Did a Queens Foot Doctor Help Donald Trump Dodge the Vietnam Draft?

In the fall of 1968, a 22-year-old Donald Trump walked away from his military obligations with a medical exemption that few people questioned at the time. For five decades, the precise circumstances behind that exemption stayed buried, with Trump himself unable, or unwilling, to name the doctor who had signed off on it. What has since come to light reads less like a straightforward medical case and more like a quiet arrangement between two men who each had something the other needed.

A Nation at War, a Young Man on the Cusp of Service

By 1968, the Vietnam War had consumed American life in ways that were impossible to ignore. Draft boards across the country called up roughly 300,000 men that year alone, filling quotas without the structure of a lottery, which would not arrive until December 1969. Men without deferments or medical exemptions had very little standing between them and induction.

Trump had spent the preceding years protected by a series of education deferments, four in total, while he completed his studies at the University of Pennsylvania. When he graduated, that protection ended. Draft officials declared him available for service in July 1968, and with no academic cover left, his options had narrowed. Then came the diagnosis.

A 1-Y Classification and a Convenient Condition

In October 1968, records show, Trump received a 1-Y classification, a temporary medical exemption granted on the basis of bone spurs in both heels. Under that designation, he could only be called up in the event of a national emergency or a formal declaration of war. Neither happened during the Vietnam conflict. When the 1-Y classification was abolished in 1972, his status changed to 4-F, a permanent disqualification from service.

For years, Trump told a different version of events. He claimed it was ultimately a high lottery number that kept him out of the war. His Selective Service records, obtained from the National Archives, contradicted that account. He had already been medically exempt for more than a year before the draft lottery even began.

When pressed on the subject during a 2016 interview with the New York Times, Trump recalled that a doctor had provided him with a strong letter about the condition in his heels, which he presented to draft officials. Asked to name the doctor, he drew a blank. “You are talking a lot of years,” he said.

That answer satisfied no one. Critics had long found it difficult to accept that a young man described as athletic and physically capable had been suddenly rendered unfit for service by heel growths. Trump’s own inconsistencies over the years only fed the suspicion that something about the story did not add up. It would take another fifty years, and the recollections of two women from Queens, before a clearer picture began to form.

The Doctor Below the Building

Dr. Larry Braunstein practiced podiatry for decades out of a ground-floor office below Edgerton Apartments in Jamaica, Queens, one of dozens of residential buildings owned by Fred C. Trump during the 1960s. Patients came and went through a congested waiting room, and Braunstein became a familiar presence in the neighborhood, close enough to the Trump family orbit that his relationship with Fred Trump went well beyond landlord and tenant.

Braunstein died in 2007, leaving no medical records with his family related to Donald Trump. But his two daughters, Dr. Elysa Braunstein and Sharon Kessel, carried the story with them for years. When the New York Times contacted them in late 2018, they agreed to speak publicly for the first time.

Their account was direct. According to them, their father often told the story of how he had helped a young Donald Trump avoid the draft as a personal favor to Fred Trump. “I know it was a favor,” Elysa said. She added that her father had implied Trump did not have any foot ailment that would have qualified him for an exemption, though she was unsure whether Braunstein had even examined him at all.

No paper trail has emerged to confirm or contradict what the Braunstein daughters described. A doctor who later purchased Braunstein’s practice said he did not know any documents tied to Trump. Government draft records from that era are largely gone, according to the National Archives.

What Fred Trump Got, and What He Gave

Understanding why a podiatrist in Queens would put his professional reputation behind a questionable diagnosis requires looking at what he stood to gain. Braunstein ran his practice out of a building his landlord could make comfortable or difficult at will. Fred Trump, by all accounts, made it comfortable.

Elysa Braunstein explained the arrangement in plain terms. “What he got was access to Fred Trump. If there was anything wrong in the building, my dad would call, and Trump would take care of it immediately. That was the small favor that he got.”

Another doctor who had worked with Braunstein in the late 1990s, Dr. Alec Hochstein, recalled that Braunstein had spoken warmly of the Trumps over dinner, mentioning that they had been open to negotiating his rent and had kept him in the space at a rate he found acceptable. Hochstein said he had no recollection of any discussion about Trump’s military exemption.

Fred Trump’s willingness to accommodate a tenant who had done his son a considerable service fits the pattern of favors and financial support that investigators later traced through the Trump family. A New York Times investigation published in October 2018, just weeks before the Braunstein story broke, found that Donald Trump had received the equivalent of at least $413 million from his father’s real estate empire over the course of his life, including what amounted to $200,000 a year by the time he was three years old.

Trump had long maintained that his father played no role in keeping him out of Vietnam. In a 2014 interview with biographer Michael D’Antonio, he was explicit on the point. “I didn’t have power in those days. My father was a Brooklyn developer, so it wasn’t like today.” Whether he believed that or simply needed it to be true remains an open question.

A Second Name in the Story

Braunstein was not necessarily the only medical figure involved. His daughters said that when their father spoke about Trump’s exemption, he often brought up a colleague, Dr. Manny Weinstein, a fellow podiatrist and one of his closest friends. Weinstein, known to the Braunstein family as Uncle Manny, had graduated from podiatry school with Braunstein in New York in 1953 and maintained a practice in Brooklyn’s Bath Beach neighborhood.

What made Weinstein’s name significant was not just the friendship. City directories showed that Weinstein moved into Westminster Hall, a Trump-owned building in Brooklyn, in 1968, the same year Donald Trump received his exemption. He later lived in a second Trump property. His office sat near Shore Haven Apartments, another Trump building.

Weinstein died in 1995 and had no children. A podiatrist to whom he referred patients when he closed his practice in the late 1980s told the Times he had never heard of any connection between Weinstein and the Trumps. But the Braunstein daughters said one theory that had circulated within the family was that Weinstein may have had a specific connection to the draft process itself. Some private practitioners during that era did maintain ties to draft examination stations, and draft procedures allowed civilian specialists to review cases and make recommendations before a local board finalized a man’s classification.

Whether Weinstein played any active role, or simply represented a second link in a web of relationships between the Trump family and its medical tenants, has never been established.

How the Exemption Process Worked

Before induction, men underwent a physical exam overseen by military doctors. Private physicians could prepare documentation of any medical concerns, and men were permitted to bring that paperwork to their exams. A military medical officer would then review it, and in some cases, a civilian specialist attached to the exam station would weigh in before passing a recommendation to the local draft board, which made the final call on a man’s classification.

Multiple doctors, in other words, could have touched Trump’s case at various points. Braunstein may have supplied the original documentation. Weinstein may have facilitated its reception at a later stage. Or neither account may be entirely accurate. Without records, certainty is impossible.

A Favor That Grew Complicated

Elysa Braunstein said her father was, at first, proud of having helped a well-known figure in New York real estate. Larry Braunstein had served in the Navy during World War II, and his politics sat firmly on the Democratic side of the aisle. His daughters share those politics and said they hold no affection for Trump.

Over time, as Trump became a fixture in the tabloid pages and later a reality television star, Braunstein grew weary of the association, according to his daughters. A story he had once told with a degree of pride became something he carried more quietly.

What drew the Braunstein family out of silence was not loyalty to any political cause, they said, but a sense that the truth had been sitting in plain view for long enough. “It was family lore,” Elysa said. “It was something we would always discuss.”

The Questions That Remain

More than fifty years after that 1-Y classification was stamped onto Trump’s Selective Service file, no document has surfaced to prove the Braunstein account, and none has surfaced to disprove it. Trump, for his part, suggested in 2016 that he still had paperwork connected to the exemption. He did not produce it, and the White House declined to make him available for follow-up questions or to respond to written queries about his service record.

Bone spurs are real and can be painful. A diagnosis of that condition is not, on its face, implausible. What made Trump’s case draw scrutiny was not the diagnosis itself but the circumstances surrounding it: a tenant with professional obligations to a powerful landlord, an exemption that arrived with convenient timing, and a former president who could not remember the name of the doctor who had, by his own account, written him a very strong letter.

Whether it was medicine or a favor dressed up as medicine, the bone spur diagnosis kept Donald Trump out of Vietnam. Fifty years on, that may be the only part of the story anyone can say for certain.