Oiling up to world leaders
Anthony Sampson
HAMMER: WITNESS TO HISTORY by Armand Hammer (with Neil Lyndon)
Simon & Schuster, £14.95
It must be the most extraordinary story of any living entrepreneur. After 88 years Armand Hammer can look back on a lifetime which began with making his first fortune while still a medical student, by selling alcoholic pharmaceuticals during prohibition; which went on to Russia after the revolution, where he sold Fords and bought furs, and built a pencil factory with Lenin's blessing; and which led on to new careers back in America, including collect- ing Russian works of art and selling them in department stores. By his mid-fifties Hammer had already made several fortunes; then he gambled in oil, and built up his most successful busi- ness of all, the Occidental company which became the eighth of the oil 'sisters'. He also renewed his links with the Soviets, visiting each successive leader concluding with Gorbachev. And he bought up his third and most ambitious art collection.
It is a weird and restless story, told as if Hammer was aboard his private airliner, Oxy 1 — ignoring frontiers, looking down on the world with an icy detachment, touching down only to talk to tycoons and heads of government. Ever since he met Lenin at the age of 23 — an encounter which changed his life -- Hammer has seen the world in terms of a few men at the top with whom he can do deals and exchange favours, as if it were merely an expansion of a Levantine bazaar. The bigger the fortune, the more important become the gifts and gestures. To buy the biggest fertiliser company, he gives its owner a white Rolls-Royce. To re-establish his relations with Moscow he buys some of Lenin's letters, and presents them to Brezhnev.
The continuity of his Moscow links apart from the long hiatus under Stalin — is staggering. Today Hammer is once again acting as a broker between Soviet power and American technology and money, as he did for Lenin 60 years ago. Slipping in and out between the embattled armies of governments and corporations, this wily middle-man, like a grinning imp, can still play his lifetime role, whispering `pssst . . wanna do a deal?'
`Throughout my many years of dealing with top politicians round the world,' he writes, 'I have usually found that the ones who are supposed to be prisoners of a rigid ideology are the most flexible and coolly pragmatic in their judgments. .
The most important section historically is probably the chapter which deals with his most lucrative coup, when he acquired oilfields from King Idris in Libya, and then came under heavy pressure from Gaddafi who compelled Hammer to concede far better terms for his oil. It was the Libyan's success in breaking the bargaining unity of the seven sisters which prepared the way for OPEC to take over control.
In telling his story about Libya Hammer quotes my own remark that he `had a combination of imagination and ruthless- ness that made him in some ways more disrupting to the sisters than Getty or Mattei'. He spells out his own ingenuity, and the blunders of the bigger companies, particularly Exxon, who refused to help out Hammer and thus hold a common front. But it was Hammer himself always a trader rather than a builder who provided the weakest link, and allowed first Gaddafi and then the other Arab oil states to divide and rule over the oil companies.
His impish instinct soon took him out of Libya, into the North Sea, where he saw the British companies as sleepy union- ridden bureaucrats who did not realise what they had discovered. He obtained the concession for the huge Piper field, sharing it with Getty and Roy Thomson; and incidentally making Thomson's biggest for- tune.
But he found the new oilfield 'a mare's nest of political complications and tangled in the cobwebs of age-old disputes between labour unions'. Tony Benn, who was then Minister for Energy, reminded him of the fanaticism of Trotsky, with his 'hard bright eyes' (like any good wheeler-dealer, Ham- mer always watches his opponent's eyes). But to Hammer Britain was just another province, to make another fortune and to move in and out of, picking up a friendship with Prince Charles and some art bargains on the way.
What was the real secret of Hammer's global money-making? The breezy fast- moving style of the book's co-author Neil Lyndon depicts a genial and brilliant oper- ator who saw needs and opportunities where bureaucrats were blind, and who charmed rulers and fellow-tycoons with his gifts and favours. His rivals suggest that his real secret was bribery, breaking the un- written rules of corporate conduct. Many of his associates found him simply inhuman and impossible.
Certainly his own account frequently lacks credibility: particularly the dialogue which makes all world leaders sound the same. 'Someone must break the ice', said Lenin, 'why don't you take this asbestos concession yourself?' Come immediately', Deng telexed from Peking to Los Angeles, `Bring as many people as you like'. Was that really how they put it, Dr Hammer?
But the fundamental secret is clear: he never for one moment lost sight of the pre-eminence of money. The book is punc- tuated with dollar signs: the paintings which he praises are never mentioned without reference to their increasing value.
Luckily, it is not a story which inspires envy. Though he was already rich at 21, he was never secure. As a boy he saw his father unjustly sentenced to Sing Sing for allegedly killing a patient. As a father he saw his son charged with manslaughter. His first wife Olga was bored by his constant business; his second wife Angela became an alcoholic. Only his third wife, a rich widow, made him happier, but hardly less restive. It is an extraordinary record of what money can — and cannot — achieve.
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