The future president was 17 years old. Blond hair, blue eyes, a strapping 6-foot-2 or 3. He wore a dapper military uniform: white-crowned cap emblazoned with a bald eagle, fully pressed blue uniform with badges and shiny buttons, pristine white gloves.
As the commanding officer of the drill team for the New York Military Academy, Donald John Trump stood on Fifth Avenue and 44th Street, the starting point of the Columbus Day Parade on Oct. 12, 1963.
The country was poised between the hope of the March on Washington, held 45 days prior, and the devastation of a presidential assassination in Dallas, 41 days ahead. It was a sunny afternoon, wind blowing out of the north, as the teenage Trump began marching uptown.
Thousands of spectators lined Fifth Avenue to watch the city honor the Italian explorer credited with “discovering” America in 1492. There was no talk of Indigenous Peoples’ Day, no beheading of statues, no commander in chief denouncing efforts to dismantle memorials to Confederate generals or presidents who enslaved people. There was no pandemic canceling Columbus Day parades across the country, including New York’s, which is being held virtually this year.
In Manhattan, Columbus stood tall at the southwest corner of Central Park, 14 feet of solid marble atop a 76-foot monument, and no one denounced him as a killer and a trader of enslaved people.
The parade’s theme — “Americans All” — celebrated the idea of a nation of immigrants.
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Trump’s own parents were part of that melting pot. Back when his mother was 17, Mary Anne MacLeod had set sail aboard the RMS Transylvania from Scotland for New York, coming to shore beneath the beacon of the Statue of Liberty. Not long after, she met Frederick Christ Trump, whose father had arrived in New York as a barber from Bavaria.
That America — the one in which Trump was coming of age — still retained its pre-Kennedy assassination, pre-Vietnam War protests innocence. Yes, there was a racial reckoning underway full of sit-ins and freedom rides. Many were stunned by the snarling dogs and fire hoses unleashed on civil rights protesters in Birmingham, Ala., in the spring of ’63 — a prelude to the Ku Klux Klan bombing of a church that killed four Black girls.
In August, a quarter-million people basked in the baritone brilliance of Martin Luther King Jr. at the Lincoln Memorial. The No. 1-selling nonfiction book in the country that week was James Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time.” Other bestsellers in 1963 hinted at other movements incubating in the culture: Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” and Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique.”
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Little of this registered for Trump in the segregated, all-male world of New York Military Academy. Founded in 1889 by Civil War veteran Charles Jefferson Wright, the academy was a pricey prep school with a military structure designed to transform unruly youngsters into disciplined young men. In 1959, Trump arrived as a 13-year-old hellion, privileged but positioned at the bottom of the school’s hierarchy.
Overseeing the academy’s caste system was the superintendent, Nathan Dingley III. Long before Trump surrounded himself in the White House with Michael Flynn, John F. Kelly, Jim Mattis and H.R. McMaster, the first general in his orbit was Dingley, a veteran of both World War I and World War II. He prided himself on running a school that claimed in Trump’s senior yearbook: “By providing a strong code of ethics, with its heart in the honor system, the academy imparts to the individual a strong sense of responsible citizenship. Because he develops an understanding of personal integrity the cadet is uniquely prepared to make his contribution to society.”
Cadets were hazed into submission. “From the day we arrived in military school as New Guys, we slammed our bodies against a wall whenever an Old Guy walked past,” remembered Ilan Fisher, who entered the academy with Trump in 1959 when they were eighth-graders, in a 2018 essay on WBUR. “We were ‘The scum of the earth’ and announced that to the world a dozen times each day.”
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By the fall of 1963, Trump’s class had climbed the ladder to the top. He had distinguished himself as a solid athlete on middling teams, the center halfback in soccer, the first baseman in baseball. He began the year as the captain of Company A but was replaced and moved out of the barracks, according to a 2016 Washington Post story, after “a freshman named Lee Ains complained of being hazed by a sergeant under Trump’s command.” Trump insisted in The Post story he had been “promoted” — and pointed to his subsequent leadership of the drill team as evidence.
Promotion or demotion, Trump did indeed lead the cadets past the riches of Rockefeller Center at 49th Street, and the grandeur of St. Patrick’s Cathedral at 51st, going up Fifth Avenue as part of the throng celebrating America.
No one knew what changes the winds held on that October afternoon. Trump still had much of his senior year in front of him, soccer games to play, a baseball season ahead. He would be saluted in his senior yearbook, the Shrapnel, with one of the seven superlatives for seniors. He wasn’t awarded “Best Sport,” “Full of Fun” or “Everybody’s Pal.” He wasn’t recognized as “Most Military,” or “Most Athletic,” or “Most Likely to Succeed.” What he won was perhaps the most coveted title at the academy: “Ladies Man.”
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At 56th Street, Trump marched past the elegant Bonwit Teller building, which featured scantily clad dancers in bas-relief nine stories up on the facade.
Years later, Trump purchased the building and demolished it to make way for Trump Tower. Before it was destroyed, the Metropolitan Museum of Art sought the friezes of the dancers for its collection but never got the chance. On June 6, 1980, the New York Times reported they were “smashed by jackhammers yesterday on the orders of a real estate developer.”
The story quoted John Barron, a vice president of the Trump Organization, claiming that independent appraisals determined the sculptures were “without artistic merit.” During the 2016 presidential campaign, The Post found several instances of John Barron speaking for the Trump organization — and revealed that the man’s real identity was Donald Trump.
Needing no alias, Trump descended his building’s golden escalator in 2015 and announced he was running for president.
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“Americans All” had given way to “America First.”
“The U.S. has become a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems,” warned Trump, who vowed to build a wall along the southern border and force Mexico to pay for it.
“When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. … They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
Trump concluded: “Sadly, the American Dream is dead. But if I get elected president, I will bring it back bigger and better and stronger than ever before, and we will make America great again. Thank you. Thank you very much.”
Whether standing at the bottom of a golden escalator, addressing supporters from the White House balcony or marching up Fifth Avenue, the man has always loved a spectacle.
Martin Dobrow is a professor of communications at Springfield College in Massachusetts.
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