Elaine Richardson

"America was never innocent," James Ellroy says matter-of-factly. "This country was built on a bedrock of land grabs, slavery, religious extremism, genocide and general bad juju. Anyone who contends anything else is insane."

With the release of "The Cold Six Thousand," the "L.A. Confidential" author has taken on that decade that won't go away—the sixties, serving up a wonderfully staccato glimpse at the underbelly of "Camelot," filled with ideas liable to stand most baby boomers' hair on end. "The notion that America was innocent prior to Jack Kennedy's murder is preposterous," Ellroy says. "By the rules he lived by Jack got what he deserved. He took aid from organized crime during the 1960 election; he repaid the debt by siccing his kid brother Bobby on the Mob at large. He betrayed the Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs. He pissed off a hot-headed troika of mobsters, exiles and renegade CIA men involved in the Cuban cause. They whacked him for it."

What Ellroy offers instead is his vision of a time that not only wasn't innocent—but teemed with corruption, violence and vice. Somewhat fittingly, Ellroy is chatting now from his temporary digs at Washington, D.C.'s Watergate Hotel.

"Yeah," he says. "I'm here. Actually, it's pretty good." Though he notes that his next book, set for the period from 1968 to 1972, will stop short of dealing with the Watergate break in and the ensuing scandal. "That's been covered," Ellroy says. "Everyone's bored with it." And while a lot of people might say the same about the sixties, for Ellroy, "The Cold Six Thousand" offers something new—a darkly funny, sparely written blast of fiction that shines a spotlight on the little fish, the schmos behind the scenes of the twentieth century's most public events.

"I was twelve when the decade began and 23 when it ended," Ellroy says of the sixties' staying power. "Look at the cast of characters—you had John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King. And the events—the FBI's war on the civil rights movement, the cover up of the Kennedy assassination, the early days of the Vietnam War, the start of the heroin trade. You had Howard Hughes, a racist, xenophobic drug addict who was so afraid of blacks...

"It was a hell of a time to be a kid—a hell of a time by any standards. And I get to go back and tell it all from the perspective of the bad guy," Ellroy says with some glee. "And I get to kill all these great people and it doesn't hurt anyone, because they're already dead."

Picking up where "American Tabloid" left off, "The Cold Six Thousand" finds one of Ellroy's bad guys, Wayne Tedrow—member of the Las Vegas P.D. and stooge for the casino operators—arriving in Dallas on November 23, 1963. Tedrow's been slipped a cold $6K to kill a black man who shived a casino dealer before splitting to Dallas. Coming off the plane, Tedrow walks into history: "He walked to the terminal. He followed bagged signs. People walked past him. They looked sucker-punched. Red eyes. Boo-hoo. Women with Kleenex... A woman walked by—boo-hoo-hoo—one big red nose... 'What's Wrong?' 'Some kook shot the President.'"

The story is a tapestry of fact and fiction, blending the people we know, the Kennedys and King and J. Edgar Hoover, into a mass of government corruption, linking them through an eerily effective network of mafiosos, Klan members, CIA drug traffickers and any other little scummy job you can imagine.

"These are the perps, bad guys, people on the run," Ellroy says of the book's crew, a revolving cast of the very bad, the bad and the not-so-bad lurking in the shadows behind America's most powerful figures. "I'm giving readers the souls of bad guys. If you can empathize with them—that's my goal, to make you interested in the characters so you can see the humanity in them, you see them as human beings and keep reading, even though you're following Tedrow down the road to becoming a racist murderer."

So what do we take from the sixties? "Disillusionment lead to enlightenment," Ellroy says prosaically. "But we [America] can't be as great as we are, we can't be the world's leader without doing dirty shit all over the world; and we can't be all the cultural things we are without calling on some mass interior lunacy."

James Ellroy shares "The Cold Six Thousand" plus a biographical documentary film May 31, 6pm at the Harold Washington Library, 400 South State, (312)747-4300.

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