The Wolves of K Street: The Secret History of How Big Money Took Over Big Government

A dazzling and infuriating portrait of fifty years of corporate influence in Washington, The Wolves of K Street is a masterpiece of narrative nonfiction--irresistibly dramatic, spectacularly timely, explosive in its revelations, and absolutely impossible to put down. In the 1970s, Washington's center of power began to shift away from elected officials in big marble buildings to a handful of savvy, handsomely paid operators who didn't answer to any fixed constituency. The cigar-chomping son of an influential congressman, an illustrious political fixer with a weakness for modern art, a Watergate-era dirty trickster, the city's favorite cocktail party host--these were the sort of men who now ran Washington. Over four decades, they'd chart new ways to turn their clients' cash into political leverage, abandoning favor-trading in smoke-filled rooms for increasingly sophisticated tactics, such as "shadow lobbying," where underground campaigns sparked seemingly organic public outcries to press