Meet Phil Elwood, an insider’s insider of Washington. A public relations professional, he has stealthily managed challenging assignments over the years, from Qatar’s contested World Cup bid to Vogue’s disastrous 2011 profile of Bashar al-Assad’s wife, Asma. His passion is controlling the narrative — leveraging valuable intelligence and his media savvy to deliver for clients. And oh, what a client list it is.
Under the surface, though, Elwood is a wreck. Diagnosed with depression when he dropped out of college, he self-medicated with booze (and more) as he built his Washington career, battling a succession of mental health crises that culminated in a suicide attempt. After recovering from that episode, he’s telling his story in “All the Worst Humans: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians,” an account that’s part therapy, part cautionary tale.
End of carouselWhat makes Elwood’s story stand out from the typical Washington read is that his personal demons are so intertwined with his professional choices. Most dramatic is his realization at the end of the story that his addiction to adrenaline — the power rush from working behind the scenes — is also a feature of his bipolar II disorder, which led him to the edge.
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The book also pops because it’s funny — despite everything. Elwood’s prose is zippy, even Sorkin-esque, and he relishes dark humor. “Karl Marx said religion was the opium of the people,” Elwood writes in a section about becoming addicted to pain medication following a serious hip injury. “You know what’s a lot more like the opium of the people? Opiates.”
Elwood’s D.C. journey began in the summer of 2000. Even though he blew up his college career, he finagled a Senate internship with Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) with the help of a well-connected friend, then landed in the office of Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.). Through Levin’s pull, he completed his formal education, then launched his professional life in Washington PR. His lucky breaks made it clear to him how unfair the system can be.
He soon landed a job at Brown Lloyd James, the PR shop headed by former Beatles manager Peter Brown with a long client list of what Elwood deems the “worst humans,” including Libyan dictator Moammar Gaddafi and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad. Needless to say, the job gave Elwood the excitement he craved.
Except that it was a bit too exciting. One of Elwood’s wildest tales took place in 2009, when, he writes, Brown dispatched him to Las Vegas with Mutassim Gaddafi, son of the Libyan dictator, to make sure he and his entourage stayed out of the headlines while they had fun. There were drugs, guns, a Cher concert (Mutassim was a fan) and lots of gambling. A terrified Elwood realized that if anyone in this brutal, unhinged gang wanted to kill him, they’d probably get away with it.
He left Las Vegas relieved to be alive, only to be told he was needed in New York. This time, it was Mutassim’s father, Moammar Gaddafi, whom BLJ had to (try to) manage during his notorious appearance at the U.N. General Assembly, as part of his short-lived rehabilitation phase with the West. Tasked with housing and other logistics, the firm scrambled to organize a massive tent on the Bedford, N.J., estate of Donald Trump (the only willing host, according to Elwood) and find a sacrificial goat for the Libyan delegation, just to name a few to-do list items.
Elwood recounts that his moral angst and self-doubt became more acute in 2010 when he was part of Qatar’s successful effort to beat the United States in its bid to host the 2022 World Cup — a FIFA decision so controversial that the Justice Department eventually investigated. He was further shaken on a business trip to Bosnia, where he visited the site of a Bosnian Serb massacre of Muslim civilians and was “confronted with the gritty reality of totalitarian power.”
He didn’t have to ponder too long; upon his return, Elwood recalls, Brown told him, “The Arab Spring has been bad for our business model,” and fired him. Elwood then landed at Levick Strategic Communications. There the clients were less brutal, but some were still, in Elwood’s assessment, dodgy; he cites the example of Kim Dotcom, a hacker and internet entrepreneur who has had decades of run-ins with the law. Eventually, Elwood started his own shop. This time, he worked with an Israeli firm, Psy-Group, that became ensnared in the Mueller investigation for allegedly pitching an election influence campaign to Trump’s team in 2016. Elwood was questioned by the government but let go — and deftly managed to keep his name out of the press. Another close brush.
One of the juiciest parts of Elwood’s story is his work with the media. Early on, after he negotiated with CNN to air a strategically useful clip, he describes an “aha” moment: “My job isn’t to manipulate public opinion. My job is to get gatekeepers like CNN to do it for me.”
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This sounds cynical, but what he describes is an exchange in which both sides mutually benefit. Elwood has an innate understanding of how journalists work and genuinely respects them. He makes that clear as he spills details of his tradecraft: working with reputable reporters at top publications (he divulges a long A-list of names), selectively picking outlets for maximum impact and exploiting the “scoopiness” that journalists prize in exchange for results for his clients.
He describes this quid pro quo as a form of “insider trading” but points out that valuable information in Washington, like all commodities, is appraised and traded on a market. And information is valuable only if it’s true, or at least true-ish. To that end, he counsels his fellow PR flacks against trading in bad information — reminding them that good journalists will quickly detect lies when they are handed to them.
Elwood is a troubled but sympathetic narrator, and most readers will probably find themselves relieved to know that, at the end, he’s in a better place. He closes his story lurking in the background, as a black rectangle on a Zoom call with clients. But this time, he says, he’s working for “the good guys.”
Helen Fessenden is an assistant business news editor for The Washington Post.
All the Worst Humans
How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians
By Phil Elwood
Henry Holt. 272 pp. $28.99.
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