Continued:
About that same time, Hammer's 26-year-old-son, Julian, was charged with first-degree manslaughter after he shot an old Army drinking buddy, Bruce Whitlock, twice in the chest in Julian's Los Angeles apartment. Julian told police that he and Whitlock had quarreled about a $400 gambling debt. Armand Hammer spread bribe money around, and employed Rep. James Roosevelt as an intermediary. The eldest son of President Franklin Roosevelt, James Roosevelt had been eased out of the White House staff by his father, because he frequently intervened in politically sensitive cases and offered his influence to financial backers of the Democratic Party.
James Roosevelt informed Hammer that he was in deep financial trouble, requiring $2,500 for alimony payments and debts. He also asked and received $10,000 from Hammer for a partnership in a failing business he owned. Through Roosevelt's intervention, Hammer's bribes, reportedly amounting to $50,000, and the slick manipulations of his attorneys, the charges were dismissed against Julian.
Hammer was the guest of Sen. Albert Gore Sr. at the inauguration of President John F. Kennedy on Jan. 19, 1961. That evening, Hammer and Gore hoped to talk with the new president about Soviet President Nikita Khrushchev's proposal for "coexistence" with the West. However, the meeting never took place. Hammer had recently become chairman of Occidental Petroleum, then a financially strapped venture, and he allegedly skimmed millions from his third wife's substantial settlement from her former husband to keep Occidental afloat. After Kennedy and his White House aides rebuffed Hammer's bid to represent the U.S. at a meeting with Khrushchev in Moscow, Albert Gore Sr. approached Secretary of Commerce Luther Hodges and persuaded Hodges to allow Hammer travel to Russia under the Commerce Department's auspices.
That same year, Hammer also attempted to reinstate a variation of the fertilizer deal with Russia that had been shot down a decade before. This scheme was avidly supported by Rep. Roosevelt and Sen. Gore. The FBI learned about the deal from wiretaps on key Soviet agents.
This information was brought to the attention of William Sullivan, then the number-three man at the FBI. W.A. Brannigyn, special-agent-in-charge of the FBI's New York office, wrote Sullivan on Feb. 23, 1961, "Hammer has been described by a business associate as a loyal American but (is) unscrupulous and a type 'who would do business with devil if there was a profit in it.'" Brannigyn also wrote that because of the "political overtones" of Hammer's proposed deal, the U.S. should avoid any dealings with him.
Hammer's wholesale bribing of Libyan officials in the 1960s to obtain drilling and exportation rights for Occidental was credited by knowledgeable sources as having caused the overthrow of King Idris by Muammar Gaddafi, then only a 27-year-old sub-lieutenant in the Libyan army, in 1969. The year before that happened, Hammer and his third wife, Frances, and Gore Sr. had attended an extravagant affair in Libya staged by Hammer to honor the King Idris and his court. Occidental didn't fare all that well with Gaddafi.
Not long after Richard Nixon became president in 1969, Hammer began petitioning administration figures to normalize U.S./Soviet relations. According to a CIA memo, Hammer worked through an experienced KGB officer, Mikhail Bruk, to smooth the way for him to return to Moscow. Hammer announced at a press conference that he had concluded "a wide-ranging agreement" with the Soviets for his company. Occidental's stock value shot up 19 points before analysts determined that most of it was pie-in-the-sky. The CIA labeled the deal a stock swindle. CIA director Richard Helms sent Henry Kissinger, Nixon's national security adviser, a memo on Aug. 1, 1972, which included excerpts from the agency's voluminous files on Hammer and Russia in order to blackball Hammer's most recent Russian proposal.
"The financial community is skeptical about the worth of this agreement," Helms wrote.
Hammer donated $54,000 in laundered $100 bills to President Richard Nixon's reelection campaign during the spring of 1972. Watergate special prosecutors moved against him, and his attorney, Edward Bennett Williams, persuaded Hammer to plead guilty in 1975 to misdemeanor charges of making illegal campaign contributions. He was fined a mere $3,000 and put on probation, but not sent to prison. He immediately launched a crusade to have his guilty pleas set aside.
For the remaining years of his life, Hammer commuted back and forth to Moscow, failed several times in his attempt to wangle a Nobel Peace Prize and battled to keep his life as Soviet agent secret. He also continued to do business with Albert Gore Sr. -- and began an alliance with Gore's son, Al Jr.
By 1990 when Hammer died, Gore Sr. had been a full-time Hammer employee for 20 years after having lost his 1970 senatorial reelection bid. After Gore's defeat, Hammer put him on the Occidental board of directors and subsequently made him chairman of an Occidental subsidiary, Island Creek Coal Co., the third largest coal producer in America.
'Money in the bank'
Of all the deals and financial schemes that Sen. Albert Gore Sr., the father of the current presidential candidate, was involved in with Soviet agent and business mogul Armand Hammer, none was more tawdry than their bull-and-heifer breeding venture.
In 1950, with Hammer's encouragement and financial support, Gore began buying and breeding prize Aberdeen-Angus cattle in a big way for his farm outside Carthage, Tenn., which he was turning into a baronial estate. Gore's hometown paper, The Carthage Courier, contains stories during the 1950s and '60s of important politicians, lobbyists, sports figures, defense contractors and government vendors flocking to Tennessee to attend a Gore cattle auction. A former Gore senatorial office staffer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that many of the buyers never bothered to pick up their livestock after plunking down thousands of dollars for the animals.
Was this a bribe?
"Not in the strictest sense of the word," the former staffer said. "It was sleazy, something you would expect from Gene Talmadge (a flamboyant Depression-era political boss from Georgia). People weren't bribing Sen. Gore for any specific favor. They were putting money in the bank for the time when they needed a favor from him."
He added, "This was not the King Ranch. Gore wasn't even an especially good cattle farmer. These people (the buyers) wanted something for their money. The cattle trading wouldn't pass any kind of smell test."
He said that what happened on Gore's farm with the cattle was well known, but was a carefully guarded secret by the staff. What about Armand Hammer?
"He was a really sinister character, a gangster, and supposedly a Soviet agent," the former aide said.
Former Tennessee Gov. Ned McWherter, a close ally of the Gore family, told author Zelnick, "I've sold some Angus in my time too, but I never got the kind of prices for my cattle that the Gores got for theirs." For example, a 1963 sale grossed $85,675. Cattle and the sale of bull semen quickly surpassed the family's profits from growing tobacco. Al Gore Jr. first participated in one of his father's cattle auctions when he was 10 years old, selling a cow his father had given him to raise to a Virginia businessman for $751.
Gore Sr. and his family were embittered by his humiliating defeat by Rep. William Brock in 1970. The senior Gore, his son and their supporters would, from then on, solemnly swear that the senator had been beaten by the forces of darkness due to his championing of racial equality and his opposition to the war in Vietnam.
Actually, Gore had a spotty record at best on race relations, having voted against the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964. According to Washington author Joe Goulden, whose 1969 book, "Truth Is The First Casualty," is still required reading for students of the Vietnam war, Gore was a Johnny-come-lately to the peace movement.
"Gore was allowed to vote in absentia for the Tonkin Gulf Resolution while he was on the road campaigning for reelection. This resolution was used by President Lyndon Johnson as a basis for widely escalating the war. Gore didn't come out against the war until it became unpopular with the American people," Goulden said.
Many Tennesseans recall Al Gore Jr. in 1970 as being a vain man who had lost touch with his constituents. And to make matters even worse in that election, Gore appeared in a campaign commercial shortly before election day dressed as a country squire sitting astride a prancing white horse. To many voters, this was the height of arrogance in a state renowned for its folksy ways and populist heritage.
Shortly after his defeat, Gore was on an airliner flying between Nashville and Washington. Larry Bates, then a member of the Tennessee General Assembly, sat beside him.
"Sen. Gore was a very bitter man, who told me, 'I've served on the committees which handle taxes, and I know every loophole by heart. Since the voters don't want me anymore, I'm going to take my expertise and make some serious money for myself, my good friend Armand Hammer and Occidental Petroleum,'" Bates said. Bates is now a nationally syndicated radio talk show host based in Memphis.
Gore continued to serve as a buffer between Hammer and J. Edgar Hoover during the last two years of the FBI director's life. One of the first chores Gore undertook for Occidental was getting the long-term fuel contracts one of its subsidiaries, Island Creek Coal Co., had with the Tennessee Valley Authority, set aside and renegotiated for a higher price. Gore was just the man for the job, having treated the system that generates electrical power at often-inflated rates to seven southern states like a fiefdom since shortly after its inception in 1933.
Gore Sr., and later Gore Jr., routinely named appointees to TVA's board, influenced lucrative contracts and smoothed the way for campaign contributors who wanted permits for such things as building boat docks and homes along the Tennessee River, its tributaries and man-made waterways controlled by the massive utility and flood control agency. Hammer was so pleased by Gore's work on this project that he named him executive vice president and director of Island Creek Coal Co. in 1972. Island Creek remains TVA's top supplier of coal to this day.
Al Gore Sr. also was instrumental in papering over some of Island Creek's outstanding federal pollution complaints. Al Gore Jr. prospered through his father's camaraderie with Armand Hammer when the senior Gore purchased an 88-acre mineral-rich farm located just across the Caney Fork River from the Gore estate for $80,000. The former senator paid another $80,000 for the mineral rights and then resold everything at no profit to his son. Occidental then leased back the mineral rights for zinc, shelling out more than $450,000 in zinc royalty payments over the past 25 years.
When Gore Jr. first ran for Congress at age 28 in 1976, Armand Hammer was one of his biggest campaign contributors. According to Micah Morrison, writing in The Wall Street Journal, Hammer, his relatives and employees contributed to Gore Junior's successful 1990 bid for Senate reelection, and the Hammer family and business associates made donations up to the legal maximum in all of Gore's campaigns.
Gore Jr. attempted to repay Hammer by inviting him to attend official functions, such as President Ronald Reagan's inauguration in 1981. Gore's father had previously squired Hammer to five earlier inaugurations. Hammer had attended every presidential inauguration since Franklin Roosevelt's in 1933. Gore Jr. also invited Hammer to President George Bush's inauguration in 1990. It would be the last such ceremony Hammer attended before his death in December of that year.
Neil Lyndon, who formerly ghosted some of Armand Hammer's memoirs, wrote in London's Daily Telegraph newspaper after his boss's death that Gore Jr. regularly dined with Hammer, and that the young lawmaker and his wife, Tipper, frequently attended Hammer's lavish parties, often jetting around the country on Occidental's Boeing 727 private jet. The plane was sometimes used by Tipper during her crusade to outlaw violent and salacious music.
In 1988, during his abortive run for the presidency, the 39-year-old Gore again relied on the largesse of Armand Hammer. According to Zelnick, Gore became involved in the Illinois primary against Paul Simon, Jesse Jackson and Michael Dukakis and needed money that the banks wouldn't lend him. Hammer came through with the funds and personally called Simon, a popular native son, asking him to withdraw and endorse Gore in return for a cabinet level appointment if Gore were elected. Stunned, Simon angrily rejected the offer and won the election. Gore received only a tiny fraction of the vote.
The year before this occurred, Gore flew with Hammer to Moscow to meet with Mikhail Gorbachev. Hammer received a humanitarian award from the International Physicians Against Nuclear War. Gore spoke to the same group, advocating a cut in nuclear weapons. Once Gore and Hammer returned to the U.S., the newly-minted senator continued to laud his benefactor for his patriotism.
Gore invested in Occidental Petroleum. According to Alexander Cockburn writing in The Nation magazine, Gore hiked his investments up to $1 million this year. He also oversees the estimated $500,000 in Occidental stock his father willed to his family when the senior Gore died two years ago. The company has showered the Clinton, Gore and Democratic Party with $470,000 in campaign contributions since 1992.
Gore continued to do huge favors for Occidental even after his father's and Armand Hammer's deaths. He finagled to have Occidental receive 78 percent of the oil drilling rights in the once-sacrosanct Elk Hills National Petroleum Reserve outside Bakersfield, Calif., for $3.65 billion. Although the presumption had been that it would cost $4.50 a barrel to extract oil from Elk Hills, Occidental was soon extracting it at a wildly profitable $1.50 a barrel. This oil had been set aside for use by the Navy since 1912. This incursion tripled Occidental's U.S. petroleum reserves.
Even while protesting that he is a defender of the environment and advocate of preserving tropical rain forests, Gore has positioned himself on the side of Occidental Petroleum and the Los Angeles-based company's plans to drill on land near a Colombian Indian reservation. Earlier in his campaign, Gore was dogged by protesters upset about his position on this issue. He has steadfastly defended the right of the Columbian government to grant extensive drilling rights to Occidental which might uproot the U'wa people. The U'wa are deeply opposed to the despoliation of their ancient territory and have promised to starve themselves to death if the plan goes forward. There's a chance all the U.S. military hardware being funneled to Columbia might be used against the Indians if they continue to resist. Police using tear gas have already fought them after they blocked a rural highway near the eastern border with Venezuela to protest Occidental's plans.
Gore claims that as the custodian of his father's Occidental stock, his hands are tied.
"I have legal obligations as executor that are very stringent," Gore told the Associated Press. "If you can find anything wrong with that, please tell me." Asked if there was anything wrong with his and his father's lengthy relationship with Occidental and Armand Hammer, Gore replied, "There certainly is not."
This from a presidential candidate who regularly castigates his opponents, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, for their past associations with "big oil." |
