Our author and his genre vice, he can’t shake it. He fiends. Ellroy, oh boy.

I was pleased he avoided excessive hocus pocus here, well, outside of J Edgar Hoover pulling a ridiculous number of strings. Yeah the plot device of the female friends being daughters of the featured protagonists has long disappeared. The libidinal images of spouses and GFs asserts itself here instead.

The idea here that Dealey Plaza launched a wave of operations which shifted the course of history, replete with transcripts from Hoover advising the unwitting. There’s torture and narcotics, more slurs and epithets than one might want to. It just grew tired. There’s no need to connect events within a narrative arc by such threadbare characterization.

It went from Dallas to Vegas to Vietnam ringing in Sonny Liston, Jack Ruby and other assorted murderers and martyrs. Despite the last of those I don’t consider us witnesses. Perhaps just paroled from the slog by the turning of the final page.

Unfortunately this book just isn't as good as American Tabloid. And I think the problem with it is that the main plot is just not that compelling. In AT we knew that everything was leading up to the assassination of JFK. And even a fraction of the way in, we knew that the Bay of Pigs was coming down the pike.

In the Cold Six Thousand, we know that MLK and RFK are both going to die before the end of this 650 page story. It's more of the same... multiple shooters, set up a patsy. The Routine. The conspiratorial intricacies are far less interesting, because they aren't really new. And the rest of the plot--dense as it is--draws little interest. Many of the characters are new. Their claims to sympathy are not well established, and the relationships between them don't feel important. Howard Hughes is still a player, but with much less presence than in the preceding novel. J. Edgar Hoover has become less complex in the Cold Six Thousand, somewhat cartoonish even. Pete Bondurant and Ward Littel are also void of much solidity. One wishes occasionally that Littel would start drinking again to liven things up. Or that Pete Bondurant might have a crisis of confidence or an anxiety attack at least.

Yes there is much violence to spice things up. Silencers smoke, faces are shot off, heads are crushed in vices. But between these episodes are long segments of explication that turn the book into a literary slog somewhere between the third-hundredth and fifth-hundredth page. Even Ellroy's rat-a-tat prose can't cut through the thicket. Where American Tabloid read like a thousand consecutive punches to the head, Cold Six Thousand is like Chinese water torture, each short chapter starting in agony and ending in relief.

I get the feeling that Ellroy felt as bored writing this book as I felt reading it. But just as Cold Six Thousand is required reading in the Underworld USA trilogy, this is a book that Ellroy was required to write. Is it possible that he skipped over most of the editing process because he just didn't want to deal with it anymore?

I picked the wrong book to finish off my Reader's Challenge this year. With a slow moving plot and almost 700 pages, this book took a awhile to read.

With all that said, it's not a bad book. Ellroy writes well, well enough that I've read seven of his books and just bought another. And this book takes us through tumultuous events in the sixties with a fair degree of accuracy and plenty of speculation.

The writing style on this book is a mixed bag of eloquent passages, bland narrative and quasi-beat style. The word 'boocoo' (author's spelling) comes up boocoo times. Racist and politically incorrect vernacular of the era populates most of the novel. Ellroy seems to dislike his characters, both historical figures and fictional protagonists.

For those wanting to sample Ellroy, try his LA series, which includes the excellent 'LA Confidential'.

”They brought him back.

Frankenstein came. Frankenstein went. Nuns fluttered and fussed. Don’t hurt me--I’m Protestant French.

Frank destapled him. Nuns shaved him. He dehazed. He saw razors and hands. He rehazed. He saw Japs and Betty.

Hands fed him soup. Hands touched his dick. Hands jabbed tubes in. The haze sputtered. Words filtered through. Decrease his dose--don’t addict him.
He dehazed. He saw faces:

Student nuns--the brides of Frankenstein. A slight man--Ivy League threads--John Stanton-like. Memory Lane: Miami/white horse/Outfit-Agency ops.

He squinted. He tried to talk. Nuns went ssshhh.”

Maybe if James Ellroy had been born in New York instead of Los Angeles, he might have been a hip-hop star instead of a writer. I’m personally glad he was born in LA because no one has come to define the underbelly of Los Angeles, or frankly the whole nation, like Ellroy.

In the Underworld USA Trilogy, he turns his attention on the Kennedy assassination. The Cold Six Thousand picks up where American Tabloid left off. Wayne Tedrow Jr., Las Vegas detective, is flown from Las Vegas to Dallas to murder Wendell Durfree, a black pimp who has run afoul of the casinos. Tedrow Sr. thinks it might be good for his son to be in Dallas in November of 1963.

He’ll be a witness to history.

How’s Senior know?

There is a lot of speculation regarding President John F. Kennedy’s assassination. There is, of course, the lone gunman theory, held by people who believe that Lee Harvey Oswald worked alone. There is a theory, one of the more speculative ones in my opinion, that the brothers Ngo Dihn Diem and Ngo Dihn Nhu in South Vietnam had ordered the hit. It would be a death activated contract, meaning if something happened to the brothers, then the contract would be triggered; the brothers were assassinated November 2nd, 1963. There is the theory that the mafia had Jack taken out. Bobby, from the Attorney General’s office, crusaded long and hard to destroy organized crime in America. The mafia had been approached by Jack and Bobby’s father to help get the boy wonder elected. If they were king makers, they certainly had every reason to feel fucked over. There is also the theory that the CIA had Jack murdered as payback for the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba. There are a plethora of other theories, but these are the ones that I find most interesting.

So what Ellroy is doing with this series is blending real life people with fictional people. The names he uses for his fictional characters are so well chosen and the characters are so well developed that I found myself googling some of the names to make sure I hadn’t forgotten someone who was actually a living breathing person from the 1960s. Even though he seems like a made up person, President Lyndon B. Johnson was actually real and really did say things like this: ”Then why is that cocksucker trying to cornhole me when I’ve bent over backwards to befriend him?”

The same people who are involved in the Kennedy assassination are moved right into operations in Saigon where they start manufacturing H to pay for more clandestined operations that are best not revealed to Congress. The germ freak Howard Hughes (how freaky does he look now?) tries to buy into the casino business in Vegas. A tide of Hughes money is flooding the desert dry streets, and how much of it is skimmed and how it is used is beyond Howard’s control. ”Mr. Hughes injects codeine in his arms, legs and penis. He eats only pizza pies and ice cream. He receives frequent transfusions of ‘germ-free’ Mormon blood. His employees routinely refer to him as ‘the count,’ ‘Count Dracula,’ and ‘Drac.’” Yeah, okay Howie has definitely gone batshit crazy.

The thing about the lone gunman theory is that you can’t just believe that Oswald acted alone. You would also have to believe that Bobby Kennedy’s assassin and Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassin worked alone. What seems like the most tidy of explanations when something happens once suddenly becomes more improbable with each occurrence.

Lee Harvey Oswald/James Earl Ray/Sirhan Sirhan.

”Time sluiced. Time slithered. Time slid.”

We meet true believers here, people who think men like JFK, RFK, and MLK are going to be allowed to make a difference, but unfortunately, there are people who believe that men like this are a threat to the American way of life...check that, the American white way of life. ”King’s dead. Bobby soon. Shit will peak and resettle. The Poor People’s March tanked. The riots upstaged it. Fools popped their rocks and resettled. Chaos is taxing. Fools tire quick. King’s death let them roar and resettle. Bobby will go. Dick Nixon will reign. The country will roar and resettle.

The fix will work. Peace will reign. His type will run things. He saw it. He felt it. He knew.”

His type? Yeah, equality feels like inequality. If the black man is standing on the same level as the white man, then things are not as they should be. Equal equates to whites feeling discriminated against. Ellroy does not shy away from the deep-seated racism that has been passed down from generation to generation in this country as if it were a part of the family DNA. The Civil Rights movement was an assault on the liberties of those who defined themselves by the people they feel superior to.

The left leaders were wiped out to make room for Tricky Dick Nixon.

Could Dick have beaten Bobby? He almost beat Jack. From hindsight, we think that Nixon would have no chance against Robert Kennedy, but Dick was Loki the trickster, a chameleon graced with feral intelligence. To support him, one has to ignore his shifty eyes, his fishbelly pallor, and the flickering image of the scared boy behind the mask. Maybe enough Americans would have believed that Bobby could restore the Camelot facade. That he could make us feel like anything is possible again. That he would represent the very best of what America could produce. Some would vote for the spectre of Jack. Some would feel that we owed the Kennedys for their sacrifices.

I would have liked to see a debate between Bobby and Dick.

This novel will take you behind the curtain, into the black cesspool of American politics. Ellroy will lay out some facts before you. He will speculate for you. He will show you the hidden face of the 1960s. The ”Cordite and blood. Cheap wine. Burned silencer threads. Brass knucks/a sash cord/a pachuco switchblade. Burned bone and vomit. Scented towelettes.”

I’ve always appreciated James Ellroy, but this is the first book where I really understand the genius that takes his writing beyond just storytelling. His staccato, slip slide, rapid-fire, rap battle style reflects a mind weighing and balancing thousands of pieces of information as he searches for the right words to express the complexity of his thoughts.

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Unglaubliche Geschichten von bösen Männern

Im ersten Teil seiner Underworld Trilogie hatte James Ellroy schon das Konzept des historischen Romans bis an die Grenzen der Glaubwürdigkeit strapaziert, indem er seine drei bösen Männer ihre Finger in sämtliche Schlechtigkeiten der späten Fünfziger bis zu Planung und Ausführung des Kennedy-Attentats stecken ließ.
Der Albtraum führt dieses Konzept mit dem Vietnam-Krieg und den Anschlägen auf Martin Luther King und Robert F. Kennedy weiter. Für den am Ende von #1 hingerichteten Möchtegern-JFK-Freund Kemper Boyd rückt Wayne Tedrow nach, ein gewalttätiger Bulle mit Chemie-Diplom und einem Ödipus-Komplex, den er im letzten Drittel voll ausleben darf, auch wenn er den Vatermord an Stiefmutti überträgt. Im Verlauf des Romans ist WT erst Polizist, dann Rausschmeißer, dann Heroinkocher in Vietnam und Teil des Attentats auf MLK. Zuletzt beerbt er als neuer Anwalt von Howard Hughes und der Mafia auch noch Ward Littell, den gefallenen Engel des ersten Teils, der sein Gewissen durch großzügige Spenden an die Bürgerrechtsbewegung und die Sabotage von allerlei FBI-Aktionen gegen MLK und Co erleichtert. Beim Versuch das RFK-Attentat zu verhindern ereilt den X-Fach-Agenten aber dasselbe Schicksal wie seinen früheren Mentor Kemper Boyd beim Attentat auf den Präsidenten, niemand will die zwielichtige Größe noch anhören. Im Gegensatz zu Boyd kann Littell sein verpfuschtes Leben selbst beenden. Nun gut, Tedrow muss gegenüber Littel und Bondurant, die ein oder zwei Romane mehr Entwicklungszeit gehabt haben, eine ziemliche Strecke aufholen, aber mit einer ausgeweideten Ehefrau als Dreingabe ist sein Glaubwürdigkeitskonto schon ziemlich stark überzogen, ehe er sich der MLK-Mordbrigade anschließen muss, weil man ihm den Mörder seiner Frau, den er vorher wegen psychologischer Ladehemmung entkommen ließ quasi auf einem Serviertablett gereicht hat, das nun seine Fingerabdrücke trägt.
Im Vergleich zu den beiden anderen Musketieren des Bösen ist Big Pete Bondurant fast noch eine Art Sympathieträger, auch wenn der JFK-Attentäter in Sachen Mord und Drogengeschäfte die schmutzigsten Finger hat und sich durch Teilnahme am RFK-Anschlag aus der Mafia frei kaufen kann, zwei Herzinfarkte hat der anstrengende Lebensstil dem mörderischen Riesen eingebracht, der während der zweiten Attacke noch vier verräterische Kumpane auf der Yacht erledigt. Den letzten erschlägt er gar mit einem Anker, während sein Körper Amok läuft und bringt das Boot danach sicher von der Küste Kubas in den Hafen von Miami.
Wer's glaubt wird selig, damit bin ich auch bei meinem Hauptproblem. Denn auch dieses mal wird, ohne nachvollziehbare Motivation der Feind zum Freund und umgekehrt, dazu die die kaum vorstellbare Ballung von Verbrechen, in die diese drei bösen Männer verwickelt sind, ausnahmslos vorgetragen im Stakkato von Vier-Wort-Sätzen. Angeblich hat James Ellroy diesen Minimal-Stil während L.A. Confidential aus der Not heraus entwickelt, weil das Finale des Romans 100 Seiten zu lang war. Dieser Albtraum ist länger und durch ständige Strapazierung derselben Stilmittel und Wiederholung von Russisch-Roulette-Verhören absolut eine Zumutung an den Leser, die nichts anderes verdient als einen Stern. Der Lektor, der für die unnötige Verkürzung von L.A.Confidential verantwortlich war, sollte für den Rest seines Lebens dazu gezwungen werden, den amerikanischen Alptraum zu lesen, während der Bewacher an der Trommel seines Revolvers dreht und sich dabei ebenso vor Angst einzuscheißen wie die ganzen Leute, mit denen Littell, Bondurant, Tedrow und Co russisch Roulette spielen.

Mi ci è voluto un po’ per abituarmi allo stile iper-telegrafico, ma poi è stato come cadere nelle sabbie mobili

I have to DNF this at 13%. I'm just not in the mood.

In remembrance of my eventual adoration of American Tabloid I'm not going to rate it, but I'm not going to throw it back on the TBR either.

sei pezzi da mille riprende esattamente da dove american tabloid finisce: da quella stessa camera d'albergo, con pete che guarda, con littell che fa quello che fa.
arrivano nuovi personaggi: wayne jr. - incaricato di ammazzare un negro a dallas in cambio di seimila dollari. il negro scappa e non si trova.
che altro succede a dallas nel frattempo? ah sì, qualcuno si becca tre pallottole e una di queste gli fa esplodere il cervello.
arriva wayne senior, che ha incaricato il figlio di ammazzare il negro. è ricco, razzista e supporta il KKK. odia martin luther king e di riflesso anche bobby kennedy.
c'è dwight holly, agente FBI che trama contro gli afroamericani insieme a edgar hoover, ovviamente.
nel frattempo howard hughes vuole comprarsi las vegas e incarica il nostro amico littell di occuparsi di tutto. littell lo frega, la mafia non vuole cedere i casinò perché hughes vuole riempirli di mormoni.
pete va in vietnam, che non è ancora la guerra assurda che diventerà. vietnam è la nuova cuba. vietnam è eroina. la cia e la mafia vogliono la droga. vogliono spacciarla a las vegas, l'unica città in cui non si può spacciare. vogliono anestetizzare i negri. vogliono creare problemi: negri contro negri. vogliono screditare martin lucifer king. che tra l'altro scopa le bianche.
nel mezzo si trovano: tradimenti amorosi; il cancro; froci che si fingono eterosessuali; eterosessuali che si fingono froci; omicidi; cospirazioni; furti; prostitute; mazze dal golf e bastoni; voyeur; camere d'albergo; microfoni nei telefoni; fucili rubati; il razzismo contro i negri; il razzismo contro i bianchi; nixon; memphis e los angeles; soldi; tantissimi soldi.
redenzione.
senso di colpa.
in american tabloid i protagonisti volevano fare la storia. non avevano scrupoli, dovevano raggiungere l'obiettivo di fare soldi. erano avidi. storia & soldi.
in sei pezzi da mille è diverso. hanno fatto la frittata. la fine di american tabloid è l'inizio di sei pezzi da mille. la fine di american tabloid è l'inizio della fine. i nostri amici si rendono conto di quello che hanno fatto. hanno sensi di colpa, vogliono fare ammenda per i propri peccati, per i propri tradimenti.
ma è troppo tardi.
che altro c'è da dire? lo stile è meno fluido, più staccato. american tabloid è scritto meglio. il sangue è randagio ho saputo che è scritto un po' meglio. sei pezzi da mille a volte è quasi illeggibile. è più brutto? mah. neanche troppo. è la natura dei secondi.
le ultime 150 pagine sono pura dinamite, però. anche le prime 100. nel mezzo: vietnam, droga e senso di colpa.

Excellent

A little bit too long as a follow up to American Tabloid. Some of the characters remain. It's a snapshot of American politics and history in the 1960's with some fiction thrown in for good measure

“There are times when an abortion is necessary. I know that. When you have a black and a white*” -- nixon was a racist, red-baiting bastard. nixon was a paranoid insecure fuck. nixon jacked off reminiscing about bugging offices and launching latin american juntas. nixon said "make their economy scream" to 'the jew' (his term of affection for kissinger) as a means to destabilize Chile in order to insert an american friendly right-wing dicktator.

LBJ was cheating on Ladybird, stealing elections, calling out political enemies as commies fags or anti-americans, Gulf of Tonkin'ing as a means to escalation, forcing reporters to conduct interviews in the bathroom while he's taking a shit as a means of intimidation: 'eat my ass fumes, cocksucker.'

JFK's banging whores, starlets, singers, and secretaries. he's colluding with the mob to take down foreign leaders. he's running so much CIA blackops he makes Bush look like a friday night regular at Unicorn Alley.

J. Edgar Hoover's wiretapping the fuck outta EVERYONE. he's got bagmen working for the FBI, mucho shakedown and extortion, and a closet full of clothes my grandmom'd love to get her hands on.


that's why mike davis' criticism that ellroy's world is too much a black hole of immorality doesn't hold. when we hear the words and catch wind of the actions we get some sense of what was happening. davis argues that when things are so dark, so black, there's no contrast and everything's flattened. not so. when things are so dark it's like driving drunk: we're being overly careful so we're better at it. in the dark we can see more.

JFK, RFK, and MLK all assassinated within 5 years. all by lone gunmen. make sense?

on the one hand. we feel that the cosmic balance is way off if a major figure such as JFK or MLK is taken down by some irrelevant asshole - it just feels wrong. history doesn't work that way -- some nothing, some peon, can't alter the stream like that, right? maybe. maybe the times created these assholes. maybe peons did and do alter the stream. maybe oswald worked alone but was really an agent of History. maybe oswald was our creation.

on the other hand. it just can't have happened like that. fuck no. as ellroy's j. edgar hoover makes clear in both books, it all seemed to be moving toward a common point. it was inevitable. and it wasn't some random peon influenced by some vague 'Tide of History'. check it: castro nationalizes the casinos and the mob is booted. they're in deep with the kennedys. joe's an ex-rum runner, joe bought w. virgina, joe's crooked and bought his boy the power. his boy: a humper, a stickman, a cuntman. 'get up on top, baby, i have a bad back' MLK incites the spooks, the shines, the smokes; RFK incites the kikes, pinkos, and the young. it's all happening and it's inevitable and it's growing and it's racist and hateful and brutal and hungry and never sated and devouring everything in service of what it is and what it knows and it keeps moving. it's still going.


ellroy's the great american writer of our time and this trilogy, his 'american' trilogy, is shaping up to match (surpass?) what dos passos did with his 'american' trilogy. that is: offer one hell of a fun time while saying something very profound and disturbing about what america is.

america? from american tabloid, the first volume of the trilogy:

'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.

Mass-market nostalgia gets you hopped up for a past that never existed. Hagiography sanctifies shuck-and-jive politicians and reinvents their expedient gestures as moments of great moral weight. Our continuing narrative line is blurred past truth and hindsight. Only a reckless verisimilitude can set that line straight.'


i first met james ellroy when i worked at the book store and he was doing a reading -- i asked if he wanted a drink and he told me rapid-fire that he'd been sober for years but could use six espressos. i laughed. he wasn't kidding: he wanted six espressos poured into one cup. i ran to Coffee Bean and got the order and ellroy gulped it down like water and launched into a tirade of alliterative and intellectual dementia focused mainly on the sleaziness of bill clinton and on his great love for pit bulls. words can't express. ellroy admitted he's upset he'll die in however many years only in that he won't have the time to gain proper distance from the clinton administration to write a book about it.

i love this man.

*a gem, but not even close to one of the best from the nixon tapes

Well I finally got around to reading this and what a blast. Great how the forward starts out talking about how people romanticise a golden era that never was and then *bang* it takes you right into this dark, amoral underbelly of America. Gratuitous violence, corruption, blackmail, all delivered with some snappy one liners - sounds like a an episode of The Sopranos, except it makes that lot look positively moral. Oh, and enough conspiracy theory to bring Fox Mulder out of retirement.

If you want to try to get wise about politics, violence and crime, the easy way, then read this seminal book of history, secret history, historical fiction, and language. I think it's more interesting than AMERICAN TABLOID, the first in his "Underworld Trilogy," because events and figures like JFK/RFK(and their murders), Vietnam, civil rights, Martin Luther King (and his murder), are more dramatic than what happened during the time span of American Tabloid. The central event in American Tabloid was the Bay of Pigs, a crucial event that led to larger ones. AT conveys a potent image of violence, crime and their uses to political systems, but this book gets to the sick soul of power in America and power in general.

Nowhere have I read a more devastating exposure of the grip that racism and violence had on life and politics in America, and still does, though the racism is not as virulent. Ellroy does it all in the language of the streets: jive talk and jive turned back against the jive-talkers, Yiddish, goomba-talk, redneck hickoid hate talk, and country club hickoid hate talk - a chorus of demons.

Ellroy tags the Mafia as the origin for the Kennedy hit: revenge for not going after Castro, who took their casinos, and for Bobby's aggressive investigations. He tags Hoover and by extension, high level CIA types, as fully aware, presumably from wiretaps and snitches. They are complicit since they did nothing to stop it. Ellroy names three CIA-connected hit men, including Chuck Rogers, as the shooters, so you have to presume there could have been foreknowledge from top level CIA, but Ellroy keeps it pretty obscure, unlike later in the story, when he spells it out country simple that Hoover made the MLK hit happen.

He describes the rampant conservative and right wing hatred for the Kennedys, and Hoover and any police and intelligence agencies were and are right/extreme right wing. The shooters in this story, and in most credible accounts, are three pros, including a French national, who have been involved with the CIA for a long time, including anti-Castro activities. Not all historians agree on who the possible shooters were, but all serious writers agree that Oswald was the patsy. I don't believe that anyone who looks at the evidence can be considered serious if they still believe that Oswald killed JFK from the book depository.

Ellroy doesn't clear the CIA stench from the JFK hit, though he loses some intensity and impact by not tracing it to the top levels and exposing names: Dulles, Helms, Ted Shackley, et al; even Old Man Bush has been credibly implicated. He has no problem hanging the MLK hit on Hoover. He does explicitly call heroin smuggling in Vietnam a CIA job, though he calls it “unsanctioned,” or rogue. Heroin is all over American Tabloid and THE COLD SIX THOUSAND, and heroin, in those days, was Indochina-based with French intelligence/Corsican mob sources, later co-opted by the CIA, once they entered Vietnam. Calling the drug dealing unsanctioned is saying that the agency lacked the most basic form of control over it's agents, which I don't believe.

I recommend Douglas Valentine's great and crucial books: THE STRENGTH OF THE WOLF, and THE STRENGTH OF THE PACK: these books prove that the US government was involved in the drug trade for a long time, and essentially controlling it from Vietnam on. So the Mafia at it's highest levels, had CIA handlers who had the finger on them, and who controlled the raw material source and top level distribution. Drugs were money, extortion, control and power and that is CIA turf before it is Mafia turf. In other words, the mob works on their turf, as administrators, overseers and fall guys. Excluding this top level aspect of the origin of the Kennedy hit, diminishes the book's historical impact.

Ellroy focuses on Cuba as the source of Mafia rage, but Kennedy's reluctance to attack the island was the source of rage in the highest levels of large factions in the US government and military and their rage is far more deadly and long-reaching. The Mafia could provide cover and obscure the true source of any hit, including JFK and RFK. Also, Kennedy, though involved in Vietnam, was reluctant to escalate, and that was an even bigger source of rage than Cuba to the war profiteer scum and the anti-commie, religio-apocalyptic psychos, who would have annihilated the planet in a nuclear war if they had their way. That would have certainly stopped communism and those nuts thought Jesus would swoop them all up into paradise. Ellroy omits all this.

Ellroy has called the book too long, some of the more violent scenes could go, especially the scene on the boat where Pete Bondurant kills four men who double-crossed him. He kills them while he is having a "moderate" heart attack! It's just bad action movie stuff. Some other scenes are too heavy on the sadistic details, and could be nixed, which would also edit some of the individual character's, like Wayne Jr.'s story line, and let the book focus more on the big historical events. But, I don't think these are major problems – I was never bored.


I've heard Ellroy described as “right-wing,” probably from poison pen weenies, scandalized by the many racial slurs, while missing the point entirely. The slurs are part of the tone and all of the style, even if they're coming from the narrator or author's voice; this is the language of hatred and this is the language that people anywhere, who seek and get power, speak, just listen to the Nixon tapes. It can wear you down after 650 pages but that's the point, you're supposed to be exhausted by how relentless these shitbirds are.

From p.492:

Mr. Hoover spoke in D.C. Mr. Hoover wooed the American legion. He watched. He stood at the back of the hall.
The hall roared. Mr. Hoover sailed clichés. Mr. Hoover attacked Dr. King. Mr. Hoover looked old. Mr. Hoover looked frail. Mr. Hoover spewed HATE.
Littell watched.
Mr. Hoover ceded irony. Mr. Hoover ceded taste. Mr. Hoover relinquished control. Mr. Hoover spewed HATE.
It was unassailable/unvanquishable/unmediated.