Word: hammerism
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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...
...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...
Troubled Time. In the past two years Occidental has fallen into trouble. Production in Libya, the backbone of its operations, has been on a roller coaster and has never reached the mil-lion-barrels-a-day level that Hammer once forecast. The Libyan government ordered it cut from a high of 800,000 bbl. daily early in 1970 to 320,000 bbl. now. The revolutionary government of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi has been distressed by charges cited in a lawsuit filed in the U.S. that Occidental had won its concessions partly by f unneling money to officials of deposed King Idris...
...Hammer promises that the company will report a profit for 1972, though he refuses to even estimate how large. But Occidental's stock has dropped from a high of 55 in mid-1968 to 12% last week. Market analysts worry, among other things, about what will happen when the septuagenarian Hammer eventually leaves the scene. The company has gone through two presidents and a number of vice presidents in the past four years, and no clear successor seems ready to take over from Hammer, a boss who sometimes insists on deciding the most minute details. Clearly, Occidental could...