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(I.T.) I don't suppose you have any interest in Armand Hammer's ownership of the Gore family? Of course not.

(Bouncer) Set it out...I'm here...ain't running away from you. You picked this fight, now let's have a go.

You flatter yourself.

But, hey, we live to serve. Here's an extract from Gore: A Political Life by Bob Zelnick.

As you'll recall, Zelnick, a 21-year veteran reporter for ABC News, was summarily fired by fair-minded, caring liberals such as yourself for writing a book seen as insufficiently complimentary to Prince Albert.

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But if Albert Gore, Sr., was on the side of economic growth, some of his business acquaintances were less than savory. One of them was Armand Hammer, an entrepreneur extraordinaire with a particular talent for buying or otherwise ingratiating himself to those who could help him befriend top government decision-makers. During the early part of his career, Hammer also served as an agent of the infant Soviet Union. In his extraordinary account, Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer, Edward Jay Epstein documents how, during the 1920s and 1930s, Hammer—who lived in Moscow for many years—took his orders from the regimes of Lenin and Stalin. During a period when the Soviets had few diplomatic missions in the West, Hammer began by serving as a courier for the Soviets under the cover of normal business travels to and from Moscow. Hammer then graduated to more sophisticated assignments. He used his Allied American Corporation to launder Soviet funds, helped recruit Soviet spies and position them in the U.S. government, and became a key link in operations that financed Soviet espionage in London and New York. In what was perhaps his shabbiest venture, Hammer—working closely with Stalin's young aide Anastas Mikoyan—helped the Soviets sell communist-confiscated art and jewelry to the West by falsely proclaiming the items were "Romanoff treasure." In perhaps his ugliest venture, Hammer used his firm to provide a cover for the shipment of machine tools to the Soviet Union, which were then employed to help Germany circumvent Treaty of Versailles restrictions on military aircraft and weapons manufacture.

All of this was well known to the FBI, whose director, J. Edgar Hoover, had kept track of Hammer for decades. But Hoover had some of Washington's most sensitive political antenna and was wary of moving publicly against Hammer so long as he appeared "protected" by powerful members of the executive or legislative branches. Hammer had enjoyed easy access to the Roosevelt Administration, but the Truman Administration, viewing him as a possible Soviet agent, kept him at arm's length, as did the Eisenhower Administration. So he developed a core of Capitol Hill allies led by Gore, Representative James Roosevelt, and Senator Styles Bridges, a conservative New Hampshire Republican. Thus insulated from FBI interference, he went about building his economic empire.

Through the 1950s and well into the following decade, Hammer counted on Gore as his principal link to the Democratic congressional leadership, and to defend his economic interests. In the early 1950s, for example, when Hammer's United Distilleries sought to lease the Army's ordnance works in Morgantown, West Virginia, in order to develop a fertilizer manufacturing operation, Hammer relied on Senator Bridges to run interference for him. When the magazine Reporter exposed Bridges' intervention, noting the irony of his alliance with a former Soviet booster, Gore took the Senate floor to defend both Hammer and Bridges. "This private citizen has had aspersions cast upon his character and his patriotism," he declared. "I could see no reason for that except as a means of attacking the senior senator from New Hampshire."

In the late 1950s Gore introduced Hammer to Senator John F. Kennedy. Hammer contributed to Kennedy's 1960 campaign and attended his inauguration as Gore's guest. During the following weeks, Kennedy discussed with Gore a report that the Soviets were employing slave labor to produce crabmeat for export. Kennedy felt he had no choice but to ban the commodity, and the controversy had become a minor irritant to already troubled U.S.-Soviet relations. Gore suggested Kennedy send Hammer to the Soviet Union to investigate the claim, which, given Hammer's background, was rather like dispatching a fox to investigate the disappearance of chickens. Nonetheless, less than a month after he took office, Kennedy had Commerce Secretary Luther Hodges name Hammer a roving economic emissary and organize an itinerary that included stops in the United Kingdom, France, West Germany, Italy, Libya, India, Japan, and the Soviet Union.

Gore wrote a letter "introducing" Hammer to Soviet leader Nikita Khruschev's deputy, Anastas Mikoyan, who had been Hammer's handler on the Romanoff art and jewelry scam three decades earlier. Mikoyan set up a February 17, 1961, meeting between Hammer and Khruschev, at which Khruschev quickly moved beyond the crabmeat issue to the general desirability of expanding trade between the two countries.

Upon his return to Washington, Hammer held meetings with both Senator Gore and Secretary Hodges. To no one's surprise, he reported finding no evidence that slave labor was used in the production of Soviet crabmeat. Even hardline Secretary of State Dean Rusk supported lifting the ban as a "tangible demonstration of our desire to improve United States-Soviet relations." Kennedy accepted the advice. In a March 17, 1961, letter to Hammer informing him of the action, Gore stated, "In the broad spectrum of the struggle to find a way for the East and the West to live in peace on one planet, this may not appear to some as a major item, but when one considers the dangers to mankind involved in war today, any step that moves toward better understanding and peaceful relations is important." By then, however, Hammer had all but forgotten the crabmeat controversy amid plans to export to the Soviet Union the machinery and know-how to begin production of massive amounts of phosphate fertilizer.

Al Gore, Sr., profited handsomely from his association with Hammer, even while still in office. By 1950 Hammer had ingratiated himself to Gore by taking him as a partner in his cattle-breeding business. He also supplied Gore with Christmas gifts of expensive silver. During the years that followed, Gore's herd of Aberdeen-Angus cattle was enriched by several bulls and heifers produced by Hammer's stock.

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Through the 1950s and well into the following decade, Hammer counted on Gore as his principal link to the Democratic congressional leadership, and to defend his economic interests.

Did someone mention the word "treason"?