In the fall of 1984, a few months after arriving at Random House as a senior editor, I was at lunch with the publishing house's proprietor, S. I. (Si) Newhouse (whose family owns Condé Nast, which publishes The New Yorker), and its C.E.O., Robert Bernstein, who had hired me away from the Washington Post. We were in the Bahamas, at a sales conference. Newhouse was ordinarily a quiet, phlegmatic man, I had been told, but on one subject he was very animated: Donald Trump. By then, Trump, who had recently completed the construction of a shimmering tower on Fifth Avenue, had been around for a decade. A profile in the Times, in 1976, had called him New York's “No. 1” real-estate promoter. “He is tall, lean and blond,” the story noted, “and he looks ever so much like Robert Redford.” More recently, at the suggestion of Roy Cohn, the notorious New York lawyer and fixer, who had been Newhouse's close friend since their days together at the Horace Mann School, Trump had appeared on the cover of GQ, a Condé Nast magazine. The issue had sold especially well.
This Trump fellow, Newhouse now said, was more than a comer. He had arrived. The word was that Newhouse was hands-off when it came to acquiring books, but on this occasion he emphatically was not. He said, “Let's do a book with Trump.” I had been brought to Random House to acquire and edit, among other things, high-profile books by public figures. Newhouse said that he would arrange a meeting with Trump, and it was decided that Howard Kaminsky, the new publisher of the Random House trade division, and I would accompany him. Kaminsky was a friend of Newhouse and was clearly his choice as publisher, not Bernstein's.
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