The Old-Boy Network.

The article focuses on the book "Hammer," by Armand Hammer and Neil Lyndon. Hammer has been writing and rewriting his life for at least a half-century; this is his second autobiography and the fourth official account of his life. A more telling alteration of the historical record concerns Hammer's first and only meeting with Lenin, in October 1921. Hammer has always suggested, whether indirectly or by omission, that he met Lenin alone, but Lenin's papers show that he was accompanied by Boris Reinstein, an influential Russian friend of his father's who knew Vladimir Ilych Lenin, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and who was, in 1921, a Comintern official in charge of relations with the United States.