"America was never innocent. We popped our cherry on the boat over and looked back with no regrets. You can’t ascribe our fall from grace to any single event or set of circumstances. You can’t lose what you lacked at conception." James Ellroy, from the opening to American Tabloid
This book knocked me on my ass.
There’s no other way to say it. When I first read American Tabloid by James Ellroy, I burned through it in about two days. It’s about a million pages long, but I couldn’t put it down. I hardly slept. I went without food. Day passed into night, then back into day. It is a beautiful thing when that happens.
For those who don’t know, American Tabloid is the story of the John F. Kennedy assassination, told from the point of view of the men working to engineer it. That’s right – the men. Ellroy gives no quarter to that quaint bunkum put forth by the Warren Commission, by the American media, by American elites of every stripe – that Kennedy was murdered by a lone gunman named Lee Harvey Oswald. Oswald plays exactly zero role in this story, as it should be. But with Oswald gone, who does that leave?
Everybody.
Well, not everybody. Not the powerless. Not the suckers. Not the millions and
millions of squarejohns who work for a living, pay their taxes, raise their
kids, vote for "shuck-and-jive politicians," and go to church on
Sunday. Not them.
No, Kennedy was killed by his own – a parasitical layer of immensely wealthy businessmen, illegal operators, mobsters, intelligence agencies, the military and large corporations – the true power structure that runs the United States. The book follows the exploits of three men who are instruments of that power – two rogue FBI agents, Kemper Boyd and Ward Littell, and a former cop turned bodyguard, hit man, and shakedown artist, Pete Bondurant.
These men live where the real action happens in American society. Opportunists all, they constantly shift their loyalties. They are masters of compartmentalization – they can work for the CIA, the FBI, the mob, the Kennedy brothers, or all of them at the same time, keeping each conflicting loyalty in a neat little box.
Ward Littell works feverishly to bring down the mob for Bobby Kennedy. He risks his life again and again, going so far as to steal the secret books of the Teamsters Union Pension Fund – a fund the mob uses to finance criminal activities throughout the country. Later, burned by Bobby Kennedy, Littell becomes the personal lawyer to Jimmy Hoffa and Carlos Marcello, and helps to plan JFK’s murder.
Kemper Boyd works for the Kennedy brothers on civil rights issues in the Deep South, while simultaneously working with Ku Klux Klansmen, American Nazis and right-wing Cuban émigrés to plan an invasion of Cuba. If anything, Boyd’s fatal flaw is too much loyalty to Jack Kennedy.
Pete Bondurant is always a bad guy – he always works for the CIA, or the mob, or as a blackmailer, or as industrialist Howard Hughes’s pimp and drug procurer. He has killed more than 300 men. Ruthless but clear-eyed – "Communism’s bad for business," he tells right-wing idealogue and Castro-hater Guy Banister, "don’t pretend it’s anything more than that," – Bondurant is the book’s most endearing character.
The prose is relentlessly hard-boiled – bare, stripped to the bone, machine-gun fast. It bores into your brain like a power drill, leaving you wiped-out, exhausted, with holes in your skull. The take on the American scene is cynical to the extreme. The characters cheerfully double-cross and triple-cross each other with aplomb. Everybody is on the make, everybody is dirty – J. Edgar Hoover and Jimmy Hoffa, Howard Hughes and Chicago crime-boss Sam Giancana, Jack Ruby and JFK.
In Ellroy’s world, there is no measurable difference between any of these players. The society is inherently corrupt, and the people who pull its strings are all bad news. As Kennedy’s day of reckoning approaches, everybody in the know grasps that he’s about to get whacked – it’s just that nobody knows who’s going to do it. The CIA? The mob? The Cubans? The Pentagon? The stateless French hit man who killed Patrice Lumumba and nearly got Charles de Gaulle? In the end, it doesn’t matter. It’s all the same.
Where’s the beauty in this? Right in plain sight – right where we live today. American Tabloid isn’t some blind stab in the dark; it’s not some hallucination from Ellroy’s blistered mind. It’s a mirror held up to the American social order. In the lingo of Hush-Hush – the yellow journalism rag owned by Howard Hughes – which trumpets the major developments throughout the novel:
ITEM: October 2002. Paul Wellstone, U.S. Senator, dies in mysterious plane crash just eleven days before apparent re-election. Wellstone, liberal lackey of the looney left, half-crazed critic of the Bush Administration, and the man who brought bright light on the craven cowardliness of his Democratic Party compatriots, came down in a frenzied flashing fireball, as yet unexplained.
ITEM: Wellstone’s sudden death raises eyebrows among long-memoried members of American indy-media. Two years earlier, Senate candidate Mel Carnahan dies in remarkably similar circumstances, three weeks before election against Bush family friend John Ashcroft. After Carnahan’s posthumously pyrrhic victory (the only dead man to ever win a Senate seat), newly-minted boy-king Bush bestows strangely superstitious, medieval-minded Attorney General Ashcroft upon puzzled American populace.
ITEM: Big Jack Abramoff, Washington lobbyist, fixer and friend to powerful right-wing politicos. Generous Jack, who flamboyantly flew Republican Party patriarchs, including "Hot-Tub Tom" Delay, far-afield on fabulous trips to desirable getaway destinations. Power Monger Jack, who charged inexperienced Indian tribesmen hefty dollops of delicious dollars to arrange eye-to-eyes with dull-normal Emperor Dubya. Handshake Jack, allegedly mobbed-up with murderous East Coast mafiosos, including the men who bumped-off the bumptious former owner of a string of floating casinos that Abramoff himself had bought a major interest in.
The list can go on – the Yellowcake forgery, the Valerie Plame case, Iraq War profiteering, domestic spying – lies on top of lies on top of lies. All of this (and more!) reminds us that We the People don’t drive this car. We’re passengers, strapped in, and along for whatever ride they take us on.
Ellroy’s appraisal – what he calls "a reckless verisimilitude"
– is no less accurate for being dark.
"Practically all the Cabinet members of President Kennedy's administration,
along with Director J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI and Chief James Rowley of the
Secret Service...testified that to their knowledge there was no sign of any
conspiracy. To say now that these people, as well as the Commission, suppressed,
neglected to unearth, or overlooked evidence of conspiracy would be an
indictment of the entire government of the United States. It would mean the
whole structure was absolutely corrupt from top to bottom."
Earl Warren, Chief Justice of the United States (1953-1969)
copyright© 2007 Patrick
Quinlan
Read an extract from Patrick's novel, Smoked
PATRICK
QUINLAN was the youngest child in a big, noisy, New York
Irish-American family. Ten minutes
late to supper and the food was all gone. Other
kids in the neighborhood wanted to become cops, or firemen, or crime kingpins.
He wanted to become Jimi Hendrix. At
an early age, he became an accomplished and incorrigible liar, eventually
finding work that made good use of this talent – journalist, copywriter,
political operative, and now novelist.
Contact Patrick