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How Washington Lobbyists Fought To Flack For A Stalinist Dictatorship
Random House
October 2008
On Sale: September 23, 2008
224 pages
ISBN: 140006743X
EAN: 9781400067435
Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Political
“As I have often said, I would represent the devil himself
for the right price–it’s not personal, just business.”
–a
Washington, D.C., lobbyist
For nearly as long as
there have been politicians in the United States, there have
been lobbyists haunting the halls of Congress–shaking hands,
bearing gifts, and brandishing agendas. Everyone knows how
the back-scratching game of money, power, and PR is played.
For a good enough offer, there are those who will gladly
dive into the dirtiest political waters. The real question
is: Just how low will they sink? Veteran investigative
journalist Ken Silverstein made it his mission to find
out–and “Turkmeniscam” was born.
On assignment for
Harper’s magazine, and armed with a fistful of fake
business cards, Silverstein went deep undercover as a
corporate henchman with money to burn and a problem to
solve: transforming the former Soviet-bloc nation
Turkmenistan–branded “one of the worst totalitarian systems
in the world”–into a Capitol Hill-friendly commodity. Even
in the notoriously ethics-challenged world of Washington’s
professional lobbying industry, could “Kenneth Case”
(Silverstein’s fat-cat alter ego) find a team of D.C. spin
doctors willing to whitewash the regime of a megalomaniac
dictator with an unpronounceable name and an unspeakable
reputation? Would the Beltway’s best and brightest
image-mongers shill for a country condemned for its
mind-boggling history of corruption, brutality, and civil
rights abuse?
Who would dare tread in the ignoble
footsteps of Ivy Lee, the pioneering PR guru who sought to
make the Nazis look nice? And who would stoop to
unprecedented new lows to conquer Congress and compromise
the red, white, and blue for the sake of the almighty green?
As Ken Silverstein discovers in this mordantly funny,
disturbingly enlightening, jaw-dropping exploration of the
dark side, the real question is: Who
wouldn’t?
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