| abstract | - The most prominent member of the series' Ensemble Cast, Draper starts Season 1 as the head of Creative at Sterling Cooper, rises to junior partner, and flees the company to start Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce when Sterling Cooper is sold to McCann Erickson. Has a Secret Past (two of them, in a way).
* Abusive Parents: Don's father was an abusive drunk, and his wife, who only took Don in because she wanted a child and her own had all been stillbirths, clearly never liked him.
* A Father to His Men: A very distant, cold, 1960s-style father, but a father none-the-less.
* The Alcoholic: In Season 4. His nurse neighbor and Allison both call him a drunk.
* Alliterative Name
* Anti-Hero: Type IV
* Broken Ace
* Bumbling Dad: In an odd sort of way. He gives the overall impression of being well-meaning and loving, if clueless, which stands in sharp contrast to Betty's emotional and physical abuse of Sally. However, the later seasons are taking this apart. In the fourth, following his divorce, he starts forgetting when he has to take his kids, going on a date and leaving them with a sitter, or missing his weekend with them because he was on a two-day bender. The fifth season opener shows the increasing distance with his promise to take the kids to the Statue of Liberty, to which Sally responds, "You always say that, but we never do."
* Byronic Hero
* Casanova: Wherever Don Draper goes, beautiful women hit on him and Don is perfectly willing to take them up on it, despite being married. He becomes something more of a Casanova Wannabe in the fourth season. Now that he's available and hitting on everything that moves, he gets turned down at lot more (though his conquests are still legendary). At least until he starts getting his act together in The Summer Man.
* Chivalrous Pervert: In spite of his dickish tendencies, he has a problem with the other guys at the office being overtly crude and creepy around female employees. He sort of lampshades this tendency when he tells Peggy, "I have rules" about this kind of thing (meaning, particularly, hitting on/having relationships with women at work). His drunken seduction of Allison, his secretary in Season 4, unfortunately undermined this - becoming a deliberate signal of just how out of control Don's life has become.
* Cool Car: In order: 1959 Oldsmobile, 1960 Buick, 1961 Dodge, 1962 Cadillac, 1965 Cadillac.
* Deadpan Snarker
* Dead Person Impersonation: While serving in the Korean War, he accidentally caused a gas explosion that killed his commanding officer and wounded him. He switched their dog tags, used Don Draper's identity to desert, and pretended to be him to get away from his family and start his own life.
* Flat What: Don does these. A lot.
* Manipulative Bastard
* Morality Pet: Anna is his. He's not entirely a bad guy, but Anna is the only person in his life he doesn't on occasion act like a dick towards. Tellingly, she's also for a long time the only person who really knows who he is.
* Orphan's Ordeal
* Parental Abandonment: Don has abandoned his children on several occasions--his daughter Sally's birthday party where he just took off for several hours, missing the cake; his trip to California which lasted almost a month; and his blackout in Season 4, where he drank the whole weekend and forgot to come get his kids for their visit.
* Really Gets Around: He has a reputation.
* That Man Is Dead: The only time he acknowledges having been Dick Whitman is when Adam confronts him, and even then he does not directly confirm it. He does go by Dick when with Anna.
* His second wife Megan also knows his real name, and referred to him as it in "A Little Kiss."
* Sink or Swim Mentor: To Peggy.
* Son of a Whore: "You told me your mother died in childbirth. Mine did too. She was a prostitute. I don't know if my father paid her, but when she died, they brought me to him and his wife. And when I was ten years old, he died. He was a drunk, he got kicked in the face by a horse. She buried him and took up with some other man, and I was raised by those two sorry people."
* Unfortunate Names: Dick isn't a terribly unfortunate name in and of itself but in this case he got the name because his mother died in childbirth and her last words were "I'll cut his dick off".
* Dick Whitman, 'nuff said.
* Wouldn't Hurt a Child: Don is against the use of physical punishment in the raising of his kids, a very progressive attitude for his time. As he explains to Betty when questioned about this, his father used to beat him up all the time when he was a child, and all it lead to was him fantasizing about murdering him.
* Tall, Dark and Handsome: When you hear this phrase, Don Draper is the image that pops into your head.
* Your Cheating Heart: He's a serial adulterer.
* At times borders on Sympathetic Adulterer due to some of Betty's deep character flaws, but it's portrayed as a bad thing.
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