Finder, Joseph. Red Carpet. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston (A New Republic Book), 1983. 372 pages.

This book began in 1981, when author Joseph Finder, a graduate student at Harvard's Russian Research Center, interviewed Armand Hammer, who was then 83 years old. After failing to bribe Finder's faculty advisor at Harvard to stop the project, Hammer tried to buy up as many copies as he could find. After this book was published, two biographies appeared on Hammer that are even more devastating (by Steve Weinberg and Edward Jay Epstein). Since both of these were already indexed in NameBase, this book was mainly of interest for the other aristocrats profiled by the author: W. Averell Harriman, Cyrus Eaton, Donald Kendall, and David Rockefeller.

Finder's point is that when big money was involved, both the U.S. and Russia overlooked their ideological differences, even at the height of the Cold War, and cooperated in the interests of higher profits. The Kremlin has always given distinguished U.S. millionaires access to the inner sanctum. From the other end, no one in Washington tells a Rockefeller or a Harriman what they can and cannot do. (Apparently the Cold War wasn't really a war at all. Sure, the little guy was expected to kill and be killed in Vietnam, and World War III nearly started more than once. And yes, the taxes we paid for all this excitement made the folks behind the U.S. defense industry richer, as the middle class went into decline. But it kept us busy and distracted.)
ISBN 0-03-060484-2

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