Word: hammered
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Food for Furs. Still, it would be grossly premature to count Hammer out, if only because his history of friendly dealings with Soviet authorities goes back half a century. The son of a Russian emigre, Hammer was educated at Columbia as a doctor but never practiced medicine; even as a student he spent most of his time helping to run his family's profitable drug-wholesaling business. He went to Russia in the 1920s, intending to set up a field hospital. But he quickly realized that the Russians needed food more than medicine and arranged to import grain from...
...Hammer succeeds, he will give a spectacular push to the movement toward greater trade between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. In particular, his version of a plan to import vast quantities of Siberian gas may eventually help relieve the American energy shortage. But a growing legion of skeptics among investment analysts and fellow businessmen will be astonished if Hammer can come back with any major agreement -and even more surprised if he can arrange the financing to carry out his part of a big deal. They note that Occidental, one of the growth wonders of the 1960s, already carries...
...Hammer's expeditions have been surrounded by the most extensive publicity to attend any talks between the Soviets and a U.S. businessman in years, no small amount of it generated by Hammer himself. In the West, he has given glowing descriptions of his negotiations; in Moscow, his aides have telephoned American newsmen with breathless accounts of his progress. His Soviet trips have won extremely rare recognition in Pravda and Izvestia, favorable editorials in the New York Times and the Washington Post, and a pair of red-white-and-blue enamel cuff links presented by President Nixon...
...date, though, even Hammer claims only one hard deal: an agreement to barter $40 million worth of U.S. machinery for Soviet nickel over the next five years. That works out to a not overly impressive $8,000,000 a year. The only exchange that he has already concluded involved neither money nor commercial products but art works. He donated a Goya portrait to the Hermitage museum in Leningrad and received in return an abstract painting by Kasimir Malevich, whose work is in such deep disfavor among Soviet officials that it has not been exhibited in more than 40 years...
Back in the U.S., Hammer went on to make more millions manufacturing beer barrels, distilling whisky and raising cattle. In 1956 he retired to California but got restless; the next year he bought control of Occidental, then a company with sales of only $274,000. Through a combination of luck, brass and shrewd management, he had built the company by 1970 into a behemoth earning $175 million on sales of more than $2 billion. Major factors in the rise: oil strikes in California and above all in Libya (one on land that Mobil Oil had abandoned because it produced nothing...