmas, as Donald Trump was celebrating the holiday with his family, McCain was starving in a prison camp called “The Plantation,” a satellite POW site near the Hanoi Hilton.
“I was down to about 100 pounds from my normal weight of 155,” he wrote. “I was told later on by [cellmate] Major Day that they didn’t expect me to live a week.”
McCain survived, however, 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 inside a hot, stifling, windowless cell.
Trump, meanwhile, was taking Manhattan by storm. He had already made a small fortune — $200,000 then is almost $1.4 million today — working for his father during college.
In his autobiography, Trump describes these early years as fraught with danger: a quick learning curve for the soon-to-be-celebrity CEO as he went around learning the business. “This was not a world I found very attractive,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.”
“I’d just graduated from Wharton, and suddenly here I was in a scene that was violent at worst and unpleasant at best.”
The danger? Collecting rent.
Left: Donald Trump stands next to a model of the D.C. convention center he hoped to develop in 1976. (Tom Allen/The Washington Post)
Right: John McCain is welcomed be President Richard Nixon in 1973. (U.S. Navy)
“One of the first tricks I learned was that you never stand in front of someone’s door when you knock. Instead you stand by the wall and reach over to knock,” Trump wrote of collecting for his father, who owned low-income housing blocks. “The first time a collector explained that to me I couldn’t imagine what he was talking about. ‘What’s the point,’ I said. The point, he said, is that if you stand to the side, the only thing exposed to danger is your hand.”
“There were tenants who’d throw their garbage out the window, because it was easier than putting it in the incinerator,” he wrote in horror.
Meanwhile, McCain languished in a genuine hell. When he wasn’t being tortured — several times his interrogators rebroke 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 fellow prisoners beaten to death, yet McCain refused to sign the confession that would have granted him a speedy release (and a publicity coup to the North Vietnamese).
Trump was living large — maybe not by today’s Trump standards but larger than most Americans. He ate in New York City’s finest restaurants, rode in his father’s limousines and began hitting the clubs with beautiful women.
“The turning point came in 1971, when I decided to rent a Manhattan apartment,” he wrote. “It was a studio, in a building on Third Avenue and 75th Street, and it looked out on the water tank in the court of the adjacent building…. I was a kid from Queens who worked in Brooklyn, and suddenly I had an apartment on the Upper East Side…. I got to know all the good properties. I became a city guy instead of a kid from the boroughs. As far as I was concerned, I had the best of all worlds. I was young, and I had a lot of energy.”
That energy went into signing some of his first real estate deals — and into partying.
“One of the first things I did was join Le Club, which at the time was the hottest club in the city and perhaps the most exclusive — like Studio 54 at its height,” he wrote. “Its membership included some of the most successful men and the most beautiful women in the world. It was the sort of place where you were likely to see a wealthy 75-year old guy walk in with three blondes from Sweden.
“It turned out to be a great move for me, socially and professionally. I met a lot of beautiful young single women, and I went out almost every night,” he added. “Actually, I never got involved with any of them very seriously. These were beautiful women, but many of them couldn’t carry on a normal conversation.”
He was so good looking, he said, that the manager of the club “was worried that I might be tempted to try to steal their wives. He asked me to promise that I wouldn’t do that.”
As McCain remained in solitary confinement, tapping messages on the filthy walls to his fellow POWs in Morse code, Trump was out partying at legendary nightclubs.
Several years later, Trump was frequenting “Studio 54 in the disco’s heyday and he said he thought it was paradise,” Timothy O’Brien wrote in “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “His prowling gear at the time included a burgundy suit with matching patent-leather shoes,” O’Brien wrote.
“I saw things happening there that to this day, I have never seen again,” Trump told O’Brien. “I would watch supermodels getting screwed, well-known supermodels getting screwed on a bench in the middle of the room. There were seven of them and each one was getting screwed by a different guy. This was in the middle of the room.”
As Trump made plans to buy and refurbish bankrupt hotels, McCain was staving off death in Hoa Lo Prison, a.k.a. the Hanoi Hilton.
And as McCain continued to refuse special treatment, Trump actively courted it.
“The other thing I promoted was our relationship with politicians, such as Abraham Beame, who was elected mayor of New York in November of 1973,” he wrote in “Trump: The Art of the Deal.” “Like all developers, my father and I contributed money to Beame, and to other politicians. The simple fact is that contributing money to politicians is very standard and accepted for a New York City developer.”
McCain refused to meet with most visitors for fear of being used as a puppet by the North Vietnamese. But back in the United States, Trump was too eager to manipulate the press.
“At one point, when I was hyping my plans to the press but in reality getting nowhere, a big New York real estate guy told one of my close friends. ‘Trump has a great line of s—, but where are the bricks and mortar?’” he wrote. “I remember being outraged when I heard that.” (Expletive deleted by The Post, not by Trump.)
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.
It was March 14, 1973. McCain arrived back in the United States a physically broken man, but also a hero.
That word has yet to be applied to Trump.
That same year, the Department of Justice slapped the Trump Organization with a major discrimination suit for violating the Fair Housing Act.
“The Government contended that Trump Management had refused to rent or negotiate rentals ‘because of race and color,”’ according to the New York Times. “It also charged that the company had required different rental terms and conditions because of race and that it had misrepresented to blacks that apartments were not available.”
Trump at first resisted signing a consent decree, according to the Times. He hired his friend, Roy Cohn, the lawyer and former right-hand man to U.S. Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin. “Mr. Trump said he would not sign such a decree because it would be unfair to his other tenants,” the Times reported. “He also said that if he allowed welfare clients into his apartments … there would be a massive fleeing from the city of not only our tenants but the communities as a whole.”
But ultimately the company came to terms with the government.
Trump would weather the scandal, of course, and go on to build his fortune to its present day tally of $4 billion.
McCain, in contrast, received a Silver Star, Bronze Star, Purple Heart and Distinguished Flying Cross. He would become a U.S. senator and run for president.
Whether Trump can triumph where McCain came up short remains to be seen.
Guesser: I get your premise McCain good guy Trump bad guy. your passionate about it & researched it well
& alot of what you posted jives with my recollections about Trump. Here is what I know, from 66 to 71 I
hit the NY scene bar scene centered around 64th & 1st & of all the people I met there the I enjoyed Trumps
company the most. We double dated a few times & he was a little crass with the waiters at the eateries.
One time I came into Maxwell's and he gave me the # of a woman he knew who he couldn't date, to close to
someone he was dating, he said she was a 10 and that was the only time I ever allowed myself to get fix up.
Went tp Ranger games together his tickets, boxing matches together at the old garden my tickets. A lot of fun times.
I got married in 1971 someone I met a Maxwell's Plum i was 28 and time to move on, and I was glad of it.
Anyway your post talks about Trymp at Studio 54 when I gues the in crowd moved away from the Maxwell 1st ave
area I was gone by that time but from what I heard of that scene with all the drugs & all I am surprised Trump
flourished there also, the guy never drank or smoked.
Talking about who are the heroes. At my highschool graduation the principal mentioned 3 of us who were
going to prestigious schools. Our QB & Wingback were in the top 10 of 250 gradewise & I was 70th of 250
7 played End. This is important one went into the Navy Rotc & was shot down like McCain over Viet Nam skies,
later imprisioned in the Hanoi Hilton, another went to the Naval Academy and after graduation while engaged
was commissioned on a nuclear submarine and at 23 stayed under water for 6 months. After graduation
I joined the National Guard in 66 and though never sent to Nam was activated four days to quell the Newark Riots
in 1967. In my mind we all fullfilled our patriotic duties but were not heroes. I f one was I'd say staying under
water in a nuclear sub was the most heroic. We had out 50th reunion a few years ago & I'm the only one still
around!
& alot of what you posted jives with my recollections about Trump. Here is what I know, from 66 to 71 I
hit the NY scene bar scene centered around 64th & 1st & of all the people I met there the I enjoyed Trumps
company the most. We double dated a few times & he was a little crass with the waiters at the eateries.
One time I came into Maxwell's and he gave me the # of a woman he knew who he couldn't date, to close to
someone he was dating, he said she was a 10 and that was the only time I ever allowed myself to get fix up.
Went tp Ranger games together his tickets, boxing matches together at the old garden my tickets. A lot of fun times.
I got married in 1971 someone I met a Maxwell's Plum i was 28 and time to move on, and I was glad of it.
Anyway your post talks about Trymp at Studio 54 when I gues the in crowd moved away from the Maxwell 1st ave
area I was gone by that time but from what I heard of that scene with all the drugs & all I am surprised Trump
flourished there also, the guy never drank or smoked.
Talking about who are the heroes. At my highschool graduation the principal mentioned 3 of us who were
going to prestigious schools. Our QB & Wingback were in the top 10 of 250 gradewise & I was 70th of 250
7 played End. This is important one went into the Navy Rotc & was shot down like McCain over Viet Nam skies,
later imprisioned in the Hanoi Hilton, another went to the Naval Academy and after graduation while engaged
was commissioned on a nuclear submarine and at 23 stayed under water for 6 months. After graduation
I joined the National Guard in 66 and though never sent to Nam was activated four days to quell the Newark Riots
in 1967. In my mind we all fullfilled our patriotic duties but were not heroes. I f one was I'd say staying under
water in a nuclear sub was the most heroic. We had out 50th reunion a few years ago & I'm the only one still
around!
...congratsneverbend, Trump needs to apologize for the statement he made to McCain. Pick up the phone and call John, then publicly apologize to all surviving American prisoners of war
John McCain ;
'McCain himself has called for Trump to apologize to the families of prisoner of war victims
'I think the point here is that there are so many men and women who served and sacrificed - and happened to be held prisoner - and to denigrate in any way that service, I think, is offensive to veterans.
'The best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward'.
the fact that he refuses to apologize , doesnt see the bigger picture is shocking. Keep in mind Mr Trump deferred 4 times, yet has the audacity to throw stones at those that courageously served. Sad.
neverbend, Trump needs to apologize for the statement he made to McCain. Pick up the phone and call John, then publicly apologize to all surviving American prisoners of war
John McCain ;
'McCain himself has called for Trump to apologize to the families of prisoner of war victims
'I think the point here is that there are so many men and women who served and sacrificed - and happened to be held prisoner - and to denigrate in any way that service, I think, is offensive to veterans.
'The best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward'.
the fact that he refuses to apologize , doesnt see the bigger picture is shocking. Keep in mind Mr Trump deferred 4 times, yet has the audacity to throw stones at those that courageously served. Sad.
This, in spades. NB, I don't think Trump's a bad guy necessarily, and I don't particularly like the new version of McCain after 2000, but that's irrelevant. What Donald said was an affront to McCain and all POW's. I agree with at least the modern version of Trump, as opposed to when you knew him, about the folly of the Vietnam War, but that's irrelevant too.
Trump has a SEVERE character weakness, the inability to ever admit he's wrong publicly and/or apologize publicly, but instead doubles down and worse. His mouth gets ahead of his brain. I get that some people like that about him, and it's an attractive roguish thing, but that's not what a POTUS or perspective POTUS needs to do. It's is a strength to admit your own errors, and apologize to those you might have offended or effected by them, not a weakness.
In comparison, I think O'Malley was right to apologize to those people who he might have offended with his statement, even if he didn't think he said anything wrong(he didn't, IMO, but I'm not who he offended). He was in their house, he offended, apologize, and move on. That's what a leader that can work with people does.
Ted Cruz refuses to appease the gaystream media:
“You know I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else,” Cruz told reporters, according to CNN. “I’m not going to do it.”
:aktion033
Smart, smart guy that Ted Cruz.
“You know I recognize that folks in the press love to see Republican-on-Republican violence, and so you want me to say something bad about Donald Trump, or bad about John McCain or bad about anyone else,” Cruz told reporters, according to CNN. “I’m not going to do it.”
:aktion033
Smart, smart guy that Ted Cruz.
apologize for what? He called him a hero 4X
neverbend, Trump needs to apologize for the statement he made to McCain. Pick up the phone and call John, then publicly apologize to all surviving American prisoners of war
John McCain ;
'McCain himself has called for Trump to apologize to the families of prisoner of war victims
'I think the point here is that there are so many men and women who served and sacrificed - and happened to be held prisoner - and to denigrate in any way that service, I think, is offensive to veterans.
'The best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward'.
the fact that he refuses to apologize , doesnt see the bigger picture is shocking. Keep in mind Mr Trump deferred 4 times, yet has the audacity to throw stones at those that courageously served. Sad.
You should only apologize if you have something to apologize for.
If anyone should apologize it should be McCain. First for calling the 15,000 people "crazies" that attended Trump's speech and secondly (and more importantly), the fact that he has failed the Vets in his country with the poor job he is doing.
Is McCain a war hero? Yes but only because he was a prisoner of war. Nothing in his military career suggests he was exemplary.
He has since been a politician for over 30 years.
Other than McCain–Feingold there is no significant legislation he can claim.
Like all career politicians he has done a lot of talking but the results has been mediocre at best.
It would have been interesting to see how his life would have evolved if he hadn’t spent 5 years in the Hanoi Hilton and then married into money.
Time has come for him to retire. He is the Republicans answer to Harry Reid.
He has since been a politician for over 30 years.
Other than McCain–Feingold there is no significant legislation he can claim.
Like all career politicians he has done a lot of talking but the results has been mediocre at best.
It would have been interesting to see how his life would have evolved if he hadn’t spent 5 years in the Hanoi Hilton and then married into money.
Time has come for him to retire. He is the Republicans answer to Harry Reid.
