Dave Schaafsma's Reviews > American Tabloid

“America was never innocent.”

“It's time to demythologise an era and build a new myth from the gutter to the stars. It's time to embrace bad men and the price they paid to secretly define their time.”

American Tabloid is one of three big books by major authors I’ve read in the last twelve months focused on what they would all agree is a key event in twentieth-century American/world politics, the killing of JFK: 11/22/63 by Stephen King; Libra by Don DeLillo, and this 1995 publishing and award-winning sensation by the author of The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential.

A combination of The People’s History of the United States and Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail, but far more propulsive, something like being body-punched with tough, staccato sentences, but, I don't know, admiring him for his pugilistic skills. Ellroy is maybe the most cynical writer I know this side of Celine, but he's also politically astute. Ultimately angry, not despairing. Anti-romantic, assuredly, on the issue of Making America Great Again.

So American Tabloid, using an LA scandal rag, Hush Hush, as its sometime model, all alliteration and bombast, is a rapid-fire, 500-page epic, connecting the dots between the CIA, FBI, the Mob, Jimmy Hoffa, Edgar Hoover, Howard Hughes, the Kennedys, Sam Giancana, Fidel Castro and a host of minor players. Three central characters--Ward Littell, Pete Bondurant and ​​Kemper Boyd--are (I presume) fictional characters, but trust me, everyone in this book is despicably culpable in their own ways. You thought Oliver Stone’s JFK was crazy paranoid leftist conspiracy theory? Read this to see if it makes more sense, and we can get together at a JFK Conspiracy Convention next month, wearing Groucho masks. But in general I am a believer that no one is innocent, that Oswald did not act alone, as is the case with something like 80% of Americans, according to recent polls.

“Jimmy Hoffa said, “I know how Jesus must have felt. The fucking pharaohs rose to power on his coattails like the fucking Kennedy brothers are rising on mine. . . Fucking Jesus turned fish into bread, and that’s about the only thing I haven’t tried. I’ve spent six hundred grand on the primaries and bought every fucking cop and alderman and councilman and mayor and fucking grand juror and senator and judge and DA and fucking prosecutorial investigator who’d let me. I’m like Jesus trying to part the Red Fucking Sea and not getting no further than some motel on the beach” (you may have heard the mob--Oak Parker mobster Sam Giancana, in cahoots with union boss Hoffa) engineered a win in Illinois for Kennedy over sweaty “red-baiting” future-deposed-King Nixon?).

Anyway, the time frame of five major sections, 100 chapters in each section, some as short as one page, proceeding in chronological fashion, is from November 22, 1958, right up until the moment President John Fitzgerald Kennedy is killed on November 22, 1963. So this is all just a political and social and moral foundation for Ellroy’s case.

One interesting aspect of this book, which is the first of a trilogy, is that Lee Harvey Oswald is not even mentioned once. King’s book is a time travel book, an alt-history fantasy, and a romance, but Oswald’s descent to Presidential killer is documented with some detail. Oswald acted alone, King believes. In DeLillo’s Libra the whole focus is Oswald, but it is Oswald suborned by the CIA. In American Tabloid, we just lay all the political and historical groundwork for the murder, and as Ellroy would say, no one is innocent. The groundwork includes the “mobbed up” millions of Joseph Kennedy, the Kennedy patriarch, his sex addict son Jack, (the “author” of Profiles in Courage, the book that won the Pulitzer Prize but was actually written by his speechwriter Ted Sorenson), his disastrous Bay of Pigs, his brother Bobby’s anti-mob obsession, their "liberal" views on Civil Rights.

“Facts can be bent to conform to any thesis.”

“I'm saying it's so big and audacious that we'll most likely never be suspected. I'm saying that even if we are, the powers that be will realize that it can never be conclusively proven. I'm saying that a consensus of denial will build off of it. I'm saying that people will want to remember the man as something he wasn't. I'm saying that we'll present them with an explanation and the powers that be will prefer it to the truth, even though they know better."

If you read this book, you can see many people who likely wanted to kill the Kennedys, and for that matter, MLK, too. And the book is told with excerpts of wiretap transcriptions, news articles and other “document inserts.” Taped Jack Ruby stripper convos from motel room trysts with some of the principals. Sleaze and politics, traversing from Chicago to Miami to LA, mapping the country like weaving a spider web of politics/sex/drugs.

Of the three books on JFK by major authors, all award-winning, I thought this was the best, but it’s not easy to read, as dark a vision of hate and corruption in American politics as one can imagine. But you, this was a time in which a popular President, his popular brother, a popular civil rights leader and plenty of other activists were shot down. Hard times. I read this after Rachel Maddow’s Blow Out, her send-up of the corrupt and world-destructive oil and gas industry, which makes it clear that this is not an isolated incident, men of power bent on world domination/destruction

So! I really need to read some happy picture books again. I mean, things were bad in the underbelly of the sixties, Ellroy makes clear, when I was wearing flowers in my hair. The sixties was a time of hope and peace, man? Ellroy would laugh and say they are just one point on the map of self-destruction we are on now. His LA trilogy maps the decade before that. Maybe WWII speaks for itself.

Stephen King said he and his wife were divided over whether Oswald acted alone. He sez Oswald was just a crazy solo killer. His wife sez it was a murder involving the guvamint. After reading Libra and this book, you are gonna side with the wife.