[2] Called "Lenin's chosen capitalist" by the press, he was also known for his art collection and his close ties to the Soviet Union.

[3][4][5] Hammer's business interests around the world and his "citizen diplomacy" helped him cultivate a wide network of friends and associates.

[6][7][8] Julius Hammer came to the United States in 1875 and settled in the Bronx, where he ran a general medical practice and five drugstores.

[13] After the Lusk Committee supported the police raid of the Soviet Russian Government Bureau on June 12, 1919, Ludwig Martens escaped and went underground, often hiding at Hammer's home.

[14][15] Hammer said originally that his father had named him after a character, Armand Duval, in La Dame aux Camélias, a novel by Alexandre Dumas.

[17] On July 5, 1919, federal agents witnessed Marie Oganesoff (the 33-year-old Russian wife of a former tsarist diplomat) entering Julius's medical office located in a wing of his Bronx home.

[17] Oganesoff, "who had accumulated a life-threatening history of miscarriages, abortions, and poor health, was pregnant and wanted to terminate her pregnancy.

[17][19] While most historians (such as Beverly Gage[20] and Nigel West[21]) state that Julius had performed the abortion, an opposing position has been put forward by author Edward Jay Epstein, who in his book Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer puts forward the claim that it was Armand Hammer, then a medical student, rather than his father, who performed the abortion and his father Julius assumed the blame.

[24] After the Soviet Russian Government Bureau closed, Allied Drug's smuggling activities between the United States and Soviet Union ceased, which caused Allied Drug to gain enormous debts from storing large amounts of unpaid items in warehouses in New York and Riga.

[25] When his father was imprisoned, Hammer and his brother took Allied Drug, the family business, to new heights, reselling equipment they had bought at depressed prices at the end of World War I.

According to Hammer, his first business success was in 1919, manufacturing and selling a ginger extract, which legally contained high levels of alcohol.

[citation needed] While Julius was imprisoned, he sent Armand Hammer, who could not speak any Russian, to the Soviet Union to look after the affairs of Allied Drug and Chemical.

He has claimed that he originally intended to recoup $150,000 in debts for drugs shipped during the Allied intervention, but was soon moved by a capitalistic and philanthropic interest in selling wheat to the then-starving Russians.

[31][32] After leaving Columbia 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.

[33] Prior to his departure, he visited Charles Recht, Lenin's United States attorney that supported Soviet Russia's best interests in the United States and whose law office was in the same building that the former Soviet Russian Government Bureau had occupied, and Recht gave Hammer a package to deliver to Ludwig Martens in Moscow.

[34] During this first visit, Armand Hammer allowed the Cheka, the Soviet secret police who later became known as the KGB, to take control of Allied Drug and Chemical.

[37][38] 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, caviar, and jewelry expropriated by the Soviet state in exchange for a million bushels (27,216 tons) shipment of surplus American wheat.

[39] Before Lenin's death, Hammer negotiated the import of Fordson tractors into the USSR, which served a major role in agricultural mechanization in the country.

[43] Barmine states the party spent five million gold rubles on stationery supplies made in factories controlled by Julius Hammer and other concessionaires, making them rich.

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

[52] After returning to the US, Hammer entered into a diverse array of business, art, cultural, and humanitarian endeavors, including investing in various U.S. oil-production efforts.

In later years, he lobbied and traveled extensively at a 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.

[70] After Richard Nixon, as the first United States President to visit the Soviet Union, traveled to Moscow for a summit that ended on June 1, 1972, Hammer traveled to Moscow arriving July 14, 1972,[d] and, with Sargent Shriver as his legal advisor, negotiated the first trade agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union following Nixon's summit.

[81] Nixon encouraged the Export–Import Bank to finance in part the deal, valued at $20 billion over 20 years,[82][83][84] and fund the Soviet construction of four ammonia plants in the greater Volga region, and a pipeline connecting them to the port at Odessa.

[89] In August 1989, US President George H. W. Bush pardoned Hammer for the illegal contributions to aid Nixon's re-election in 1972.

Gore, who had a longtime close friendship with Hammer, became the head of the subsidiary Island Creek Coal Company, upon his election loss in the Senate in November 1970.

His personal donation forms the core of the permanent collection of the UCLA Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, California.

[115][116] It has been reported that Charles intended to make Hammer Prince William's godfather but was forced to abandon these plans as Princess Diana disliked the idea.

Hammer hungered for a Nobel Peace Prize, and he was repeatedly nominated for one, including by Menachem Begin,[119] but never won.

He is buried in Westwood Village Memorial Park Cemetery, across the street from the Occidental Petroleum headquarters on Wilshire Boulevard.