Page 81 - Too Much and Never Enough - Mary L. Trump

CHAPTER SEVEN
Parallel Lines
When Freddy (in 1960) and Donald (in 1968) joined Trump Management, each had a similar expectation: to become his father’s right-hand man and
then succeed him. They had, at different times and in different ways, been groomed to fit the part, never lacking for funds to buy expensive clothes and luxury cars. The similarities ended there.
Freddy quickly found that his father was unwilling to make room for him or delegate him any but the most mundane tasks, a problem that came to a head at the height of the construction at Trump Village. Feeling trapped, unappreciated, and miserable, he left to find his success elsewhere. At age twenty-five, he was a professional pilot, flying 707s for TWA and supporting his young family. That would turn out to be the pinnacle of Freddy’s personal and professional life. At twenty-six and back at Trump Management, the chimerical chance for rehabilitation ostensibly offered to him at Steeplechase evaporated, and his prospects were at an end.
By 1971, my dad had been working for my grandfather, with the exception of his ten months as a pilot, for eleven years. Nonetheless, Fred promoted Donald, then only twenty-four, to the position of president of Trump Management. He’d been on the job for only three years and had very little experience and even fewer qualifications, but Fred didn’t seem to mind.
The truth was, Fred Trump didn’t need either one of his sons at Trump Management. He promoted himself to CEO, but nothing about his job description changed: he was a landlord. Fred hadn’t been a developer since the failure of Steeplechase six years earlier, so Donald’s role as president remained amorphous. In the early 1970s, with New York City on the brink