American Magazine: November 2016

JUDY SMITH IS
WASHINGTON’S ULTIMATE FIXER
BY MIKE UNGER
PHOTO BY VINCENT RICARDEL
My phone starts buzzing a few minutes
after Judy Smith was supposed to call
for our scheduled interview.
“Hello,” she says in a warm-yetprofessional,
calm-yet-pressed voice. “Can
I call you back in a few hours? I’m having
a crisis at work.”
Of course she is. But, to paraphrase
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Smith’s idea of a crisis is
not like yours or mine. Crises are the currency
in which she deals, and they’ve made her
fabulously successful and increasingly
famous. In turn, she’s provided her clients—
a Who’s Who of they-shouldn’t-have-donethat—with
opportunities for a second act
following some very public problems.
That her words are spoken without
a hint of irony demonstrates why she’s
become so entrenched in the milieu of
American celebrity gone bad. The access
to society’s boldest names, the hit network
television show based on her career: it’s
all secondary to Smith. Her primary goal
has remained simple: What’s the client’s
objective, and how can I help them
achieve it?
Smith, WCL/JD ’86, is Washington’s
ultimate fixer. Her name has become
synonymous with the field of crisis
communications, a pressure cooker brand
of PR designed to protect (or salvage) an
individual’s or corporation’s reputation.
When a politician or noted athlete or actor
gets caught with their hand in the cookie
jar, they call Smith. She’s also become
linked to her small screen alter ego Olivia
Pope, the no nonsense, problem-solving,
heroine of ABC’s Scandal.
In our conversation, Smith is measured
and reserved when discussing her
work—much of which aims to mitigate
transgressions much more serious than
tawdry trysts—and guarded when speaking
about herself. You’d never know her job is to
parachute into the most stressful of media
feeding frenzies or the stickiest of legal jams
and align herself with the person squarely in
everyone’s sights.
You’d never know that you were speaking
to a true gladiator.
Smith was born and raised in the nation’s
capital, the second youngest of five
children. Much of her hard-nosed work ethic
comes from the example set by her parents.
Her father drove a truck by day and a cab at
night, while her mother worked as a secretary
from nine to five before heading out to clean
office buildings. Occasionally, Smith would
tag along.
After leaving the city to earn a bachelor’s
degree in public relations from Boston
University, she felt the pull of home.
26 AMERICAN MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2016