Late in their careers, journalists with well-known bylines tend to write memoirs. These books are all the same, just about. Early on, they have plenty of entertaining character studies of the scamps and scoundrels who populate newsrooms. That is followed by scenes of boozy evenings in exotic locations, usually with some gunfire in the distance. On Page 100 or so comes the step-by-step narrative of how the reporter, despite some deep-seated personal failings, plays a key role in exposing this or that corrupt politician, business leader or institution.
“All the Worst Humans,” a pithy, anecdote-rich memoir by Phil Elwood, has a lot in common with those books. But it tells a story from journalism’s shadow side, the realm of high-level public relations. And so, while the book has plenty of scoundrels, cocktails and guns, it comes with no cathartic recounting of how the author exposed wrongdoing. That is because Elwood has devoted himself to the dubious pursuit of drumming up positive news coverage for dictators and other malefactors.
It starts with the crack of a Jack Reacher thriller. It is 2018, and F.B.I. agents are about to knock on Elwood’s door. Nearly 20 years into a career of shaping public opinion, he has served so many bad guys that he cannot be sure just what the investigators are after.
“It could be the Israelis,” Elwood writes. “Or Muammar Gaddafi. Or Bashar al-Assad. Or the Iranians. Or because of what I pulled in Antigua. Or the bank transfers to accounts in tax havens all over the world. Or Project Rome.”
The author will describe his many misadventures in due course — but first he lays out how his desire to be counted as even a minor player in world events, along with a penchant for thrill-seeking and a dash of cynicism, led him to specialize in the dark art of massaging the truth for fun and profit.
A character who comes to life in these pages is Peter Brown, a onetime manager of the Beatles who, in 1983, founded the company that became the powerful international public relations firm BLJ Worldwide. Brown’s dealings with John, Paul, George and Ringo have been chronicled in countless books and articles. Thanks to Elwood, interested readers can learn of his long and lucrative sequel career as a behind-the-scenes image-maker and string-puller. If “All the Worst Humans” is a hit, Brown might consider assigning one of his charges to do some reputational cleanup work on his behalf.
Elwood becomes a foot soldier for BLJ Worldwide after making a name for himself as an aggressive and creative spin doctor in Washington. He is impressed, at first, by Brown’s polished demeanor, not to mention his habit of unspooling Beatles anecdotes between sips of Campari and soda. Nor is Elwood put off by the firm’s client list, which comes to include the Libyan dictator Muammar el-Qaddafi, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria and Russia Today, a news outlet started by the Kremlin to improve Russia’s standing beyond its borders.
“Everyone deserves representation,” Brown says, in Elwood’s account. “And anything is possible with the right amount of money.”
Elwood, the son of a minister, feels he has arrived when he finds himself among Yoko Ono, Donald Trump and Barbara Walters at a Christmas party in 2008 hosted by Brown in his grand apartment on Central Park West in Manhattan. But like the protagonist of a 19th-century bildungsroman, or perhaps a 20th-century movie starring Charlie Sheen, Elwood begins to lose his bearings, not to mention what is left of his innocence, as he tries to please his demanding boss and his more demanding clients, one of whom is a son of Qaddafi. Increasingly, he quiets his moral qualms with alcohol.
Journalism professors will weep when they come across Elwood’s analysis of the media ecosystem. As he tells it, news gatherers are simply “outgunned” by their counterparts. There are 300,000 public relations employees in the United States, he writes, most of whom are much better paid than the nation’s estimated 40,000 journalists.
“My industry is worth $129 billion,” he adds. “We will do anything to earn those billions.”
Rather than trying to muscle reporters into writing propaganda or puff pieces, Elwood is savvy enough to go with a soft-sell strategy, heavy on charm, nuggets of exclusive information and expense-account dinners, in the hope that a mere 50.1 percent of a published article will favor the people whose images he is trying to burnish or whose misdeeds he is hoping to bury. This approach keeps his clients happy, or happy enough, while encouraging scoop-hungry reporters to come back for more.
The book has its longueurs but picks up narrative steam when Elwood describes how the grind of providing cover for bad actors takes its toll. Filled with regret about some of the things he has done, and finding himself the potential target of a federal investigation because of public relations work he’s performed for a group of ex-spies, he becomes suicidal. After receiving a diagnosis of bipolar II disorder and post-traumatic stress disorder, he undergoes a lengthy ketamine treatment.
In the book’s mostly happy ending, Elwood does not suddenly switch teams to join the ranks of righteous journalists. He’s no sap. But now, instead of lending his talents to any rogue with a bag of cash, he throws himself into worthier campaigns. One of them comes in the service of Ukrainians fighting Russia’s invasion. Another is an effort to change the public perception of ketamine from a good-time party drug to an effective treatment for people suffering from depression.
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