Politics & Power Quote by James Ellroy

The line catches the snap of a cultural gearshift: a long, gray plateau of Eisenhower permanence giving way to Kennedy’s sudden, glossy dominance. Ellroy isn’t offering a civics memory so much as a lesson in how power becomes pop. “President forever” isn’t a fact; it’s the childhood sensation of uninterrupted authority, a background hum you stop hearing. Then Kennedy arrives and the world turns into a single, obsessively lit subject. The phrasing “all of a sudden” does the work of describing not just political change but media velocity: the acceleration of attention as television makes a presidency feel like a starring role.

Ellroy’s subtext is about identification and inheritance. He was “12, interested in politics,” a self-portrait of the budding obsessive: a kid already scanning for narratives, faces, and codes. The father detail is the keyhole. A Massachusetts accent “like Kennedy” turns national charisma into something domestic, intimate, even coercive. Politics isn’t abstract policy; it’s voice, cadence, belonging. The accent functions like a passport into the Kennedy spell, suggesting that Kennedy’s appeal wasn’t merely ideological but tribal, sonic, performative.

Coming from Ellroy, the noir anatomist of American glamour and rot, the anecdote also reads as origin story. He’s tracing the moment when public myth started to feel irresistible and personal - exactly the kind of myth that, a few years later, would curdle into assassination, conspiracy, and the dark material his work keeps excavating.