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Compiled by Luke Ford

Tape 1,1

Jingle. "Southern California. Living here, it all comes true. Let us share it all with you. On KABC, Talk Radio 79. Southern California, everything place on earth is near, you can see it all from here… With Dennis Prager."

Dennis Prager: I was listening to the words of that jingle. I have one of those minds that only picks up melodies and not words. Is Los Angeles emptier than New York? I cross the country almost every week to lecture. I get a chance to visit other cities. Last week, I picked up New York magazine, and compared it with Los Angeles magazine. And it was painful. There were actually articles of thought, of culture in New York magazine. While Los Angeles magazine makes the Yellow Pages look deep. Similarly, compare the Los Angeles Times magazine with the New York Times magazine. It's depressing.

I am here from 10PM to midnight Saturday and Sunday nights. I invite you to think a second time about the great issues of life. Bill Pearl, [an ardent hater of communism, a neoconservative] has one of the most stimulating shows on radio [before Dennis].

This morning, you may've caught my show on KTLA. I interviewed Vladimir Posner, an American raised communist who has lived in the Soviet Union most of his life. It was difficult for me to enter into a dialogue with the man whom I think represents the filthiest most barbaric regime on earth. I asked him if he saw a moral distinction between Hitler and Stalin. He said yes. I asked why, when Stalin murdered more, including the massive famine in the Ukraine that killed millions. Posner blamed the famine on the West for not supplying food.

That was all he had to do, was to tell a lie. Americans don't know enough, and they think that if you are charming, that is enough. It was depressing. People said to me, "that guy is slick and sharp." He may be slick and sharp, but he does not tell the truth. It's depressing that Americans fall for this nonsense because it is said with charm and a Brooklyn accent.

As Bill Pearl put it… Imagine a South African raised in Brooklyn received this much media attention as Posner.

It is not unbelievable. It is disgusting.

William F. Buckley was asked why he would not appear with Posner. WFB said he considered Posner the moral equivalent of Joseph Goebbels, Nazi propagandist. Therefore, I'd have to call him a paid liar… It wouldn't be conducive to civil dialogue.

Prager then moved on to date rape. According to a study at the University of South Dakota revealed that about 20% of the female students described themselves as victims of date rape. Our elite universities, these bastions of value free education, have men in them who are value free.

[If Prager gave this talk eight years later or more, he would voice his skepticism of the rape statistics as rape has been redefined to mean any sex the woman later regrets.]

Prager quoted a professor who said that a woman's most effective resistance to rape is active physical resistance, i.e. a kick in the groin. Negotiation usually does not work. Sometimes you have to be violent. This statement should be inscribed in the brains of everyone. "Negotiation simply does not ward off." Why we don't understand this with regard to Afghanistan… Apparently there are only individual rapists, not collective rapists.

Prager says that one of his ten biggest heroes is secular atheist, Sydney Hooks, a leftist who hated communists.

P. says that New York's Ethical Culture Society invited Sandanists Communist Ortega to speak, and they thought him a great guy. Why is it that even religious dummies are cognizant of the evils of communism, but the most intellectual secularists are bamboozled constantly by communists, like Stalin.

P. finds it depressing how few people challenge the way that they are raised. Everyone is fundamentalist in his own way… They don't like to change. I remember that the first time I voted Republican, I thought my hand would fall off.

When I lecture to elderly people, I tell them… that if they are not prepared to change, they are as good as dead. You are merely waiting for burial.

With all the '60s attitude of QUESTION AUTHORITY, do any of these folks question their views?

His main objection to liberalism is that it only hates the Right. No enemies on the left.

Benjamin Linder decided to help Third World people in Nicaragua…and died. He picked that country, not out of solidarity with the Third World, for there are 100 other such countries. He went to support Sandanists communists. He carried a Soviet Rifle, AK47 assault rifle, at the time of his death. Linder was in an area of Nicaragua that had seen 88 combat engagements over the past month. And you can still cry with his parents, but it was not victimization at the hand of Ronald Reagen.

In the long run, Nicaraguans will look at Linder with contempt. In the long run, those who implanted communism will be loathed.

I am writing a book… Why Don't All Good People Hate Communism… Half of the book delineates what communism does to people. And there is a chapter on boredom. That's why people drink so much. I don't drink. Not out of principle, I just don't care for liqour. But when I am in the Soviet Union, I run to the bottle. You can go mad, it is so boring. Communism is permanent humiliation.

Stalin killed more Ukrainians than Hitler killed Jews. 7-14 million Ukrainians were starved to death. Yet hardly anyone knows. They just know Vladimir Posner's happy face.

Unitarians don't stand for anything. Just openness.

P. discussed the Pope's desire to meet with the Austrian President Kurt Waldheim, an ex-Nazi. I see little wisdom in the Pope's move. Even secular governments, not known for their deep love of theology and morality, won't meet with Waldheim. The Western World is boycotting him. I was in Vienna as a member of the US delegation to the Helsinki Accords in November [1987]. And they asked me to meet with Waldheim. And it's not because I am a major American. They were down to the bottom of the barrel - Me.

It is the purpose of religion to be a moral light to the world. So one would hope that the leader of a world religion would be more sensitive to moral issues than secular governments.

Many say that it is a priest's job to meet with sinners, like Arafat and Waldheim. But the Pope has not announced that these men are sinners. And not with the cant that we are all sinners.

If the answer is that Austria is predominantly Catholic, that is a political, not a moral argument.

I see that the US Supreme Court has blasted creationism as a sham. I agree with the ruling. Teaching the literal Genesis story as science seems silly. I never learned from my rabbis that Genesis teaches geology, or that its seven day creation should be interpreted as seven 24-hour days. A plague on both houses. The attempt to teach religion as science is wrong, and the attempt to remove religion from school. I do not think that American children are better off because public schools can't post the TEN COMMANDMENTS.

Trying to teach creationism is a reaction against the Kulterkampf, culture war, against religion in public life. Unfortunately, it has been the extreme in the religious who have been most vociferously opposed. The religious liberals have been quiet.

Men and women have lots of tension. Female friends of mine tell me how single men act on dates. I am embarrassed as a man when I hear about male shenanigans, including raping on dates. Assuming that a date or two means sex, and the pressures to have sex. One man had his pants off. The woman rejected him. He replied, "this is why we men hate you women. You titillate us and then you don't deliver."

While this man is in need deep need of values, he is on to something. Men do get angry at women because of the constant titillation directed their way… I'm surprised by how in-flight pictures feature nudity…and how offensive this must be to some people, who did not get on the plane to see a naked lady, but rather to get from Newark to Miami.

Many women don't understand that it is their skin which most arouses men, not her degrees, her brilliance or her ability to comfort him when he is down.

I am not a prude. For all you know, I just returned from an orgy and will be attending another one after the show. I am not talking about sexual conduct. I am talking about the tension between men and women and how we can reduce it.

Tonight I gave money to two homeless men on Fairfax. Jewish Law forbids me to say no, if someone asks me for money. I show my four year old son how to put Love Your Neighbor into practice. The opening up of mental institutions seemed to create many of these homeless. I think homelessness is a terrible problem and I don't need the solution. I think society should demand that all able-bodied people work. People have to know that there consequences to their behavior.

My first love is not America. My first love is human decency.

Armand Hammer is a moral midget. Yes, he is trying to bridge the gap between us and Soviets. He has spent his lifetime trying to build the economy of the most barbaric country in history. At best, he was only out for profits.

People who support people who run gulags are morally inferior. It's wrong to do business with butchers. That's what the makers of Cyclon B and Mercedes did during WWII.

Why isn't he running to South Africa to establish business with them, and develop rapport?

The average citizen of the Soviet Union has fewer rights than the average citizen of South Africa. There are gradations of evil.

Dr. Rodney Jacobson writes: "Hammer shipped millions of bushels of grain in the early 1920's leveraging

everything he owned to stave off starvation (he was in his early 20's)...he

was in the country setting up a donated portable medical hospital to

provide relief for a suffering people... he owned a small U.S. based drug

company at the time. When the greater problem was starvation instead of

medical he did both.

"The west had pretty much shut off Lenin and presumably wished isolationism

to stall or cause the fall of the revolution.... His efforts in my book

qualifies as a human decent thing to do even if he eventually made money in

his efforts....In the 20's he ushered in capitalism there...he setup and

owned the largest soviet pencil factory and encouraged other business

endeavors

" The Gulags and other human atrocities were primarily started under Stalin.

The country and its outcome very well may have been different had Lenin

survived or Stalin had not come to power and squashed the budding

capitalism & freedoms.

"Hammer's early help did open business opportunities for him and opened many

diplomatic channels.... however with the rise of Stalin, Hammer eventually

left the country and did not restore the "relationship" til after Lenin's

demise... in the 70-80's he did substantial diplomatic efforts trying to

open communication with the communist and was significantly responsible for

breakthru's and communication. Contributing to avoiding WW3 and the end of

the cold war seems pretty responsible and worthwhile.

"The bum rap given to Hammer is odd and to my knowledge never substantiated

with fact.... he was pretty effective at making a buck however and was very

successful in many varied endeavors....from drugs(legal), imports, art,

cattle , booze and oil."

From the 12-30-96 New Republic Book Review of the book by Edward Jay Epstein:

Good riddance

By Joseph Finder

Dossier: The Secret History of Armand Hammer

by Edward Jay Epstein

(Random House, 418 pp., $30)

"The greatest humbug of all," wrote P.T. Barnum in 1865, is the man who believes--or pretends to believe--that everything and everybody are humbugs. We sometimes meet a person who professes that there is no virtue; that every man has his price, and every woman hers; that any statement from anybody is just as likely to be false as true and that the only way to decide which, is to consider whether truth or a lie was likely to have paid best in that particular case.... Poor fellow! He has exposed his own nakedness. Instead of showing that others are rotten inside, he has proved that he is.

Barnum's genius was to recognize how peculiarly American this type had come to be. In The Confidence-Man, written a few years earlier, Melville even implied that the success of the con man in America speaks well of America: a society that can be conned cannot be cynical. This was a little optimistic, at least about the century to come.

It is fitting that the greatest confidence man of the twentieth century emerged from its greatest political and philosophical conflict. Armand Hammer, industrialist and chairman of Occidental Petroleum, or Oxy, best known for his seven decades of dealings with the Soviet Union, died in 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He was, as is now confirmed by Edward Jay Epstein's book, a Soviet agent who secretly worked for the KGB in its various incarnations, laundered money for Soviet intelligence and the Comintern, and transformed Occidental Petroleum into a multibillion-dollar behemoth by means of lies and bribes. He was a charlatan and a thug who sprinkled around enough laundered money to persuade a gullible public that he was a "philanthropist" and a "humanitarian."

The obituaries that appeared on the front pages of newspapers around the country the morning after Hammer's death were his most breathtaking achievement. Virtually all of them could have been written in Hammer' s public-relations boiler room, a sizable and well funded arm of Oxy. Writing in The New York Times, Eric Pace eulogized Hammer, "who long sought peace between the United States and the Soviet Union and financed research for a cancer cure." According to The Washington Post, Hammer had "won world renown for his accomplishments in ... diplomacy and philanthropy." Time called him a "tireless spokesman for better U.S.- Soviet relations," while the Associated Press exalted him as a "tireless crusader for international peace who improved the human condition by investing millions in education, medicine and the arts." For The Boston Globe Hammer was a "tireless crusader for world peace," and Senator Edward Kennedy insisted that "we could not have ended the cold war without him." The Times of London recalled: "He was the man who singlehandedly helped ease the antagonism between Russia and America from the 1920s through to the late 1980s."

An obituary, of course, is not a genre of unvarnished truth-telling. (Alger Hiss's overly polite obituaries weren't nearly so nice, but he wasn't nearly so rich.) Who, indeed, wishes to speak ill of the newly dead? But, please, hold the agitprop. By the time of Hammer' s death, at least some of the truth about his life was available to any journalist who bothered to look for it. But our allegedly cynical press preferred the more appealing mythology that Hammer had laboriously created himself and which, by the time of his death, had spread like an oil slick.

James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's legendary chief of counterintelligence, told me in 1981 that Armand Hammer was an agent of Soviet intelligence. Angleton also believed, of course, that Henry Kissinger was a Soviet agent and that the Sino-Soviet split was a sham, so I listened with skepticism. His tip seemed quaint, a bit of cold war kitsch. But he had been watching Hammer since the late 1950s, and in 1963 his prize Soviet defector, Anatoly Golitsyn, had told him about one of the Soviets' most secret assets, known as "the Capitalist Prince." Golitsyn didn' t know the mole's real name, but he had the contours of a biography: son of an American millionaire, the Prince came to Russia on business in the 1920s, returned to the United States in the early 1930s, was reactivated in the late 1950s and left a son behind in Moscow who was used by the Soviets as leverage. At first Angleton suspected Averell Harriman, who had done some business in Russia in 1925 and was the son of a railroad tycoon, but Harriman otherwise didn't fit the profile. Angleton turned his attention to Hammer, who fit just about perfectly. (Or almost perfectly: it was Hammer's brother who had left a son behind in Moscow.) Angleton had access to a great deal of intelligence, but the Soviet archives would not be open for another decade, so he didn' t have it down cold. It turns out that he was right.

In the world of espionage, an agent or a case officer in deep cover must have what is called a legend, a plausible false identity and false occupation to conceal his true operational activities. The legend that Armand Hammer devised was so simple it was brilliant: he would pose as a businessman, a capitalist, a tycoon. The legend was ingenious because it was not a legend. It was true. And it nicely played upon the popular Manichean assumption that communists and capitalists differed not in degree but in kind, that they were the irreconcilable antitheses of modern history, that a man interested in making money just couldn' t be a communist. What better proof could there be of Hammer's true- blue status than the fortune he amassed? In truth, Armand Hammer was not a communist. His only overt political act seems to have been joining the Party (then the Socialist Labor Party) in 1916, as a high-school student--a fact that he concealed, and angrily denied, all his life. And there was nothing idealistic about this affiliation of his youth. Hammer worked secretly for the Soviet government because it was the family business, and because they buttered his bread. He was a Soviet agent, but out of expedience. He was certainly no lover of socialism, or of any principle. He seems to have had no political allegiances whatsoever.

"Only in his later years," recalled the Times of London, "did he shake off the suspicion ... that he was some kind of communist agent.... [Hammer] did not share his father's socialist sentiments. He was interested in making money, not building socialism." That obituarist never met Julius Hammer, Armand's father, for whom the phrase "Babbitt Bolshevik" seems to have been invented. Julius Hammer, to be fair, was a complex fellow, at once a genuinely committed socialist and a rather aggressive businessman. He was a rich man and a radical leftist, a friend and a supporter of Lenin, a founder of the Socialist Labor Party, which in 1919 became the American Communist Party. He was also a physician and the owner of a pharmaceutical company that was half-owned, and entirely controlled, by the Soviet Union.

He was the Party's financial angel. When the new Soviet government sent its first ambassador to the United States, long before the United States recognized the new state, Julius paid the unofficial embassy' s rent and became its financial adviser. When Julius's first child was born in 1898, he named him Armand, for the arm-and-hammer symbol of the Socialist Labor Party. Julius was fervently committed to building the great locomotive of Soviet communism, so long as he didn't have to get engine grease under his manicured fingernails. He and his family lived in New York with two full-time servants and a chauffeur. His socialist comrades, including Bertram Wolfe and Jay Lovestone, regarded Julius Hammer with mingled awe and contempt. In 1921, when Julius Hammer was imprisoned for a botched abortion (which, Epstein maintains, Armand performed while in medical school), his 23-year-old son was sent to Moscow in his father's stead to launch a new phase of the family's Russian operations, a mining business in the Urals. Never mind that none of the Hammers knew the first thing about mining. Lenin' s idea was that if American capitalists could show the world how much money they were making in Russia, the rest of the greedy capitalists would follow, and Western governments would drop their onerous trade restrictions against the Soviets. It didn't matter if the mine made money or not. It was just for show. "Let it be a concession," Lenin instructed, "even if a fictitious one." It was "important politically."

But there was more to this hoax than politics. Lenin summoned Armand Hammer to the Kremlin to talk business, and then informed him that the project would be controlled by the Soviet government, under the direct supervision of Feliks Dzerzhinski, the head of the Soviet secret police. Why? Because the other purpose of the business was to create a shell company, including a banking operation in New York City, to transfer money back and forth between New York and Moscow. Armand Hammer's business venture was to be used as an illegal financial conduit to fund Soviet activities, including espionage, in the United States. This was so important to Lenin that the very last message he sent Stalin, marked "urgent" and "secret," was about the Hammers, whom he ordered to be given "particular support."

Epstein is not the first to reveal that Armand Hammer laundered money for the Soviet government. In 1995, Harvey Klehr and John Haynes, in The Secret World of American Communism, published Comintern documents showing payments from the Comintern directly to Hammer in Berlin. But Epstein's documentation of this subject is by far the most complete. In his research in the Soviet archives, he uncovered letters between the Hammers and Trotsky (in one, marked "absolutely confidential," Trotsky orders the use of Armand Hammer as a Soviet "scout and business propagandist"), proving clandestine money transfers to the Communist Party in New York, laundered by the Hammers and thus untraceable. Epstein has also obtained definitive proof that the Hammers secretly channeled money to agents of the OGPU (a forerunner of the KGB) in the United States, and to clandestine Soviet organizations in London and Berlin as well. Their money-laundering operation was so mammoth that it was directly supervised by Genrikh Yagoda, the deputy chairman of the ogpu. Epstein also establishes for the first time that the Hammers were used as conduits for money from Moscow to set up Soviet espionage operations in the United States.

Communism was good to Armand Hammer and his family. He, his parents and his two brothers lived in Moscow in high style for a decade. (Julius Hammer was released from prison in 1923 and arrived in Moscow in time to celebrate May Day.) Their mine in the Urals was losing money at the rate of $20,000 a month--all their Russian businesses lost money- -but the Soviet government provided them with a thirty-room mansion and eight full-time servants and two chauffeurs. They were constantly in debt, and yet the Russians allowed them to live large while ordinary Muscovites starved. Since the enterprise was designed in part for show, and in part to channel funds, the Hammers were not expected to make any money. Still, it was important for the Hammers to maintain the illusion that they made a fortune there. Ensconced in baronial splendor in Moscow, Julius shunned all American communists who came to visit: the family had to keep up the appearance of being wholesome and unambiguous capitalists. They made a point of entertaining every celebrity who came to visit Moscow, among them Will Rogers, H.G. Wells, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks and Gene Tunney.

Armand Hammer discovered early that American journalists and politicians prefer the "cynical" explanation to the complicated truth. Thus, on his visits back to the United States, he posed as a ruthless capitalist exploiting the Communists' weakness, a charade that he kept up all his life. In 1921 he gathered prominent businessmen at the Commodore Hotel in New York, passed around a letter from Lenin and told the panting bunch that Lenin had confided to him he was giving up on communism and wanted the capitalists to come in and run the Soviet economy.

By 1930, Hammer's father had ceded the family business to him. He left Russia, broke, to begin the next phase of his career: selling confiscated Russian art and other merchandise in the United States, including counterfeit Faberge eggs (Fauxberge, as they came to be known) that Armand himself faked, using signature stamps seized by the Soviets from the Faberge workshops. The goods, owned by the Soviets and sold by Hammer on commission, also included Torah scrolls looted from synagogues, costume jewelry, samovars ransacked from merchants' homes, as well as a lot of miscellaneous junk. Hammer billed it the "Romanoff treasure."