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If Al Gore Jr. ever runs for President, he'll have to answer some embarrassing questions about the source of his family's wealth.

"One of the minor mysteries of American politics has been the source of wealth for the family of Vice President Albert Gore Jr.," observes Joseph Goulden of Accuracy in Media. "When Gore's father was first elected to the House of Representatives in the late 1930s," Goulden continues, "he was an impecunious Tennessee school teacher who eked out extra dollars by playing fiddle at church weddings. But later, as a United States Senator, he lived in the plush Fairfax Hotel on Embassy Row in Washington, and sent his son, Al Jr., to the pricey St. Albans School, the haunt of kids from Social Register families."

In a recent issue of the Washington Inquirer, Goulden summarizes the contents of a new book called Dossier, written by investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein, which "shows that the senior Gore had a silent partner who for several decades insured that his pockets remained comfortably filled. He was Armand Hammer, the multi-millionaire businessman and oil promoter who apparently collected art and politicians with equal zeal." Goulden notes that Al Gore Sr. was "Hammer's designated door-opener in official Washington." The handsome compensation that Gore Sr. received for his services culminated in a half-a-million-dollars-a-year position with Armand Hammer's oil company, Occidental Petroleum. Al Gore Jr. picked up where his father left off and "put the family's Senate seat at Hammer's service."

Goulden describes Armand Hammer as "one of the odder, more odious characters of American business and politics, 'famous' chiefly because he was rich enough to promote his mammoth ego." He notes that Hammer's carefully and expensively crafted public persona was "that of a renegade oilman who made billions from Libyan oil, chummed around with politicians up to White House level, and adorned acres of galleries with paintings, some priceless, some fakes. Hammer's lawyers bedeviled honest journalists who tried to write otherwise."

Hammer's powerful influence on Al Gore Sr. and Jr. would have been bad enough had he been nothing more than an unscrupulous businessman. Like his father Julius, however, he was a lifelong Communist and a friend of the Soviet Union. "Some scattered hints that Hammer's ties with the USSR went beyond business friendship have surfaced over the years," says Goulden. Documents discovered in Soviet archives, however, leave no doubt that Hammer was "a man who bribed and cheated his way to great wealth -- and who started with Soviet gold."

Edward Jay Epstein's new book, Dossier, makes a compelling case that both Al Gore Sr. and Al Gore Jr. were the willing partners of a very powerful and very wealthy man, Armand Hammer, who was not loyal to the United States of America. A truly independent press would have exposed these connections decades ago, long before Al Gore Sr. and Jr. rose to their prestigious and influential positions.

The eulogies, encomiums and laurel wreaths have all been bestowed upon the carcass of one of America's most despicable turncoats, the late Al Gore Sr, father of the Vice-President, R.I.H (Rot in Hell).

The American media, true to form, suppressed the veritable Niagara of documentation on former Sen. Gore Sr.'s Communist service, corruption and the fact that since the 1950s he had been bought and paid for by the son of the founder of the Communist Party USA, Jewish financier Armand Hammer.

All of that was air-brushed out of the insipid greeting card obituaries for Gore which were issued by our "tough, investigative" and may I add, pro-Communist news media.

Earlier this year, this writer detailed the facts on Hammer, Gore Senior and Junior, in a special dossier compiled for our "Revisionist History" newsletter entitled, "Hammered" (U.S.$6.50 postpaid; overseas $9 US funds/bank. Order from Independent History, Box 849, Coeur d'Alene, Idaho 83816.

Here are additional facts:

Hammer owned Al Gore Senior lock, stock and whiskey barrel. Hammer kept Senator Gore Sr., as he liked to say, "in my back-pocket." When he said this, Hammer would touch his wallet and chuckle.

Throughout virtually the whole of his political career , until 1990 when Hammer died at age 92, Al Gore Senior and the Gore family depended on bribes, kick-backs and "salaries" from Hammer.

Hammer exploited his outright ownership of Gore Senior's political career as Congressman and later Senator and even became part of the Gores' intimate family life.

Gore Sr.'s Sugar-Daddy Hammer was an agent and accomplice of every Soviet leader from 1917 onward, from Lenin to Gorbachev. Hammer made his first millions in the 1920s, initially through the operation --with slave labor --of a Soviet asbestos mine, in the shafts of which the bodies of the murdered Imperial family of the Czar had been dumped.

In the early 1920s Hammer laundered money for Lenin and sold looted Russian art treasures in partnership with Mikoyan, to enrich himself and the Bolshevik regime.

In 1931 Hammer established a banking operation in Paris specifically to provide foreign exchange funds for Stalin.

Meanwhile, Hammer bribed and suborned elected officials at all levels of American life, from mayors to presidents.

Hammer first took control of Gore Sr. in the early 1950s when he was a struggling hick Congressman, putting him on the payroll of a cattle-breeding business which Hammer owned, thereby funneling Gore Sr. large sums. In return for the cattle money, Gore and other powerful legislators also feeding at the Hammer trough, suppressed an FBI investigation into Hammer's Communist espionage.

Later Gore Sr. defended Hammer on the floor of the Senate against allegations of bribery in obtaining government contracts (the allegations were true).

Vice-President Al Gore Junior's political career was launched and sponsored as a wholly owned subsidiary of Armand Hammer, from Gore's initial success as a politician until just two years before he assumed the vice-presidency in 1992. Gore Jr.'s wife Tipper had a personal relationship with the priapic Hammer, the details of which are still being investigated by yours truly. (I do know that she "hitched" rides from Europe to America on Hammer's private luxury jet).

In the 1960s, as chairman of the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Gore Sr. helped broker Hammer's lucrative oil deal with Libya, upon which Hammer's Occidental Petroleum Corporation would fatten handsomely.

After he was defeated in his last senate election contest, Gore Sr. was made a director of Hammer's Island Creek Coal corp. at an annual "salary" of one-half million dollars. In the 1980s Gore's "salary" rose to $750,000.

Most of the Left in America is convinced that a mighty McCarthyite anti-Communist apparatus was deeply entrenched in the U.S. government, only releasing its grip during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Almost all of the redoubtable "Commie fighters" from J. Edgar Hoover to Richard M. Nixon were engaged in an elaborate charade of anti-Communism, when in actuality they represented the government which had financed, nurtured and strengthened Communism and, with the defeat of Germany, then declared the Communists "The Enemy."

By this ruse, the military-industrial complex in the U.S., led by such huge multi-national corporations as General Electric, was able to reap profits beyond the dreams of avarice, from this staged enmity.

A case in point is Nixon. The "Commie-fighter" needed deep pockets to wage his Watergate wars. Armand Hammer, well-known to Nixon's intelligence team as Soviet Communism's "Capitalist Prince," needed credits from the US Export-Import Bank to follow through on a financial windfall he had devised for the Soviets by means of a billion dollar fertilizer deal.

At that point in the "Cold War", such credits were not officially granted for trade with the USSR. What Hammer wanted from Nixon was nothing less than a change in the law conferring Most Favored Nation trading status on the Soviets.

"Commie fighter" Nixon complied. Hammer received his $200 million EximBank credits and almost secured the MFN status for the Russians. The Soviet Communists were temporarily denied that victory when Nixon was forced to resign the presidency.

Nixon in turn received a Hammer slush fund for covert operations. In addition, Hammer distributed supplementary millions to Nixon allies including at least $100,000 to Maurice Stans, Sec'y of Commerce.

It was Hammer's money that Nixon had in mind when he informed Haldemen and Erlichman that a million dollars in cash was available to pay for their illegal acts.

When George Bush was waging his great White House "war on drugs" he was also receiving funds from Hammer to look the other way while Hammer set up the Shining Path Maoist guerrilla movement (yes, Hammer enjoyed easy access to China and taught Al Gore Junior the avenues of access to Bejing). Shining Path soon seized control of Peru's billion dollar cocaine traffic and split the proceeds with the Gores' Jewish Godfather.

But not a word of this was breathed during the funeral of "Sen. Whore," who was rendered America's saint by a media as prostituted as he was.

Just substitute Nazi for the word Communist in the preceding profile and imagine what kind of investigative digging, ringing denunciations and uproar would have been ensued in the media upon the passing of so effective and flagrant a Nazi operative. But Gore Sr.'s Communist operations are not an issue with our "free press."

Hoffman is a former reporter for the American Contemporary Radio Division of ABC News and the New York bureau of the Associated Press.

C-SPAN Booknotes Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer