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Phil Elwood's memoir All the Worst Humans is a self-implicating insider account of Washington's PR industry, written by a former operative who ran influence campaigns for clients including Gaddafi, Assad, and the government of Qatar — and who eventually had to reckon, in a very concrete way, with what that actually meant.
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The book opens, essentially, with a man who is very good at his job and not yet bothered enough by that fact. Elwood's early career reads as a sequence of escalating absurdities: a four-day stretch in Las Vegas with a dictator's son that somehow keeps accelerating — more money, more exposure, more complicity — until the whole episode reads like a controlled demolition of professional judgment, rendered in deadpan detail that makes it funnier and more disturbing in equal measure. That scene sets the book's tone precisely: Elwood is not going to moralize at you while he's describing the thing, and the restraint is what makes the portrait land.
He structures the memoir around clients and campaigns rather than strict chronology, which means each chapter tends to arrive with its own moral weather system. The cumulative effect isn't exactly momentum in a conventional narrative sense — it's more like a slow accumulation of evidence, each job slightly harder to justify than the last. What makes this work is that Elwood understands the systemic logic well enough to explain it without excusing it. He's describing a marketplace with willing participants on every side: PR firms, lobbyists, journalists, politicians, foreign ministries. The chapters dealing with West Africa and the Middle East are especially useful here, because they make visible what foreign influence operations actually look like as a business — strategy decks, client calls, billable hours, magazine profiles timed to diplomatic moments. The mechanics are specific enough to be genuinely educational.
Elwood has a gift for comic timing that keeps the self-accounting from curdling into self-pity. When he describes pitching a sympathetic journalist on a narrative he knows is thin, the humor comes not from the absurdity of the situation but from his own fluency in it — the ease with which the language came, the way the pitch practically wrote itself. That kind of detail does more to indict the industry than any amount of explicit editorializing, and Elwood is smart enough to know it. He largely lets the reader do the moral arithmetic.
The book's structural turning point — an FBI contact that arrives with the force of a cold bucket of water — is handled with more sobriety than most of what precedes it, and that tonal shift is deliberate. The memoir's arc moves from cheerful cynicism to something more unsettled and harder to dismiss, and the shift earns its weight precisely because it builds slowly rather than arriving as a sudden conversion. That said, readers who want the moral accounting front-loaded may find the first half's breezy self-deprecation tests their patience before the stakes fully settle in.
One honest caveat: this is memoir, not reported investigation. Elwood's scope is necessarily limited to what he personally witnessed and participated in, and he makes no attempt to source or document the industry beyond his own experience. That's a fair trade if you're reading for voice, texture, and the specific gravity of personal culpability — but readers hoping for a policy argument or an externally sourced account of the lobbying and foreign-influence business should pair this with more rigorously reported work. What Elwood offers is something different and genuinely valuable: the view from inside one career, told by someone who was good at it, and who eventually stopped pretending that was enough.
Reviewed by Ellis
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