Eric Dezenhall '84

A crisis management expert dishes on truth, lies and wiseguys

"Public relations is about tellingpretty lies. Damage control is about telling ugly truths."

"I occupy an unusual place in thebusiness culture. I specialize in hideousness. What I love is the unrepentant defense of a controversial client."

"The best managed crises are theones you'll never hear about because we made them go away."

"Crisis management takes seeingthrough facades. What people say is always edited to be socially appropriate. Lesson one in damage control is that certain charms provide immunity. That's a very offensive concept."

"The spin doctor is seen as an American Merlin; he's homegrown folklore. He's a pixie with transforming powers. The dirty little secret about spin is that you can only spin a public that wants to be spun."

"The best spin doctor I ever knew was my mother.

She had a gift for concealing ugliness in my own background that took me until middle age to know existed. I trade on this in my fiction because it's interesting."

"Coming from south Jersey, the desire to get as far away as I could culturally was a big motivator in going to Dartmouth. It helped me look objectively and, ultimately, more affectionately at where I'd come from."

"Way back in my family were people who weren't exactly choir boys.

I don't know what they did, but they didn't get monthly statements from Dean Witter. The scene in my book Money Wanders where the mob hides out at Dartmouth is loosely based on something that happened in 1981. A couple of my family elders drove up from New Jersey and started going house to house on Webster Avenue hustling pool. My uncle asked one preppie kid where he'd learned to play and the kid said, 'Choate.' My uncle said, No shit! Us too!'"

"People show up at my book signings expecting a 6-foot-4longshoreman but what they get is a 5-foot-8 suburban dad who coaches Little League. There's disappointment I don't come across as a thug."

"Americans tolerate liars but hate hypocrites. Why do we love the mob and despise World Com? Because the wiseguys are who they say they are. Charles Manson is perversely reassuring because he looks like a mass murderer."

"If you make it in America, it's only a matter of time before we want to stone you in the town square. We validate our notion of equality by cutting down someone who gets too far ahead of us. We label it justice because it sounds nobler."

"When men are naughty it's dudes being dudes. When women are naughty, they're unstable."

"We're going through a cycle when any allegation against a business or a celebrity will be embraced by the culture. This follows a period when any charlatan who could weave the word bandwidth' into a sentence was hailed as a genius."

"The role of celebrity in Washington has become much more important. Twenty years ago the consultants were behind-the-scenes people; now they're rock stars."

"My house is surrounded by an 8-foot iron gate. Because of my business and being on television, you never know when you'll hit a nerve."

"After being on The O'Reilly Factor once, I got an e-mail from a Romanian dominatrix who told me it was clear to her I needed her services. I thought, 'Am I that transparent?'"

"In business, I'm constrained by the law,ethics, good judgment and reality. In my fiction I have no such constraints and can do anything to save someone's reputation, which makes it fun. I don't write about mobsters as Shakespearean kings; I write about them as schnooks, which is how I see them." "Truth can be the best swindle."

CAREER: Damage control consultant, author and frequent television commentator JOB TITLE: Partner, Nichols- Dezenhall Communications Management based in Washington, D.C., with offices in Sacramento, Los Angeles and London BOOKS: Nail 'Em: ConfrontingHigh-ProBle Attacks on Celebritiesand Businesses (1999) and two novels, Money Wanders (2002) and Jackie Disaster (2003) EDUCATION: A.B., political science FAMILY: Resides in Bethesda, Maryland, with wife Donna and children Stuart, 13, and Eliza, 11