HAMMER: A FOLK TALE

By CALVIN TRILLIN

We still refer to Hammer by his last name alone, at his request. He thinks it makes him sound more sinister. In the late '60s, when Hammer and all of his friends liked to think of themselves as dangerous, you could make him glow by calling him the Hammer, as in "Do you think the Hammer's phone is tapped?"

Apparently it wasn't. Hammer was among the many Americans who had their self-image crushed by the Freedom of Information Act. In 1967 he requested his file, only to be informed that he didn't have an FBI file.

"It's no big deal," I told him at the time, in an effort to cheer him up. "Epstein said the only thing in his file was that he was observed dancing the kazatsky at a 50th-wedding-anniversary party for his Aunt Yetta, who was once engaged to a Trotskyite."

"Epstein had a file?" Hammer asked. "Epstein didn't even burn his draft card. Epstein is a moderate."

"Hammer, it's not important," I said. "We're talking kazatsky here."

I thought I'd been able to console him, but six years later he was disappointed at not being included on Richard Nixon's enemies list. By then he was working in journalism, but he took it for granted that the White House was still smarting from the attacks he'd made in his student radical days.

"Hammer," I said, "you know how much I admired the speech you gave in front of the Student Union describing how Nixon looked with the blood of children dripping from his fangs. But Nixon is a busy man. He's the President of the United States. He has a lot of important people to hate."

"Regular journalists like Daniel Schorr were on the list," he said.

"Daniel Schorr is a considerable figure, Hammer," I said. "Daniel Schorr is not Epstein."

But Hammer could never get it out of his head that a person who was unlisted and without a file was a person who was not being taken seriously. Years later, he was greatly distressed at not being on the list that the Reagan Administration turned out to have been keeping of people considered too left-wing to be sent abroad by the usia on cultural-exchange visits.

Trying to calm him, I explained that there was no reason for him to be under consideration for a cultural-exchange visit in the first place. Some of his friends, after all, were in the habit of describing him as a culture-free zone.

What I didn't go into was that he was no longer too left-wing for anything. Although Hammer insisted that what had changed was the left, not him, his articles reflected steadily increasing hostility to, say, affirmative-action programs and identity politics and, eventually, the progressive income tax. Since then, he has moved resolutely toward the right. In recent months, someone reading only Hammer's commentary would have assumed that the major question facing Americans at this point in their history is whether Hillary Clinton is or is not the Antichrist.

Which is why he expected his FBI file to be among those collected by Bozo the Clown and the other security specialists hired by the Clinton White House. "You'll notice they only had files through the letter G," Hammer told me at lunch one day, shortly after the story hit the papers. "Otherwise my FBI file would have been there. I've been hitting them pretty hard." I nodded. I didn't have the heart to remind him what we've known for 25 years: Hammer doesn't have an FBI file.