NYTimes | When
Hollywood wants us to understand a character, it gives us a Rosebud —
an event or an object, like the wooden sled in “Citizen Kane,” that
reflects the character’s essence. Mr. Trump’s Rosebud moment, I learned
recently from a story on WNYC, happened one day in 1964, when he accompanied his father to the opening ceremony of the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge.
As Mr. Trump recounted the story
for Howard Blum in The New York Times in 1980: “The rain was coming
down for hours … But all I’m thinking about is that all these
politicians who opposed the bridge are being applauded.” Even as a
wet-behind-the-ears kid, he wanted the reporter to understand, he
couldn’t abide the hypocrisy of big shots. “In a corner,” he continued,
“just standing there in the rain, is this man, this 85-year-old engineer
who came from Sweden and designed this bridge, who poured his heart
into it, and nobody even mentioned his name.
“I
realized then and there,” the budding real estate mogul and future
Republican front-runner concluded, “that if you let people treat you how
they want, you’ll be made a fool. I realized then and there something I
would never forget: I don’t want to be made anybody’s sucker.”
Who
was that sad sack in the corner? It’s worth asking, because the Trump
Rosebud moment reveals more than he perhaps realizes — and not just
about himself, but about the people who are swelling his poll numbers.
Othmar H. Ammann
was born in Switzerland, not Sweden, in 1879, and came to the United
States in 1904. He proposed, designed and oversaw the construction of
the George Washington Bridge and was closely involved with others around
the country, the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco among them. As the
chief engineer of the Port Authority of New York and the Triborough
Bridge and Tunnel Authority, he oversaw the building of the Lincoln
Tunnel, the Outerbridge Crossing and the Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck,
Triborough, Bayonne and Goethals Bridges.
0 comments:
Post a Comment