The Wolves of K Street: How K Street Runs America
Reviewed in July/August 2024 issue of the Atlantic

Luke and Brody Mullins, a pair of energetic reporters, have written this absorbing new book.

Lobbying, likeHollywood and Silicon Valley, is a quintessentially American industry. The sector took root along the K Street corridor of gleaming glass- and-steel buildings in downtown D.C. during the 1970s.

In 2016, the “advocacy cluster” employed more than 117,000 workers in metropolitan Washington (that’s more than the population of Manchester, New Hampshire). Lobbying has become a pernicious force in national life, courtesy of corporate America, which hugely outspends other constituencies—labor unions, consumer and environmental groups—on an enterprise now dedicated to honing ever more sophisticated methods of shaping public opinion in service of its own ends. (In the late ’60s, only about 60 registered lobbyists were working in Washington.)

The story that unfolds in The Wolves of K Street features an ironic twist: Liberal activists figured out how to mobilize the public to care about important issues and how to inspire them to become democratically engaged. When conservative K Street fixers saw this success, they adapted the tactics to serve the interests of corporations.

As K Street boomed, the Mullinses show, its denizens remade American life well beyond Washington culture. They report that the firm Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly, also a central player in their book, aided the Australian magnate Rupert Murdoch in overcoming regulatory obstacles and extending his corrosive media empire in the United States.

TWoKS isfull of cautionary tales about the normalization of corruption. Revolving-door practices—leaving government jobs and parlaying insider connections into lucrative lobbying work—became part of the system.