A Spin Doctor to the Rich and Corrupt Spills His Secrets

ALL THE WORST HUMANS: How I Made News for Dictators, Tycoons, and Politicians, by Phil Elwood

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.