[1] Hammerschmidt served in the United States Army Air Corps during World War II.

In 1942, he joined the 3rd Combat Cargo Group of the U.S. Army Air Corps and served in the China-Burma-India theater until the end of the war in 1945.

Hammerschmidt received the Distinguished Flying Cross with three oak leaf clusters for his service in the war.

[citation needed] In the 1966 election, Hammerschmidt won the Republican nomination for the 3rd district and then defeated 11-term incumbent Democrat James William Trimble, by more than nine thousand votes.

[citation needed] Hammerschmidt became very popular in the 3rd district, even though most of its residents had never been represented by a Republican before; indeed, Democrats would hold most state and local offices well into the 1990s.

[5] Clinton had harshly criticized Hammerschmidt for being one of the few Republicans to stand by Richard Nixon in the wake of the Watergate scandal.

This election was one of only four in which Democrats received more than one-third of the vote against Hammerschmidt, the others being Hardy Croxton in 1968, Donald Poe in 1970, and former Clinton associate James McDougal in 1982.

[7] In 1978, Hammerschmidt faced weak opposition from the Hot Springs real estate broker William C. Mears and instead had the resources to help the Republican gubernatorial nominee, A. Lynn Lowe, a farmer from Texarkana, win in Boone County.