Armand Hammer - Career

Career

After graduating from medical school, Hammer extended earlier entrepreneurial ventures with a successful business importing many goods from and exporting pharmaceuticals to the newly-formed Soviet Union, together with his younger brother Victor. According to Hammer, on his initial trip, he took $60,000 in medical supplies to aid in a typhus epidemic, and made a deal with Lenin for furs and caviars in exchange for a shipment of surplus American wheat. He moved to the USSR in the 1920s to oversee these operations, especially his large business manufacturing and exporting pens and pencils.

According to Alexander Barmine, who was assigned by the Central Committee to run the Mezhdunarodnaya Kniga company to compete with Hammer, the stationery concession was actually granted to Dr. Julius Hammer. According to Barmine the party spent five million gold rubles on stationery supplies made in factories controlled by Julius Hammer and other concessionaires making them rich. The Soviets were eventually able to duplicate certain items such as typewriter parts and pens and end those concessions but were never able to match the quality of Hammer's pencils so that concession became permanent according to Barmine.

In his 1983 book Red Carpet, author Joseph Finder discusses Hammer's "extensive involvement with Russia."

After returning to the U.S., Hammer entered into a diverse array of business, art, cultural, and humanitarian endeavors, including investing in various U.S. oil production efforts. These oil investments were later parlayed into control of Occidental Petroleum. Throughout his life he continued personal and business dealings with the Soviet Union, despite the Cold War. In later years he lobbied and traveled extensively at great personal expense, working for peace between the United States and the Communist countries of the world, including ferrying physicians and supplies into the Soviet Union to help Chernobyl survivors.

Politically, Hammer was a staunch supporter of the Republican party. He boosted Richard Nixon's presidential campaign with $54,000 in campaign contributions. He pled guilty on charges that one of these donations had been made illegally and received probation and a $3000 fine, but was later pardoned by Republican U.S. President George H. W. Bush.

He was a collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings. His personal donation forms the core of the permanent collection of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California. Together with his brother Victor, he was the owner of the famed "Hammer Galleries" in New York City.

Hammer was a philanthropist, supporting causes related to education, medicine, and the arts. Among his legacies is the Armand Hammer United World College of the American West (now generally called the UWC-USA, part of the United World Colleges). By the time of his death, Hammer had won the Soviet Union's Order of Friendship of Peoples, the U.S. National Medal of Arts (1987), France's Legion of Honor, Italy's Grand Order of Merit, Sweden's Royal Order of the Polar Star, Austria's Knight Commander's Cross, Pakistan's Hilal-i-Quaid-Azam Peace Award, Israel's Leadership Award, Venezuela's Order of Andrés Bello, Mexico's National Recognition Award, Bulgaria's Jubilee Medal, and Belgium's Order of the Crown. Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and was repeatedly nominated for one, including by Menachem Begin, but never won.

In 1986, Forbes Magazine estimated his net worth at $200 million.

Hammer made a guest appearance on a 1988 episode of The Cosby Show (as the grandfather of a friend of Theo Huxtable's who was suffering from cancer), saying that a cure for cancer was imminent.