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Title: The Huey Long Murder Case

Author: Hermann B. Deutsch

Release date: August 6, 2020 [eBook #62864]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Tim Lindell, Harry Lamé and the Online
        Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
        book was produced from images made available by the
        HathiTrust Digital Library.)


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HUEY LONG MURDER CASE ***




Produced by Tim Lindell, Harry Lamé and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This
book was produced from images made available by the
HathiTrust Digital Library.)







  Transcriber’s Notes

  Text printed in italics has been transcribed _between underscores_.
  Small capitals have been changed to ALL CAPITALS. Superscript-t has
  been transcribed as ^t.

  More Transcriber’s Notes may be found at the end of this text.




  The Huey Long
  Murder Case

  by Hermann B. Deutsch

  Doubleday & Company, Inc.
  Garden City, New York, 1963




  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-15869
  Copyright © 1963 by Hermann B. Deutsch
  All Rights Reserved
  Printed in the United States of America
  First Edition




  In Boundless Affection, This Modest Volume
  Is Dedicated to
  _THE LYING NEWSPAPERS_
  A Generic Term Applied by Huey P. Long to
  _The Free Press of a Free Republic_.
  Especially is it dedicated to any and all who
  during almost half a century have been
  My Fellow Workers
  As Typified by
  John F. Tims and Ralph Nicholson
  And Most Specially Is It Dedicated to the Memory of
  Richard Finnegan and Marshall Ballard.




CONTENTS


              Foreword                        ix

  Chapter  1: Prelude to an Inquest            1

  Chapter  2: Profile of a Kingfish           13

  Chapter  3: August 8, 1935: Washington      29

  Chapter  4: August 30 to September 2        39

  Chapter  5: September 3 to September 7      53

  Chapter  6: September 8: Morning            69

  Chapter  7: September 8: Afternoon          75

  Chapter  8: September 8: Nightfall          81

  Chapter  9: September 8: 9:30 P.M.          91

  Chapter 10: September 8-9: Midnight        103

  Chapter 11: The Aftermath                  127

  Chapter 12: Summation                      145

  Chapter 13: The Motive                     157

              Epilogue                       171




FOREWORD


Until I undertook to gather all available evidence for what I hoped to
make a definitive inquiry into the circumstances of Huey Long’s
assassination, I had no idea of how many gaps there were in my knowledge
of what took place. Yet except for the actual shooting, which fewer than
a dozen persons were present to see, and for what then took place in the
operating room of Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, most of what had any
bearing on the circumstances took place before my eyes.

Consequently I am so deeply indebted to so many who were good enough to
fill those gaps with eyewitness reports, that no words of mine could
begin to settle the score. Chief among those whose claims on my
gratitude I can never wholly acquit are Dr. Cecil A. Lorio of Baton
Rouge, one of the only two surviving physicians who played any part in
the pre-operative, operative, and post-operative treatment of the dying
Senator; Dr. Chester Williams, the present coroner of East Baton Rouge
parish, who made it possible for me to see, study and understand the
microfilmed hospital chart sketchily covering the thirty hours that
elapsed between the time of the shooting and its fatal termination; Col.
Murphy J. Roden, retired head of the Louisiana State police, who was the
only person to grapple with Dr. Weiss; my friend and for many years
colleague, Charles E. Frampton; Sheriff Elliott Coleman of Tensas
parish; Chief Justice John B. Fournet of the Supreme Court of Louisiana;
and Juvenile Court Judge James O’Connor, who carried the stricken
Kingfish to the hospital after the shooting.

No less am I under obligations to Earle J. Christenberry, Seymour
Weiss, and Richard W. Leche, to whom I owe so much of the information on
background elements that alone make intelligible some of the otherwise
enigmatic phases of what actually occupied no more than a fractional
moment of crisis.

My thanks are likewise tendered to Captain Theophile Landry, formerly an
officer of the state police; to General Louis Guerre who was that
organization’s first commandant; to Adjutant-General Raymond Fleming of
Louisiana; to Charles L. Bennett, managing Editor of the Oklahoma City
_Times_; and particularly to Dr. James D. Rives and Dr. Frank Loria of
New Orleans.

To my one time professional competitor but always close friend,
Congressman F. Edw. Hebert, I tender this inadequate word of
appreciation for the assistance so freely rendered by him in gathering
material. To another friend and colleague, Charles L. Dufour, I am
deeply indebted for assistance in proofreading.

And finally, I am more grateful than I can say to my brother Eberhard,
an unfaltering--and what is more, successful--champion before the courts
of the principle of press freedom, for advice in preparing the final
draft of this manuscript; to LeBaron Barker for invaluable suggestions
in revising the original draft; and to all others who, in ways great and
small, have been of assistance in making possible the completion of this
task.

  Hermann B. Deutsch.

  Metairie, La.
  October 31, 1962




_The Huey Long Murder Case_




1 ---- PRELUDE TO AN INQUEST

  “_Assassination has never changed the history of the world._”

  ----DISRAELI


The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are
frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such
an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in
obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a
world-shaking event.

President McKinley, for example, was shot down in full view of the
throng that moved forward to shake his hand at the Pan-American
Exposition in Buffalo. Czolgosz, his anarchist assassin, boasted of his
deed, making no effort to escape. John Wilkes Booth, one cog in a large
plot, did not withdraw in the dimness of the stage box from which he
fired on Lincoln, but leaped into the footlights’ full blaze to posture
and declaim: “_Sic semper tyrannis!_”

In recent times the perpetrator of an unsuccessful attempt at mass
assassination actually clamored for recognition. When the late Cardinal
Mundelein became archbishop of Chicago in 1919, community leaders
tendered him a banquet of welcome. At the very opening of the repast,
during the soup course, the diners became violently ill. By great good
fortune--probably because so much poison had been introduced into the
soup that even the first few spoonfuls caused illness before a fatal
dose could be taken into the system--none of the diners lost his life
as a result of the decision of an assistant cook, Jean Crones, to do
away with the leaders of Catholicism in Chicago.

The cook made good his escape. He has never been apprehended. But for
days he sent a letter each morning to the newspapers and to the police
telling just how he had kneaded arsenic into the dumplings he had been
assigned to prepare for the soup, how he had later bleached his hair
with lime whose fumes almost overcame him, in just which suburbs he had
hidden out on which days, and so on. Short of surrendering to the
police, he did all that lay in his power to identify himself as one who
had attempted a mass murder of unprecedented proportions.

One could go down a long list of political assassinations throughout the
world during the past century, and find that almost without exception
the identity of the extroverted killer was not a matter of the slightest
doubt. No one questions the fact that a Nazi named Planetta murdered
Engelbert Dollfuss in his chancellery, that Gavrilo Prinzip shot the
Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, or that President Castillo Armas
of Guatemala was killed by a Communist among his bodyguards, Romero
Vasquez, who underscored his part of the plot by committing suicide.

In modern history, however, one political assassination is still being
hotly debated, not merely as to the motives which prompted the deed, but
as to the identity of the one whose bullet inflicted the fatal wound.
This was the killing of Huey P. Long, self-proclaimed “Kingfish” of
Louisiana, who was on the very threshold of a bold attempt to extend his
dominion to the limits of the United States via the White House when Dr.
Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., fired on him, and was almost instantly mowed
down by a fusillade from the weapons of the bodyguards with whom Senator
Long surrounded himself wherever he went.

To this day, nearly thirty years after the event, there are those who
believe that the assassination was part of a plot of which President
Franklin Roosevelt had cognizance and in which representatives of his
political organization participated. Only a month prior to his death
Huey Long had charged publicly on the Senate floor that, at a secret
conference in a New Orleans hotel, representatives of “Roosevelt the
Little” had assured the other conferees the President would undoubtedly
“pardon the man who killed Long.”

There are those who accept the coroner’s verdict that the homicidal
bullet was fired by young Dr. Weiss from the eight-dollar Belgian
automatic pistol he had purchased years earlier in France where he was
doing postgraduate work in medicine. According to his father, testifying
at the inquest which followed the deaths of the two principals, Dr.
Weiss carried this pistol in his car at night, ever since intruders had
been found loitering about the Weiss garage.

A great many others--quite possibly a majority of those who express an
opinion on the matter--insist that the bullet of whose effects Long died
was not the one fired by Dr. Weiss, but a ricochet from one of the
bodyguards’ guns in the furious volley that followed.

Still others, and among these are many of the physicians and nurses who
knew Dr. Weiss well, feel certain to this day that he did not fire a
shot at all, that he was not the sort of person who could have brought
himself to take the life of another human being. It is their contention
that Dr. Weiss merely threatened to strike the Kingfish with his
fist--may indeed have done so, since Long did reach the hospital with an
abrasion of the lip after he was rushed from the capitol to Our Lady of
the Lake Sanitarium. After the blow or threat of one the young physician
was immediately gunned down, according to this version of the incident,
a chance shot thus inflicting the wound of which, some thirty hours
later, Senator Long died.

The foregoing contradictory views are still further complicated by the
fact that there are many with whom it is an article of faith that
regardless of who fired the ultimately fatal shot, the leader they
idolized would have been saved but for an emergency operation performed
on him that same night by Dr. Arthur Vidrine.

Finally, there is no agreement to this day on what could have prompted
Dr. Weiss to commit an act which almost everyone who knew him still
regards as utterly foreign to his nature. No valid motive for this deed
has ever been definitively established. One assumption has it that the
doctor was the chosen instrument of the “murder conference” whose
discussions Long made the text of the last speech he delivered on the
Senate floor.

Others feel that inasmuch as Long was on the point of gerrymandering
Mrs. Weiss’s father, Judge Ben Pavy, out of the place on the bench he
had held for seven successive terms, Dr. Weiss’s act was one of
reprisal. At least one connection of the Weiss and Pavy families has
held that Dr. Weiss was actuated purely by a patriotic conviction that
only through the death of Long could his authoritarian regime be
demolished and liberty be restored to Louisiana.

In view of the foregoing, one question poses itself rather relentlessly:
At this late date is an effort to compose such far-ranging differences
of conviction and surmise worth while? Can any purpose beyond a remotely
academic recording of facts be served thereby? Is there anything that
distinguishes in historical significance the assassination of Huey Long
from the public shooting which in time brought about the death of, let
us say, Mayor William Gaynor of New York?

It is because those questions seemed to answer themselves, and
unanimously, in the affirmative that the data chronicled in the
following narrative were gathered. They represent among other items the
statements of every surviving eyewitness to the actual shooting, and of
surviving physicians who were present during, or assisted in, the
emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine. They include the never
previously revealed hospital chart of the thirty hours Senator Long was
a patient at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.

This was no easy search for truth. There are still those who refuse to
discuss the assassination of Huey Long with anyone who does not share to
the fullest their individual views of what took place. None the less,
the significance of two figures--Franklin Roosevelt and Huey Long--so
curiously alike and yet so dissimilar, indicated a genuine need to weigh
every scrap of obtainable evidence and assess any rational conclusions
to be drawn from them.

During the early 1930s no two names were better known in the United
States than those of Roosevelt and Long. The former was the product of a
patrician heritage plus the gloss of Groton and Harvard. The latter had
received no formal education beyond that afforded by the Winnfield high
school. An intermittent career as a book auctioneer, Cottolene salesman,
and door-to-door canvasser in the rural South did nothing to soften the
rough edges of his early environment. No two modes of address could have
differed more radically than the polished modulation of F.D.R.’s
fireside chats and the bucolic idiom of one of Huey Long’s campaign
rodomontades: “Glory be, we brought ’em up to the lick-log that
time”--“He thinks he’s running for the Senate but watch us clean his
plow for him come November”--“Every time I think of how I was suckered
in on that proposition I feel like I’d ought to be bored for the hollow
horn.”

It was once stated that before Seymour Weiss, the New Orleans hotel man
who was perhaps his closest friend, took him in hand, he dressed like a
misprint in a tailored-by-mail catalogue. The description was apt.
Early photographs prove it, if proof be needed. Even when he was
oil-rich from his expanding law practice in Shreveport, he wore a ring
in which a huge diamond gleamed, and a tie-pin in which another, equally
large, was set.

“Stop talkin’ po’-mouth to me, son,” an elderly legislator at Baton
Rouge once advised him. “You got di’monds all over you. Bet you even got
di’mond buttons on yo’ draw’s.”

None the less he was superbly endowed with what, for want of a better
term, might be called personal magnetism, a quality that drew crowds as
sheep are drawn to a salt trough. Nowhere was this manifested more
strikingly than in Washington, where throngs packed the Senate galleries
the moment it was known that he was about to deliver a speech.

He was a superb actor, too. Telling the same anecdote seven or eight
times a day, day after day in campaign after campaign, he would none the
less deliver it with the same chuckling verve at the thousandth
repetition with which he had told it initially. Little bubbles of
laughter escaped him as though involuntarily when he built up to the nub
of a jest. The effect of such tricks of stagecraft was heightened by the
unhurried but uninterrupted flow of words, the affectation of homely
idiom, the Southerner’s easy slurring of consonants.

In Arkansas, at the time of the unparalleled Caraway campaign of 1932,
every gathering set a new attendance record for the time and place. The
address Long delivered from the band shell at Little Rock drew the
largest crowd ever assembled in the history of the state. And when the
motorized campaign party whipped from one city to the next to meet the
demands of a tightly co-ordinated speaking schedule, crowds lined even
the back roads through which the cars passed; crowds of those who,
unable for one reason or another to leave their small farmsteads in that
depression-harried autumn, waited patiently by the dusty roadsides for
a fleeting glimpse of the limousine in which Huey Long whizzed by them.

He was at his best in the rough and tumble of partisan politics, both on
the hustings and on the Senate floor. When Harold Ickes said Huey had
“halitosis of the intellect,” Long retorted by dubbing him “the chinch
bug of Chicago.” To be sure, this was after he had broken with the
Roosevelt administration, when, scoffing at the Civilian Conservation
Corps, he offered to “eat every pine seedling they’ll ever grow in
Louisiana.” At the same time, when arguing fiscal policy with the
Senate’s veteran on such matters, Carter Glass, he said bluntly in the
course of debate that “I happen to know more about branch banking than
the gentleman from Virginia does.”

In these respects, as in matters of politesse, Roosevelt was the very
antithesis of the gentleman from Louisiana. Yet neither would brook
opposition from within his partisans’ ranks. The breach between
Roosevelt and as selfless a supporter as James A. Farley was to all
intents and purposes identical with the disagreements that broke the
ententes between Long and every campaign manager and newspaper publisher
who had ever supported his candidacy. Escaping conviction on impeachment
charges, he announced: “I’ll have to grow me a new crop of legislators
in Louisiana.” When some of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation was
nullified by the Supreme Court, the President promptly sponsored a bill
to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, with himself to name
at one swoop six additional members; and he did his best to force what
was widely referred to as his “court packing” measure through Congress.

Long campaigned vigorously through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and
other northern Midwest states for Roosevelt in 1932. Some of these
states went Democratic for the first time in more than a generation.
Admittedly this was not all due to Long’s stump speeches. But no one
knew better than Franklin Roosevelt that much of his success in the
Long-toured regions was due to the gentleman from Winnfield. He was one
of the few political leaders who did not underestimate the Long
potential, who correctly evaluated the Long influence in overturning the
politics of Arkansas to make Hattie Caraway the first woman ever elected
to a full term in the United States Senate. He had few illusions, if
any, on the score of the national organization of personal followers
Long was building through his Share-Our-Wealth clubs.

Under the circumstances it was inevitable that these two, neither of
whom would ever admit a potential palace rival into the inner circle of
his aides, should become implacable opponents. Long was on the point of
announcing his candidacy for president against Roosevelt for the 1936
campaign when a bullet cut short his career. The challenge he proposed
to fling at the man who subsequently carried all but two of the Union’s
states was neither a forlorn token like that of Governor Landon, nor a
visionary crusade like the campaign of Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. No
one appraised this more realistically than Roosevelt himself. He never
underestimated the sort of monolithic organization Long could create
around the hard core of existing Share-Our-Wealth clubs, the amount of
whose mail, as delivered to the Senate office building, dwarfed that
delivered to any other member of the Congress.

In pursuance of his objective, Earle Christenberry, with Raymond Daniell
of the New York _Times_, had completed, by midsummer of 1935, the
manuscript of a short book to be signed by Huey Long, under the title of
_My First Days in the White House_. He had written no part of this
rather naïve treatise himself, though he had discussed it in general
terms with those who did draft it. An earlier book “by Huey P.
Long”--_Every Man a King_--was actually a collaboration in which the
prophet of Share-Our-Wealth had dictated sections to the late John
Klorer, then editor of Long’s weekly _American Progress_ (née _Louisiana
Progress_), who later became a successful scenarist in Hollywood. But
the helter-skelter discussions in which Long outlined his ideas for _My
First Days in the White House_ were turned into reasonably coherent
prose by Daniell and Christenberry; much of the manuscript Long never
even saw until it was in final form.

It was an artless bit of oversimplified future history, written in the
past tense to describe the inauguration of President Huey Long, his
appointment of a cabinet (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred
E. Smith were among its members), and the adoption of national
Share-Our-Wealth legislation under the supervision of a committee headed
by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew W. Mellon! But it was gauged for
an audience which already believed that it was possible to redistribute
all large fortunes among the nation’s have-nots. It was never meant to
convert economists, financiers, and magnates. On the contrary, its
principal purpose was to notify all and sundry, especially “all,” that
Huey Long was a candidate for president and was confident of victory.

During that early autumn of 1935 the United States stood at a windy
corner of world history. In Europe totalitarians had taken over Italy’s
tottering liberal monarchy in 1922, and in 1933 the “republic” of
Germany. In Louisiana a home-grown fascist with complete dominance over
his own state was challenging the national leadership. Long had already
put into operation at the local level an authoritarian principle of
governmental sovereignty. Legislative and judicial functions were almost
wholly concentrated in the hands of an executive who was in reality a
“ruler.” The architect of that change was setting himself to expand it
to national dimensions.

The seriousness of this situation was recognized by observers of the
national scene. Raymond Gram Swing listed five public figures in a
volume entitled _Forerunners of American Fascism_ and named Huey Long as
the one of potentially greatest national danger. The others were Fr.
Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., Theodore G. Bilbo of
Mississippi, and Dr. Townsend. George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor
of the _Saturday Evening Post_, ordered a three-part serial profile of
the senator from Louisiana. Most of this was published posthumously, as
was all of what was to have been Long’s _Mein Kampf_: _My First Days in
the White House_.

_Kingfish_ was thus tapped for a vaulting effort to become America’s
_Duce_ or _Führer_ when violence put an abrupt end to the design and to
the life of its protagonist. Official records in the coroner’s office at
Baton Rouge give no details beyond those embodied on a printed form,
whose blank spaces were filled in to note the name, age, bodily
measurements, color, and sex of the decedent, together with a curt
notation ascribing death to a “gunshot wound (homicidal).”

Nearly thirty years have passed since those notations were entered on an
official form to be filed in the archives of East Baton Rouge parish.
Death has by now claimed many of the witnesses whose testimony might
have been of value in determining what actually took place in the
marble-walled corridor where the Kingfish, hurrying along with
characteristically flapping stride, received his mortal wound. But many
other presential witnesses yet survive.

No inquest worthy of the name has ever been conducted to decide and
record officially what the circumstances of Huey Long’s assassination
were. The family refused to authorize a necropsy. The death of Dr.
Vidrine in 1955 was a portent of the rapid and inevitable approach of
the day when the last eyewitness would have passed on. No one would then
be able to relate at first hand any detail of the violent moment which
averted a conflict pitting the two best-known public figures in the
United States against one another for virtual sovereignty over this
nation.

That violent moment would thus pass into history as a confused welter of
mutually contradictory versions, of rumors, half truths, and whole
untruths. Amid these the Huey Long murder case would remain an unsolved
and probably insoluble mystery. It was for this reason that I undertook
several years ago to gather and collate whatever eyewitness testimony
might still be available. I had known Senator Long and his family for
many years. Of the newsmen who heard Huey Long make his first state-wide
political address at Hot Well on July 4, 1919, I am the only one still
actively reporting the course of events and the doings of public
figures. I had accompanied him not only on any number of his state
campaigns, but also on the remarkable Caraway campaign of 1932.

I knew nearly all of his intimates, and was on first-name terms with
most of them then in the easy camaraderie of journalism. Without
exception every surviving witness I approached has given me his version
of what took place in the capitol corridor at the time of the shooting.
With but one exception every witness who was present in the operating
room and in the sickroom where Huey later died, has told me all that he
saw, heard, or did on that occasion.

These several accounts do not agree at every point. Indeed, here and
there they are rather widely at variance. For that very reason they
merit belief. Such differences validate the integrity of testimony so
given. Had these accounts tallied in every minute particular after the
passage of more than a quarter of a century, or even after the passage
of twenty-five minutes, they would have been suspect, and properly so.
It is axiomatic that eyewitness accounts of the same event invariably
differ, even when given at once. The classic illustration of this is the
prize fight at whose conclusion one judge awards the victory to Boxer A,
the referee calls the combat a draw, and the other judge selects Boxer
B as the winner.

The fact that there is no variance whatever between accounts given by
several witnesses, especially when their testimony concerns an
occurrence involving violence, is as certain an indication of collusive
fraud as is the fact that two signatures, ostensibly penned by the same
individual, show not the slightest difference in form, shading, or pen
pressure at any point. Unless one or both such signatures are forgeries,
absolute identity is a practical impossibility.

The question of whether or not the Kingfish could have wrested political
control of the United States from Franklin Roosevelt became academic
when a bullet found its mark in his body. But a glance at the highlights
of his career offers some of the clues to what happened to him on
September 8, 1935.




2 ---- PROFILE OF A KINGFISH

  “_The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals
  with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity._”

  ----SIR THOMAS BROWNE


One day some of the VIP’s of the Long political hierarchy were gathered
in the office of Governor Oscar Allen when a matter of legislative
procedure was under discussion. It is worth noting for the record that
the Governor’s chair was occupied by Senator Huey Long. Governor Allen
sat at one side of his desk. The names of the others do not matter.
Among them were highway commissioners, a state purchasing agent, floor
leaders from House and Senate, the head of an upstate levee board, and
the like.

Huey was issuing orders and lost his temper over the apparent
inattention of some conferees, who were conducting a low-voiced
conversation in a corner of the room.

“Shut up, damn it!” he shouted suddenly. “Shut up and listen to me. This
is the Kingfish of the Lodge talking!”

From that day on he was “Kingfish.” Even Franklin Roosevelt, telephoning
him from New York during the hectic maneuvering which preceded that
summer’s Democratic national convention, greeted him with the words:
“Hello, Kingfish!”

The self-proclaimed Kingfish was named Huey Pierce Long at his birth on
August 30, 1893, the third of four sons born to Huey Pierce Long, Sr.,
and Caledonia Tyson Long. The family farm was near Winnfield, and by the
standards of that place and time the Longs were well off; not wealthy,
to be sure, but never in want. Winnfield, seat of Winn parish, is a
small wholly rural community not far from the center of the state.

“Just _near_ the center of the state?” Westbrook Pegler once asked
Senator Long incredulously after watching him put his legislative
trained seals through their paces. “Just _near_ the center of the state?
I’m surprised you haven’t had the legislature declare it to _be_ the
center of the state.”

Scholastically, Huey did not distinguish himself, and he took no part in
athletics, lacking the physical pugnacity that is the heritage of most
young males. His brother Earl, two years younger than Huey, frequently
asserted that “I had to do all Huey’s fighting for him.” But as long as
he remained in high school (he left after a disagreement with the
principal and before graduation) he was the best debater that
institution ever numbered among its pupils.

His first essay into the realm of self-support came at age fourteen,
when he loaded a rented buggy with books and drove about the countryside
selling these at public auction. In doing so he laid the foundation for
what became the largest personal acquaintance any one individual ever
had among the farm folk of Louisiana.

“I’d never stay at a hotel, even later on, when I was out selling
Cottolene or baking powder or lamp chimneys or whatever,” he would
boast. “I always drove out beyond town to a farmhouse where they’d take
me in and put up my horse, and I would pay them something and put in the
evening talking to them, and later I would make it my business to drop
those folks a post card so they’d be sure to remember me.”

At summer’s end he entered Oklahoma University at Norman, hoping to
work his way through law school as weekend drummer for the Kaye Dawson
wholesale grocery. That did not work out. After a heated disagreement
with the head of the business he returned to Louisiana and became a
door-to-door salesman for Cottolene. In glorifying this product he held
cake-baking contests here, there, and yonder.

“My job was to convince those women they could fry chickens, steaks, or
fish in something else besides hog lard, and bake a cake using something
else besides cow butter,” he explained. “I would quote the Bible to them
where it said not to use any part of the flesh of swine, and if I
couldn’t convince them out of the Bible, I would go into the kitchen and
bake a cake for them myself.”

First prize for one of his cake-baking contests in Shreveport was
awarded to pretty Rose McConnell. Not long thereafter, she and Huey were
married. With all his savings and a substantial loan from his older
brother Julius, he managed to finance nearly a year of special study at
Tulane University’s law school in New Orleans. He and Rose shared a room
in a private home not far from the university, where among other
furnishings, a rented typewriter was installed.

Young Mr. Long would bring home a law book, drive through it in furious
haste while his phenomenally retentive memory seized every really
salient detail, “and then I would abstract the hell out of it, dictating
to my wife, who would type it out for me.” With barely enough money for
housing, carfare, short rations, and such essentials as paper and
pencils, it is none the less probable that these were the least
troubled, most nearly contented and carefree days the couple would ever
know. Before year’s end he was admitted to the bar, and returned to
Winnfield with Rose to begin practice.

He soon realized that despite local successes, the ambitious goals he
had set for himself could be attained only in a much larger field. So he
moved to Shreveport, which was just at the threshold of a tremendous
boom following the discovery of oil in the nearby Pine Island areas. By
accepting royalty shares and acreage allotments for legal services in
examining titles and the like, Huey was on the threshold of becoming
very wealthy, when he and the other Pine Islanders discovered that they
could not send their black gold to market unless they sold it at
ruinously low prices to owners of the only available pipeline. Long’s
implacable hostility toward the Standard Oil Company had its inception
then and there.

As first step in a campaign to have pipelines declared common carriers,
he became a candidate for the Railroad (now Public Service) Commission
and was elected. The brothers Long presented a solid front on this
occasion, Julius and Earl working like beavers to help Huey win. George
(“Shan”) had moved to Oklahoma by that time to practice dentistry. Only
once thereafter were they politically united, and that was when Huey ran
for governor in 1928.

Commissioner Long made his first state-wide stump speech the following
year at a rally and picnic which six candidates for governor had been
called to address. He had not been invited to speak, but asked
permission to say a few words--and stole the show!

One must picture him: a young man whose bizarre garb was accented by the
fact that since he was wearing a bow tie, the gleaming stickpin with its
big diamond sparkled from the otherwise bare band of his shirt front.
The unruly forelock of rusty brown hair, a fleshy, cleft chin, and a
general air of earnest fury all radiated anger. His blistering
denunciation of the then governor as a pliant tool of the Standard Oil
Company, and his attack on the state fire marshal, an anti-Long politico
from Winnfield, as “the official barfly of the state of Louisiana”
captured all the next day’s headlines.

Thenceforth the pattern of his future was set. He continued his attacks
on trusts and large corporations, certain that this would enlarge his
image as defender and champion of the downtrodden “pore folks.” His
assaults became so intemperate that in 1921, Governor John M. Parker
filed an affidavit against him with the Baton Rouge district attorney,
and thus brought about his arrest and trial on charges of criminal
libel.

His attorneys were his brother Julius, Judge James G. Palmer of
Shreveport, and Judge Robert R. Reid of Amite. He was found guilty, but
his reputation as a pitiless opponent was already so great that only a
token sentence was imposed: one hour’s detention, which he served in the
Judge’s chambers, and a one-dollar fine. He was so delighted by the
outcome that he gave his youngest son, born that day, the names of his
attorneys: Palmer Reid Long. Also, some years later, he saw to it that
the judge who had imposed the token penalties was elected to the state
supreme court.

Continuing his onslaughts against millionaires and monopolies, he ran
for governor in 1924 on a platform of taxing the owners of great
fortunes to aid the underprivileged in their struggle for a reasonable
share of the better life: education for their children, medical care for
all who could not afford to pay, and some sort of economic security for
all who toiled, be it in factory, market place, mine, or farm.

He now inveighed against Wall Street as a whole, not merely against
isolated corporations as before. The Mellon fortune and the House of
Morgan came in for their oratorical lumps; but it is a matter of record
that later, when Earl and Huey had fallen out, the former testified
under oath before a Senate investigating committee that he had seen his
brother accept $10,000 from an official of the Electric Bond and Share
Company “in bills so new they looked like they’d just come off the
press.”

However, from every stump Huey proclaimed that “ninety per cent of this
nation’s wealth is in the hands of ten per cent of its people.... The
Bible tells us that unless we redistribute the wealth of a country
amongst all of the people every so often, that country’s going to smash;
but we got too many folks running things in Louisiana and in Washington
that think they’re smarter than the Bible.”

None the less he ran third in a three-man first primary. In view of the
fact that he had no organized backing it must be conceded that it was a
close third, an amazing achievement the credit for which must be given
to his wide acquaintance among the farm population and the matchless
fire of his eloquence. A number of factors contributed to his defeat.
One of them undeniably was his refusal, or inability, to recognize that
he “could not hold his liquor.” After a convivial evening at a
lake-front resort in New Orleans, he drove back to town with his
campaign manager at a wildly illicit speed and was promptly halted by a
motorcycle officer. His campaign manager hastily explained to the
patrolman that the car was his, and that his chauffeur, one Harold Swan,
had merely acted under orders. But the fact that Huey Long and Harold
Swan in this instance were one and the same came out later, along with
accounts of how Huey had gone tipsily from table to table at the Moulin
Rouge inviting all and sundry to be his personal guests at his inaugural
ball.

Ordinarily, this might have won him votes in tolerant south Louisiana,
where prohibition was regarded as the figment of sick imaginations, like
the _loup garou_. But in south Louisiana he had few backers in that
campaign to begin with, being a north Louisiana hillman; and in north
Louisiana, where drinking had to be done in secret even before the
Volstead Act became nominally the law of the land, such reports were
sheer poison.

Finally, the weather on election day turned foul. The wretched dirt
roads of the hinterlands where Huey’s voting strength was concentrated
became impassable, so that many of his supporters could not reach their
polling places. But four years later, when he once more ran for governor
in yet another three-man race, he barely missed a majority in the first
primary. No run-off was held, however, because one of his opponents
announced he would throw his support to Long, pulling with him many
followers, including a young St. Landry parish physician, Dr. F. Octave
Pavy, who had run for lieutenant governor. Under the circumstances a
second primary would have been merely an empty gesture of defiance.

As governor, he rode roughshod over all opposition to his proposal to
furnish free textbooks to every school child, not merely in the public
schools, but in the Catholic parochial schools and the posh private
academies as well; for a highway-improvement program which he proposed
to finance out of increased gasoline taxes. Nor was he one to hide his
light under a bushel in pretended modesty. On the contrary, after each
success he rang the changes on Jack Horner’s classic “What a good [in
the sense of great] boy am I.” Moreover, it made little difference to
his devotees whether his promises of still greater benefits for the
future, or boasts about the wonders he had already achieved, were based
on fact or fiction.

By way of illustration: Dr. Arthur Vidrine, a back-country physician,
was catapulted into the superintendency of the state’s huge Charity
Hospital at New Orleans, and later was additionally made dean of the new
state university College of Medicine Long decided to found. Vidrine had
won the new governor’s warm regard by captaining the Long cause in Ville
Platte, where he was a general practitioner.

In some quarters there is a disposition to regard Arthur Vidrine as no
more than a hack who relied on political manipulation to secure
professional advancement. While it is obvious that his original support
of, and later complete subservience to, Huey Long brought him
extraordinary preferment, it must not be overlooked that in 1920, when
he was graduated from Tulane University’s college of medicine, he was a
sufficiently brilliant student to be chosen in open, nonpolitical
competition for the award of a Rhodes scholarship, and that for two
years he took advantage of this grant to pursue his studies abroad.

After his return he served for a time as junior intern at New Orleans’
huge Charity Hospital ... and within four years he was made
superintendent of that famous institution and dean of his state
university’s new medical school, both appointments being conferred on
him by newly elected Governor Huey Long, who lost no opportunity to
picture his protégé as something of a miracle man in the realm of
healing.

To an early joint session of the legislature, His Excellency announced
that under his administration Dr. Vidrine had reduced cancer mortality
at Charity Hospital by one third. This was obvious nonsense. Had it not
been, the medical world would long since have beaten a path to the
ornamental iron gates of the century-old hospital in quest of further
enlightenment.

One of the newspapers finally solved the mystery of this miracle of
healing. It stemmed solely from a change in the system of tabulating
mortality statistics. Calculated on the old basis, the death rate was
precisely what it had been before, a little better in some years, a
little worse in others. All this was set forth publicly in clear, simple
wording. But except for a few of the palace guard, who cynically
shrugged the explanation aside, not one of the Long followers accorded
it the slightest heed. They and their peerless standard bearer continued
to glory in the “fact” that he had reduced Charity’s cancer death rate
by a third.

This accomplishment was by no means the only one of which young
Governor Long boasted. Less tactfully, and certainly less judiciously,
he made vainglorious public statements to the effect that “I hold all
fifty-two cards at Baton Rouge, and shuffle and deal them as I please”;
also that he had bought this legislator or that, “like you’d buy a sack
of potatoes to be delivered at your gate.”

Within a year the House of Representatives impeached him on nine counts.
Huey had learned that such a movement was to be launched at a special
session in late March of 1929, and sent word to his legislative legions
to adjourn _sine die_ before an impeachment resolution could be
introduced. But an electric malfunction in the voting machine made it
appear that the House voted almost unanimously to adjourn, when in fact
opinion was sharply divided. A riot ensued, which was finally quelled
when Representative Mason Spencer of Tallulah, a brawny giant, bellowed
the words: “In the name of sanity and common sense!” Momentarily this
stilled the tumult and Spencer, not an official of the House, but merely
one of its members, called the roll himself, by voice, on which tally
only seven of the hundred members voted to adjourn.

The committee of impeachment managers in the House was headed by Spencer
and by his close friend, another huge man, George Perrault of Opelousas.
However, the impeachment charges were aborted in the Senate, when Long
induced fifteen members of that thirty-nine-man body to sign a round
robin to the effect that on technical grounds they would refuse to
convict regardless of evidence. Since this was one vote more than enough
to block the two-thirds majority needed for conviction, the impeachment
charges were dropped.

Spencer and Perrault remained inseparable friends, occupying adjacent
seats in the House to the day of Perrault’s death during the winter of
1934. On the night of September 8, 1935, Huey stopped to chat
momentarily with Spencer, who took occasion to protest against the
appointment of Edward Loeb, who had replaced his friend Perrault

“All these years I’ve got used to having a man the size of George
Perrault sitting next to me,” he complained. “Did you have to make Oscar
appoint a pint-size member like Eddie Loeb to sit in his place here?”

“You remind me,” retorted Long, “of the old nigger woman that was in a
bind of some sort, and her boss helped her out, giving her clothes or
money or vittles or whatever. So she said to him: ‘Mist’ Pete, you got a
white face, fo’ true, but you’s so good you’s bound to have a black
heart.’ That’s you, Mason. Your face is white, but you’ve sure enough
got a black heart.”

       *       *       *       *       *

A year after the abortive impeachment Long announced he would run for
the Senate forthwith, though his gubernatorial tenure would not be
terminated for another two years. In this way, he said, he would submit
his case to the people. If they elected him, they would thereby express
approval of his program. If not, they would elect his opponent, the
long-time incumbent senator. Long was elected overwhelmingly, and then
went from one political success to another, electing another
Winnfieldian, his boyhood chum Oscar Allen, to succeed him as governor,
and smashingly defeating a ticket on which his brother Earl was running
for lieutenant governor with his brother Julius’ active support. It was
later that year that Earl testified against Huey before a Senate
committee.

In that same year Huey Long entered Arkansas politics. Mrs. Hattie
Caraway, widow of Senator Thad Caraway, had been appointed to serve the
few remaining months of her husband’s term, then announced as a
candidate for re-election. Huey had two reasons for espousing her
candidacy. First, she had voted with him for a resolution favoring the
limitation of individual incomes by law to a maximum of a million
dollars a year. Secondly, the senior senator from Arkansas, Majority
Leader Joe T. Robinson, who had turned thumbs down on this resolution,
had endorsed one of the candidates opposing Mrs. Caraway’s election.
Thirdly, he felt it was time to put the country on notice that
Kingfishing could be carried successfully beyond the borders of its home
state.

Mrs. Caraway was accorded no chance to win. Every organized political
group in the state had endorsed one or another of her six opponents,
among whom were included a national commander of the American Legion,
two former governors, a Supreme Court justice, and other bigwigs. The
opening address of the nine-day campaign Huey Long waged with Mrs.
Caraway was delivered at Magnolia, just north of the Louisiana border.
At its close, a dazed local political Pooh-Bah wired a major campaign
headquarters in Little Rock: “A tornado just passed through here. Very
few trees left standing, and even those are badly scarred up.”

It was here that Long first formulated what later became the
Share-Our-Wealth clubs’ credo.

“In this country,” he proclaimed, “we raise so much food there’d be
plenty for all if we never slaughtered another hog or harvested another
bushel of grain for the next two years, and yet people are going hungry.
We’ve got enough material for clothes if in the next two years we never
tanned another hide or raised another lock of cotton, and yet people are
going barefoot and naked. Enough houses in this land are standing empty
to put a roof over every head at night, and yet people are wandering the
highways for lack of shelter.”

The remedy he proposed was simple: share our wealth instead of leaving
almost all of it in the hands of a greedy few.

“All in this living world you’ve got to do,” he insisted, “is to limit
individual incomes to one million dollars a year, and fix it so nobody
when he dies can leave to any one child more than five million dollars.
And let me tell you something: holding one of those birds down to a
measly million dollars a year’s no sort of hardship on him. At that rate
of income, if he stopped to bathe and shave, he’d be just about five
hundred dollars the richer by the time he got his clothes back on.

“What we got to do is break up those enormous fortunes like the
billion-dollar Mellon estate. By allowing them a million dollars a year
for spending-money you’ll agree we wouldn’t be hurting ’em any to speak
of. We’d have the balance to distribute amongst all the people, and that
would fix things so everybody’d be able to live like he could right now
if he made five thousand a year. Yes sir, like he was having five
thousand a year and a team of mules to work with, once we share the
wealth!”

Today it is almost impossible to visualize the effect of so alluring a
prospect on a countryside forced at that time to rely on the Red Cross
for seed corn and sweet-potato slips to assure a winter’s food supply.
The rural Negroes in particular, their “furnish” sadly shrunken as a
result of the depression, accepted it almost as gospel that Huey Long
was promising them five thousand dollars a year and a team of mules.

The impact of Long’s oratory was so clearly obvious that a special
committee waited on him at Texarkana, where he planned to close the
campaign on Saturday night, to ask that he remain in Arkansas over the
weekend to address meetings in the tier of counties along the
Mississippi River on Monday, the day before the election. He agreed to
do this, canceled plans to drive to Shreveport from Texarkana, and drove
back to Little Rock instead. Since this left the accompanying newsmen
with no grist for the early Monday editions, and since he had been
quoting the Bible right and left in his speeches, not to mention the
fact that in the glove compartment of his Cadillac a well-thumbed Bible
reposed beside a loaded revolver and an atomizer of throat spray, he was
asked where he expected to attend church the next morning.

“Me go to church?” he inquired incredulously. “Why I haven’t been to a
church in so many years I don’t know when.”

“But you’re always quoting the Bible and so....”

“Bible’s the greatest book ever written,” he interrupted, “but I sure
don’t need anybody I can buy for six bits and a chew of tobacco to
explain it to me. When I need preachers I buy ’em cheap.”

Mrs. Caraway’s first primary victory was a landslide. Well pleased, Huey
returned to Louisiana to defeat two-term incumbent Senator Edwin S.
Broussard and elect one of his chief attorneys in the impeachment case,
John H. Overton, in his stead. It was this election which a Senate
committee later investigated to sift allegations of fraud. The
investigation was recessed midway to give Senator Long an opportunity to
halt a threatened bank run by the simple expedient of having Oscar Allen
proclaim Saturday, February 4, a holiday celebrating the fact that
sixteen years before, on February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson had
severed diplomatic relations with Germany!

  PROCLAMATION

  STATE OF LOUISIANA
  EXECUTIVE DEPARTMENT
  BATON ROUGE

  Whereas, on the nights of February 3 and 4, 1917, Woodrow Wilson,
  president of the United States, severed diplomatic relations with the
  Imperial German government; and

  Whereas, more than 16 years has intervened before the great American
  people have turned their eyes back to the lofty ideals of human uplift
  and new freedom as propounded by Woodrow Wilson; and

  Whereas, it is now fitting that due recognition be given by the great
  State of Louisiana in line with the far-reaching principles enunciated
  by the illustrious southerner who sought to break the fetters of
  mankind throughout the world;

  Now, therefore, I, Oscar Kelly Allen, governor of the State of
  Louisiana, do hereby ordain that Saturday, the fourth day of February,
  1933, the 16th anniversary of the severance of diplomatic relations
  between the United States and the Imperial German government be, and
  the same is hereby declared, a holiday throughout the State of
  Louisiana and I do hereby order that all public business, including
  schools, colleges, banks and other public enterprises be suspended on
  said day and that the proper ceremonies to commemorate that event be
  held.

  In witness whereof I have caused to be affixed the great seal of the
  State of Louisiana on this, the third day of February, in the year of
  Our Lord, A. D. 1933.

  [Illustration: Oscar Kelly Allen

  Governor]

  [Illustration: Attest:

  E. A. Conway

  Secretary of State.]

This meant that all public offices, schools--and banks--were legally
forbidden to open their doors on that Saturday; by Sunday the Federal
Reserve authorities had put $20,000,000 at the disposal of the menaced
bank and the run which might have spread panic throughout the country
died a-borning. However, bank closures on a national scale were thus
postponed for only a month. March 4, while Franklin Roosevelt was taking
his first oath as president, state after state was ordering its banks to
close, as financial consternation (vectored from Detroit, however, and
not from New Orleans) stampeded across the land.

One of the newly inaugurated President’s first acts--“The only thing we
have to fear is fear itself!”--was to order all the nation’s banks to
close until individually authorized by executive permit to reopen. But
the onus of having initiated the disaster had been averted from
Louisiana by Huey’s bizarre bank holiday, and this underscored the fact
that for some time past, the number and ratio of bank failures in
Louisiana had been far, far below the national average. It also
strengthened the growing conviction that Louisiana’s Long was something
more than another Southern demagogue like Mississippi’s Bilbo or Texas’
Pa Ferguson.

Franklin Roosevelt was probably never under any illusions on that score.
He gauged quite correctly the omen of Share-Our-Wealth’s growing
strength. It had been blueprinted for all to see when Mrs. Caraway’s
candidacy swept the boards in Arkansas, and again when this movement,
plus the oratorical spell cast by the Louisianian in stumping the
Midwestern prairie states, carried them for Roosevelt later that same
autumn. According to Long’s subsequent diatribes, he had campaigned thus
for “Roosevelt the Little” on the express understanding that the
president-to-be would back the program for limiting individual incomes
and bequests by statute.

There is ample ground for the belief that Long was secretly gratified
when he realized that the New Dealers would have none of this proposal.
The issue which had served him so well in the past could thus be turned
against Roosevelt four years later, when Long planned to enter the lists
as a rival candidate for the world’s loftiest office. Publicly, to be
sure, he professed himself outraged by “this double cross,” bolted the
administration ranks once more, repeated an earlier, defiant fulmination
to the effect that if the New Dealers wished to withhold control over
Louisiana’s federal appointments from him, they could take this
patronage and “go slap dab to hell with it.”

Roosevelt and his _fidus Achates_, Harry Hopkins, took him at his word,
and gave the anti-Long faction, headed by Mayor Walmsley of New Orleans,
a controlling voice in the distribution of federal patronage. The
breach between the two standard bearers--one heading the New Deal and
a federal bureaucracy tremendously swollen by a swarm of new
alphabetical agencies, the other all but worshiped as archangel of
Share-Our-Wealth--widened from month to month.

Roosevelt left the anti-Long philippics to members of his cabinet and
other department heads: Hugh Johnson, NRA administrator, for example, or
Interior Secretary Harold Ickes. The climax to these interchanges came
in the late summer of 1935, when in an address delivered on the Senate
floor, Long charged that “Franklin Delano Roosevelt the first, the last,
and the littlest” was linked to a plot against his--Huey Long’s--life.




3 ---- AUGUST 8, 1935: WASHINGTON

  “_I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone
  who killed Long._”

  ----UNIDENTIFIED VOICE FROM A DICTOGRAPH RECORD QUOTED BY HUEY LONG IN
  AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES SENATE


Long’s charge that he had been selected for assassination by a cabal in
whose plot President Roosevelt was involved at least by implication made
headlines from coast to coast and filled page on page of the
_Congressional Record_. But it fell quite flat, being taken in a
Pickwickian rather than in any literal sense. Even the unthinking elders
of the Share-Our-Wealth clubs, their numbers now sadly shrunken by
reason of the march of time, still cling to a rather pathetic belief in
this extravagant bombast only by reason of an uncanny and unrelated
coincidence: within less than thirty days after making the charge Long
actually was assassinated.

His climactic thrust at the White House was not taken too seriously at
the time, however, because, for one thing, Long had cried “plot against
me” too often. By the fall of 1935 the story was old hat, even though it
had never before been blazoned in so august a tribunal as the Senate,
and had never before involved, even by indirection, a chief executive.
On two previous occasions he had placed Baton Rouge under martial law,
calling out the militia, to defend him against plots on his life. Only
seven months before making the Senate speech in question he had
“exposed” the plot of a group of Baton Rouge citizens, a number of high
officials among them, to waylay his automobile on a given night while he
was being driven to New Orleans, and kill him at a lonely bend of the
River Road where the car would of necessity have to slow down.

In proof of this he put on the witness stand an informer who had
infiltrated into the ranks of the supposedly plotting group, and who
testified as to the details of a conspiracy.

Early in his senatorial career he had made himself so offensive in the
washroom of a club at Sands Point, Long Island, that the irate victim of
a demand to “make way for the Kingfish” slugged him. Since the blow
split the skin over an eyebrow, the incident could not be concealed.
Long promptly charged that hired bravos of the House of Morgan had
assaulted him in the club washroom, intent on taking his life.

Finally, when what he told the Senate on that August day in 1935 was
boiled down in its own juices it made pretty thin gruel, as anyone who
cares to wade through the fine print of the _Congressional Record_ for
that date can see for himself. The truth is that on the eve of Congress’
adjournment, Long was trying to build up against Roosevelt something he
could tub-thump before the voters in the next year’s presidential
campaign.

On the principle that “the best defense is an attack,” he was keeping
the New Deal hierarchy in Washington so busily occupied on another front
that he could take advantage of their preoccupation to infiltrate
Louisiana’s federal patronage with his followers.

Presumably control over these appointments to all sorts of oddball
positions under the PWA, WPA, and other auspices was now in the hands
of the anti-Long contingent, headed by among others a good half of the
state’s members in the lower house of Congress. But these were parochial
politicians, fumblingly inept at organizing such matters on a state-wide
scale. To cite but a single example, one project sponsored under the
anti-Long dispensation was a review of the newspaper files in the New
Orleans City Hall archives. By direction of Mayor Walmsley, so many
appointees were packed into this particular task that they had to work
in one-hour-a-day shifts in order to find physical room in the small
garret-like space set aside for it.

Theoretically, they were to index these files, and to repair torn pages
with gummed tape as they came across them. Actually, they would for the
most part merely turn the leaves of the clumsy bound volumes until they
came to the Sunday comics or other such features, and read these at
leisure. Then they repaired to Lafayette Square when their hour of
demanded presence was up, and joked about the way they would put out of
joint the noses of the anti-Long leadership on election day; for of
course most of them were dedicated Share-Our-Wealthers eagerly looking
forward to $5000-a-year incomes when Huey Long got around to
redistributing the nation’s wealth.

Meanwhile their Kingfish was giving the anti-Long leaders a real
Roland--an entire battalion of Rolands, in fact--for their patronage
Oliver. The spoils-system theory of a patronage plum is that its
bestowal is good for three votes; in other words, that the recipient and
at least two members of his family or circle of friends will vote for
the party favored by the job’s bestower. A United States senator would
normally be consulted about appointments to all federal patronage posts
not covered by civil service in his state: Collector of the Port,
Surveyor of the Port, Collector of Internal Revenue, district attorneys,
federal judges, and the like. During the early New Deal era this roster
was tremendously amplified by the staffs of numerous new alphabetical
agencies and their labor force.

Huey Long may not have expected to be taken quite so literally when he
told the Roosevelt hierarchs they could take their patronage “slap-dab
to hell” as far as he was concerned. But when he saw that he was indeed
given no voice in any Louisiana federal appointment, he initiated an
entire series of special sessions of the state legislature which
subserviently enacted a succession of so-called “dictatorship laws.”
Under these statutes he took the control of every parochial and
municipal position in every city, village, and parish out of the hands
of the local authorities, and vested the appointive power in himself.

He did this by creating new state boards, composed of officials of his
own selection, without whose certification no local public employee
could receive or hold any post on the public payroll. A board of teacher
certification was thus set up and without its--which is to say, Huey
Long’s--approval, no teacher, janitor, school-bus driver, or principal
could be employed by any local parish or city school board. No municipal
police officer or deputy sheriff throughout the state, no deputy clerk
or stenographer in any courthouse, no city or parish sanitary inspector,
and so on down the entire line of public payroll places, could continue
in his or her position unless specifically okayed by Senator Long. In
those pre-civil-service days the appointive state, parish, and city
employees in Louisiana outnumbered the federal patronage places within
the state by hundreds to one, even during the New Deal’s era of
production controls and “recovery.”

Hence, for each federal patronage job he had nominally lost to his
opponents he gained hundreds--literally--of local appointments which
were thenceforth at his disposal. When this was pointed out in the
anti-Long press and he was asked for comment, he chuckled and said:
“I’m always ready to give anybody a biscuit for a barrel of flour.”

In sum, he had brought practically all local public employees, including
those who staffed Mayor Walmsley’s city administration in New Orleans,
under the Long banner by the summer of 1935. Only a scant handful of
“dictatorship laws” yet remained to be enacted, and these were already
being drafted to his specifications. The moment Congress adjourned, when
he would be released from Washington and could return to Louisiana, they
would be rushed to enactment.

Meanwhile he readied his parting shot against the White House. The
incident on which he based the grotesque charge that President Roosevelt
abetted, or at the very least knew of and acquiesced in, an
assassination plot was a supposedly _sub rosa_ political caucus held at
the Hotel De Soto in New Orleans on Sunday, July 21, 1935. The gathering
had been convened presumably without letting any outsider (i.e.,
“nonplotter”) know it was to be held. Its ostensible objective was the
selection of an anti-Long gubernatorial candidate whom all anti-Long
factions would agree to support against any nominee the Senator might
hand-pick for endorsement.

However, with what still appears to be a positive genius for fumbling,
the anti-Long leadership guarded with such butter-fingered zeal the
secret of whether, where, or when they were to meet that even before
they assembled, Long aides had ample time to install the microphone of a
dictograph in the room where the anti-Long General Staff was to confer.
The device functioned very fuzzily. Its recording (which it was hoped to
duplicate and replay from sound trucks throughout the ensuing campaign)
was only spottily intelligible. But a couple of court reporters had also
been equipped with earphones at a listening post, and their stenographic
transcript, though incomplete, afforded some excerpts which Senator
Long inflated into what he presented as a full-scale murder plot.

His fulmination was delivered before a crowded gallery, as usual. This
popularity annoyed many of his senior colleagues, none more so than
Vice-President Garner, whom John L. Lewis was soon to stigmatize as
“that labor-baiting, poker-playing, whiskey-drinking evil old man.” More
than once, as the galleries emptied with a rush the moment Long
finished, Mr. Garner would call to the departing auditors, saying: “Yes,
you can go now! The show’s over!”

In this instance, as on many previous occasions, there was no advance
hint of the fireworks to come. The fuse was a debate over the
Frazier-Lemke bill, and Senator Long contented himself at the outset
with charging that the administration was conducting “government by
blackmail.” In making this statement he was referring to NIRA, which had
succeeded NRA, the latter having been declared unconstitutional some
three months earlier. This had nothing to do with the Frazier-Lemke
bill, but it gave Mr. Long an opportunity to charge that no contracts
for PWA work were being financed unless the contractor agreed to abide
by all the provisions of the NRA code which the Supreme Court had
invalidated.

That led to the statement that “we in Louisiana have never stood for
[such] blackmail from anybody,” which in turn led to a section of his
arraignment the _Congressional Record_ headed:

  “THE PLAN OF ROBBERY, MURDER,
  BLACKMAIL, OR THEFT”

He then loosed his farewell salvo.

“I have a record of an anti-Long conference held by the anti-Long
Representatives from Louisiana in Congress,” he said in part. “The
faithful Roosevelt Congressmen had gone down there to put the Long
crowd out.... Here is what happened among the Congressmen representing
Roosevelt the first, the last and the littlest.”

Holding aloft what he said was a transcript of the dictograph record, he
listed the names of those present, naming a collector of internal
revenue, an FERA manager for the state, and giving as the first direct
quote of one of the conferees a statement made by one Oscar Whilden, a
burly horse-and-mule dealer who had headed an anti-Long direct-action
group calling itself the Square Deal Association. Whilden was quoted as
saying at the very opening of the meeting that “I am out to murder,
kill, bulldoze, steal or anything else to win this election!”

An unidentified voice mentioned that the anti-Long faction would be
aided by more “income tax indictments, and there will be some more
convictions. They tell me O. K. Allen will be the next to be indicted.”

“That,” explained Mr. Long for the benefit of his hearers and the press
gallery, “is the governor of Louisiana. Send them down these culprits
and thieves and thugs who openly advocate murdering people, and who have
been participants in the murder of some people and in their undertaking
to murder others--send them down these thugs and thieves and culprits
and rascals who have been placed upon Government payrolls, drawing from
five to six thousand dollars a year, to carry on and wage war in the
name of the sacred flag, the Stars and Stripes. That is the kind of
government to which the administration has attached itself in the state
of Louisiana!”

Four of Louisiana’s congressmen were named as having taken part in the
caucus which Senator Long dubbed a “murder conference.” They were J. Y.
Sanders, Jr., Cleveland Dear, Numa Montet, and John Sandlin. But it was
another of the conferees whom Senator Long quoted next, reading from
the transcript, as suggesting that “we have Dear to make a trip around
the state and then announce that the people want him to run for
Governor, and no one will know about this arrangement here ... as you
all know we must all keep all of this a secret and not even tell our own
families of what is done.” Whereupon, according to the record, another
voice proposed that “we should make fellows like Farley and Roosevelt
and the suffering corporations ... cough up enough to get rid of that
fellow.”

Commented Senator Long: “Yes, we should make the Standard Oil Company
and the ‘suffering corporations’ cough up enough ... says Mr. Sandlin
... [but] I am going to teach my friends in the Senate how to lick this
kind of corruption. I am going to show them how to lick it to a
shirttail finish.... I am going to give you a lesson in January to show
you that the crookedness and rottenness and corruption of this
Government, however ably [_sic!_] financed and however many big
corporations join in it, will not get to first base.”

More of the same sort of dialogue was read from the transcript.
Congressman Sandlin assured the meeting that President Roosevelt will
“endorse our candidate.” Another of the conferees, one O’Rourke, was
described by Long as having refused to testify when another witness at
an inquiry into one of Huey Long’s earlier murder-plot charges “swore
that he had hired O’Rourke to commit murder in Baton Rouge. I was the
man he was to kill so there was not much said about it except that he
refused to testify on the ground that he would incriminate himself,
whereupon Roosevelt employed him. He was qualified and he was
appointed.”

The statement most frequently quoted in the weeks and months that
followed was that of an unidentified voice which the transcript reported
as saying: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would
take only one man, one gun and one bullet.” And some time thereafter,
according to the transcript, another unidentified voice declared that “I
haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon any one who
killed Long.” Thereupon someone asked: “But how could it be done?” and
the reply was: “The best way would be to just hang around Washington and
kill him right in the Senate.”

The conference was adjourned after notifying Congressman Dear that the
people would clamor to have him run for governor of Louisiana. (The
significance of this is that in one of Dear’s final campaign speeches he
made the statement that gave rise to a widely disseminated and still
persistent version of the shooting that followed, by almost exactly one
month, the delivery of Long’s attack on the New Deal.)

Long concluded his address to the Senate with the assertion that he had
exposed this presumably hush-hush meeting “to the United States Senate
and, I hope, to the country ... and I wish to announce further they have
sent additional inspectors and various other bureaucrats down in the
State....

“The State of Louisiana has no fear whatever of any kind of tactics thus
agreed upon and thus imposed. The State of Louisiana will remain a
state. When you hear from the election returns in the coming January ...
Louisiana will not have a government imposed on it that represents
murder, blackmail, oppression or destitution.”

The Senate then resumed the business of the day. But most of the
correspondents in the press gallery had left and the talk was all of
Huey Long’s excoriation of the New Deal, of his promise that “if it is
in a Presidential primary, they will hear from the people of the United
States,” and of his declaration that rumors of the New Deal leaders
plotting to have him murdered were now “fully verified.”

NOTE: Most of the purely local references, repetitions, adversions to
extraneous matters, and the like have been omitted from the foregoing
condensation of Senator Long’s last speech before the Senate. Those who
may wish to read the full text of his address will find it in the
_Congressional Record_ for August 9, 1935, pages 12780 through 12791.
The section headed “The Plan of Robbery, Murder, Blackmail, or Theft”
begins on page 12786, second column.




4 ---- AUGUST 30 TO SEPTEMBER 2

  “_Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book. Surely
  I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown to me._”

  ----JOB


Congress did not adjourn its 1935 session until seventeen days after
Senator Long had delivered his blast about “the plan of robbery, murder,
blackmail, or theft” at the Roosevelt administration in general and at
its head in particular. This was, as he clearly stated in his reference
to presidential primaries, the opening move in launching his 1936
candidacy for president; the next step would be publication and
distribution of _My First Days in the White House_.

He devoted himself to revision of this manuscript during the fortnight
in which Congress remained in session, and marveled at the difficulties
he encountered. Like many another magnetic orator, he was no writer, and
in spite of the ghosts who had helped bring it into being, _My First
Days in the White House_ eloquently testifies to that fact. None the
less, had he lived, the book would have won him adherents by the
million. In all its naïve oversimplification, it was still a triumph of
classical composition beside the helter-skelter phraseology of his
senatorial and stump-speaking oratory. But the latter, like his many
other public utterances, his early political circulars, and even the
jumbled prose of his first book: _Every Man a King_, had been accepted
almost as gospel by Longolators who jeered at literate anti-Long
editorials as propaganda dictated and paid for by the Money Barons.

Congress did adjourn in due course, and now it is time to follow Long
almost hour by hour through the final ten days of his life, assembling
an unbiased chronicle in order to dispel myths and reveal truths about
his assassination. His first concern was the publication of his book.
His only other fixed commitment before having Governor Allen call the
legislature into special session for the enactment of a final dossier of
dictatorship laws, was delivery of a Labor Day address at Oklahoma City
on September 2. He had accepted this invitation gladly, since it would
afford him an opportunity to couple evangelistic grandiloquence about
wealth-sharing with kind words about blind Senator Thomas Gore, who
faced stiff opposition in his campaign for re-election.

Earle Christenberry was left in charge of the Washington office, where
he was to pack for transportation all documents and records which might
be needed to elect a Long-endorsed governor and other state officials in
Louisiana. Meanwhile, Mr. Long with the manuscript of his book and three
of his bodyguards went to New York for a few days of relaxation.

It was also part of his long-range design to seek the Democratic Party’s
nomination for president at the 1936 convention. To be sure, he was
under no misconception as to the sort of fate this bid would encounter.
For one thing, Roosevelt’s personal popularity had reached new heights
as his first term drew to a close. His nomination for a second term was
all but inevitable. Long had attacked not only the administration as
such. He was carrying on corrosive personal feuds with Postmaster
General Farley, Interior Secretary Ickes, NRA Administrator Hugh
Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, and a host of other party
bigwigs.

Naturally, Louisiana’s Kingfish realized fully that these leaders,
controlling the party machinery in the convention of 1936, would see to
it not merely that F.D.R. received a virtually unanimous nomination for
a second term, but that even were Roosevelt eliminated from contention,
Huey Long’s effort to become the party’s standard bearer would be
rejected.

Unquestionably, that is exactly what the Kingfish wanted. He already had
a virtually crackproof national organization in his swiftly expanding
Share-Our-Wealth clubs. The growth of this movement was now so rapid
that his staff found difficulty in keeping pace with it. So valuable had
its name become that both “Share _Our_ Wealth” and “Share _the_ Wealth”
were copyrighted in Earle Christenberry’s name.

Long’s purpose was to rally from both the Republican and Democratic
camps the many who were still embittered by their struggles to escape
the Great Depression. Times had undeniably bettered. The economy would
reach a peak figure in 1937. But even the WPA “shovel leaners” were
convinced that the government owed them much more than was being doled
out on payday, and were entranced by the vision of a future in which
Huey Long would soak the rich to provide for each toiler, however lowly
his station, an income of $5000 a year and a span of mules.

In the prairie corn and wheat belts, in the Dakotas and in Oklahoma, in
all the places where Long had preached wealth-sharing while campaigning
for Roosevelt, desperate landowners on the verge of eviction from
mortgaged or tax-delinquent acres their forebears had carved out of the
wilderness, were still rallying their friends and neighbors to help keep
potential bidders from foreclosure auctions. These too would recall
Long’s clamorous efforts to bring the Frazier-Lemke bill to a vote, and
the conservatives’ success in holding it back from the floor. One and
all, they would read _My First Days in the White House_, and they would
learn in its pages how readily a wealth-sharing miracle could come to
pass if only Huey Long were president....

None the less, publishers were chary of bringing out the book under
their imprint. To Long this was no matter for concern. Over a period of
at least three years a war chest for the presidential campaign he
planned to wage in 1936 had been growing steadily. It included not
merely money--a levy on the salaries of all public employees under his
domination in Louisiana, and major campaign contributions from
corporations that felt themselves obligated to show tangible
appreciation for past favors or sought to insure themselves against
future reprisal--it included also a solid stockpile of affidavits about
the boondoggles of divers federal agencies. Hard-pressed men, driven to
almost any lengths by the crying need of their families for such bare
necessities as food and shelter, were being forced to promise they would
“praise Roosevelt and cuss Long” before being granted a WPA laborer’s
pittance.

At the outset of Long’s senatorial career this entire trove of cash and
documentary dynamite was kept in some strongboxes of the Mayflower
Hotel, where the Senator first established his capitol residence. But
for various reasons, at least one of which was the hotel’s refusal to
bar his political opponents from registering there while in Washington,
his relations with the Mayflower deteriorated rapidly to the point where
he moved to the Broadmoor, at 3601 Connecticut Avenue. The view from one
of the windows of his apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park charmed him.
At the same time the campaign cash and documents were transferred to the
safety-deposit vaults of the Riggs National Bank, where the Senator kept
a Washington checking account, or rather, where Earle Christenberry kept
it for him.

Hence the question of paying for the publication of _My First Days in
the White House_ presented no problem. For that matter, neither did the
seeming permanence of a few scattered centers of anti-Long resistance in
Louisiana. Since the dictatorship laws enacted during the previous
twelvemonth made it virtually impossible to defeat Long proposals in the
legislature, or Long candidates at the polls, the fixity of a few
isolated opposition enclaves was desirable because, to quote Mr. Long,
“it gives me somebody to cuss out, and I can’t make a speech that’s
worth a damn unless I’m raising hell about what my enemies are doing.”

Only one stubborn stronghold of this sort really irked him by its
refusal to capitulate. This was the parish of St. Landry, whose seat was
Opelousas. Always independent of alien dictation, this fourth-largest
county in Louisiana had remained uncompromisingly anti-Long under the
leadership of a couple of patriarchal autocrats: Judge Benjamin Pavy,
tall, heavy-set, and wide-shouldered, with a roundish countenance
against whose rather sallow complexion a white mustache stood out in
sharp contrast; and District Attorney Lee Garland, short and plump, his
features pink beneath a flowing crest of white hair.

Garland, much the elder, had held office continuously for forty-four
years, Judge Pavy for twenty-eight. The latter had been elected to the
district bench in 1908, after an exceptionally bitter local contest in
which the leader of the anti-Pavy forces, Sheriff Marion Swords, went so
far as to charge that one of Ben Pavy’s distant relatives-in-law was an
individual the purity of whose Caucasian ancestry was open to challenge.
Since Judge Pavy was elected not only then, but continuously thereafter
for the next twenty-eight years in election after election, it is
obvious the report was given no credence at the time. With the passage
of years, the incident was forgotten.

The situation in the parish of St. Landry would not have disturbed Huey
Long too greatly, had there not been the possibility that in some
future state Supreme Court election the heavy vote of that parish might
upset the high tribunal’s political four-to-three Long-faction majority.
On this ground alone it might be important for the Kingfish to alter the
political climate of the St. Landry judicial district before the larger
demands of an approaching presidential campaign monopolized his time and
energy.

A matter of prestige was likewise involved. It was Long’s purpose to
take the stump personally in the St. Landry area, in order to bring
about the defeat of its heavily entrenched Pavy-Garland faction and
score a personal triumph. On the other hand, if through some mischance
his persuasive oratory and the well-drilled efficiency of his cohorts
failed to carry the day, the result would be hailed not merely in
Louisiana, but throughout the nation, as a personal defeat for the
Kingfish. Hence, nothing must be left to chance. Matters must be so
arranged that failure was to all intents and purposes impossible.

This involved no very serious difficulties. Earlier that summer, when he
first outlined to his lieutenants plans for liquidating the Pavy-Garland
entente as a politically potent factor, he gave orders to prepare for a
special session of the legislature, this one to be called as soon as
Congress adjourned. Once convened, the lawmakers were to gerrymander St.
Landry from the thirteenth into the fifteenth judicial district. This
would leave Evangeline (Dr. Vidrine’s home bailiwick), small but
overwhelmingly pro-Long, as the only parish in the thirteenth district,
thus assuring the election of a friendly judge there.

At the same time, it would annex St. Landry to another district which
already included three large pro-Long parishes. Admittedly, the enlarged
district would be given two judges instead of one, but under the new
arrangement neither could possibly be elected without Long’s
endorsement.

Senator Long took it for granted that his wishes--commands,
rather--would be complied with at once. But some close friends earnestly
urged him to forgo the gerrymander, at least temporarily. Political
feeling was running too high as matters stood to risk possible violence,
perhaps even a popular uprising, through such high-handed and summary
procedures. Reluctantly, he agreed to hold this particular project in
abeyance, but only for the moment.

At the close of August, however, with Congress in adjournment, and in
view of the need to neutralize the federal government’s policy of
patronage distribution solely for the benefit of his political foes back
home, he decided that the time for action was at hand. Once more he sent
word to Baton Rouge that preparations for a special legislative session,
the fourth of that calendar year, be started without further delay. It
should be convened on the night of Saturday, September 7.

Meanwhile certain bills, embodying the statutory changes he wanted,
should be drafted forthwith by Executive Counsel George Wallace, so that
he--Huey--could check their wording in advance, and make any amendments
he deemed necessary. This must be done with secrecy--not the sort of
puerile intrigue with which his opponents had assembled their hotel
conference, but under a tight cloak of concealment, so as to catch the
opposition unawares. The gerrymander that would retire Judge Pavy to
private life was to be the first measure introduced and passed, becoming
House Bill Number One and later Act Number One. The date of the state’s
congressional primaries was also to be moved up from September 1936 to
January. These should be held at the same time as the primaries for
governor and other elective state officers. And there was another
measure, one still in the planning stage, the details of which he would
give later; something to take the sting out of Roosevelt’s punitive
dispensation of federal patronage in Louisiana.

Having disposed of these matters, Long left Washington for New York with
three of his most trusted bodyguards--Murphy Roden, Paul Voitier, and
Theophile Landry. All he had in mind at the moment was a day or two of
relaxation. August 30 was his birthday. He would be forty-two years old.
This in itself called for some sort of celebration. Besides, in view of
the busy weeks ahead--the Labor Day speech in Oklahoma on September 2,
the special session of the legislature, the need to rush _My First Days
in the White House_ into print, the fall and winter campaign for state
offices, the presidential campaign to follow--this might well be, for no
one knew how long, his last opportunity for casual diversion.

“We flew to New York from Washington,” Captain Landry recalls, “and went
straight to the New Yorker Hotel, where they always put the Senator in a
suite on the thirty-second floor. We got there on August 29. I remember
that because the next day, a Friday, was his birthday, and Ralph Hitz,
the owner of the hotel, sent up a big birthday cake. Lila Lee, a New
Orleans girl who was vocalist for Nick Lucas’ band that was playing the
New Yorker’s supper room, came up to the suite with the cake to sing
Happy-birthday-dear-Huey. After the cake had been cut and we all had a
taste of it, he gave the rest to Miss Lee.

“About that time Lou Irwin came up to take us out to dinner. I think the
Senator had talked to him on the phone about finding someone to publish
his book, and that Lou had said this was out of his line, since he was a
theatrical agent, but he would inquire around and see what could be
done. Earle Christenberry wasn’t with us. He had remained in Washington
to gather up all the things the Senator might need in Louisiana, papers
and so on, and he was going to take his time driving home with them
while we went on to Oklahoma City.

“Anyway, Lou Irwin said he had just booked a show into some place
uptown. I have forgotten the name of it; all I remember is it was quite
a ways uptown, and Lou told us they had just imported from France some
chef that made the best onion soup in the world.

“So we went there to eat, and we had hardly sat down when who should
come over to our table but Phil Baker, the radio star. He said:
‘Senator, I want you to meet the two most beautiful girls in New York,
my wife Peggy and her niece.’ I don’t remember the niece’s name, but she
was a young girl that looked to be about eighteen, and she was very
pretty. Baker was all excited, talking about having just signed a
contract that very day with the Gulf Refining people to take over their
radio show, the one Will Rogers, who got killed in a plane crash with
Wiley Post up in Alaska a couple of weeks before that, used to do.”

The name of the niece was Cleanthe Carr. Her father, Gene Carr, was one
of the best-known cartoonists and comic-strip originators in the
country. His work was widely syndicated.

“The Senator got up to dance with Mrs. Baker,” the Landry account
continues, “and she must have told him, while they were dancing, about
this niece being an artist, because when they came back to the table he
picked up a napkin and gave it to this girl, saying: ‘Young lady, I
understand you’re quite a cartoonist. Let’s see you sketch me here on
this napkin!’ Well, she made a perfect sketch of him, with his arms out
and his hair flying, as though he were making a hell-fire speech. He
thought the sketch was fine, but Phil Baker said we ought to see some of
her serious work, and we all should come up to his apartment, where he
had quite a few of the paintings she had done.

“So we left. I don’t think Lou Irwin came with us. But anyway, after we
had been quite a long while at the Baker apartment, Senator Long said
the niece would have to do the pictures for his book that he had written
about how he was already elected president and what he did in the White
House to redistribute the wealth after he was inaugurated. By the time
we got back to the hotel it was three o’clock in the morning.

“The Senator went over to the newsstand to look at the headlines in the
morning papers, and a gentleman who had been in the lobby when we came
in got up and came over to me and asked if my name was Captain Landry. I
told him yes, that was right, and he said he wanted to talk to Mr. Long.
I said: ‘Man, don’t you see what time it is? You haven’t got a chance to
see him now. You better come back tomorrow.’

“So he said it was very important for him to talk to the Senator right
away, that he had been sent up from Washington by Earle Christenberry,
and that was how he knew what my name was. He also said he represented
the Harrisburg _Telegraph_ Publishing Company in Harrisburg,
Pennsylvania, and they were anxious to publish the Senator’s book about
his first days in the White House. Naturally, that made a difference,
because that was one of the things Senator Long had come to New York
for, so I went across the lobby to the newsstand and told him what the
story was.

“At first he said he wasn’t about to talk to anybody that time of night,
but when I told him how Earle had sent the man up special because the
Harrisburg _Telegraph_ people wanted to publish the book, and how the
man said he had just missed us when we went out to supper, and had been
waiting in the lobby ever since, the Senator said: ‘Well, all right,
then. Tell him to come up to 3200 in about ten minutes, but make him
understand he’ll have to talk damn fast when he gets there.’ So I did,
and the man--I have forgotten his name; that’s if I ever knew it--didn’t
have to talk so fast after all, because the meeting didn’t break up
till after five o’clock, when we all just about barely had time to get
packed and catch the first train for Harrisburg.

“This was Saturday morning, August 31, and we went from the station at
Harrisburg right to the office of the newspaper and I know they must
have reached an agreement about printing the book, because when we left
by train for St. Louis that evening, two stenographers and a sort of
editor from the Harrisburg _Telegraph_ came along, and they were working
most of the night and all the next morning, cutting down the manuscript
for this book. It was too long the way it was written. Anyhow, as I
remember, they cut out two hundred pages, and finished just about the
time we got ready to cross the bridge and pull into St. Louis, where we
only had about five minutes to change to the train for Oklahoma City.

“This was a Sunday morning, and while I don’t know how the word had got
around St. Louis that Huey Long was passing through, I tell you that old
station there was packed and jammed like nobody ever saw before, with
people that were not working, it being Sunday, so they just wanted to
catch one glimpse of the man while he was passing through.”

Senator Long, Theophile Landry, and Paul Voitier, another bodyguard,
reached Oklahoma City late that afternoon. Only one public official,
Mayor Frank Martin, was at the station to greet the distinguished
visitor.

“Officials in Fadeout as Huey Lands” headlined the Oklahoma City
_Times_. Most conspicuous among the absentees was State Labor
Commissioner W. A. Murphy who, when invited by the local Trades and
Labor Council some days earlier to appear jointly with Long as one of
the Labor Day speakers, replied:

“I won’t be near or in a parade or program with that fellow.... A man
trying to destroy the only President who ever tried to help union labor
doesn’t deserve the support of labor, let alone being its guest.”

Long was suffering from an attack of hay fever and from near-exhaustion
when he reached the Black Hotel. He had had almost no sleep since the
previous Friday morning. But he was in better spirits the next day when
he greeted among others Kaye Dawson, the produce merchant for whom he
had been a part-time salesman in Norman during his brief interlude of
trying to work his way through the law school of the University of
Oklahoma. It is worth noting, however, that when Dawson invited him to
visit his home, Long stipulated that both Landry and Voitier be included
in the invitation.

He rode in the Labor Day parade that morning, too, and returned to his
hotel suite to hold an impromptu press conference about his
Share-Our-Wealth program. But when one of the reporters asked him
whether he had ever pressed the charge, made only two or three weeks
earlier, that several Louisiana congressmen were plotting his death, he
snapped:

“I’m tired of talking. If you can’t stay here without asking questions,
get the hell out. Can’t you see I’m tired?”

That afternoon the Labor Day crowd at the Fair Grounds cheered his
speech lustily, even his attacks on Roosevelt and Hoover, whom he
compared to the peddler of two patent medicines, High Popalorum and Low
Popahiram, both being made from the bark of the same tree.

“But for one the peddler peeled the bark off from the top down,” he
explained, “and for the other he peeled it off from the bottom up. And
that’s the way it is at Washington. Roosevelt and his crowd are skinning
us from the ear down, and Hoover and the Republicans are doing the job
from the ankle up. But they’ve both been skinning us and there ain’t
either side left now.”

“Huey May Toss Hat,” headlined the _Oklahoman_ next day, and quoted
Huey’s promise that “if Mr. Roosevelt and Mr. Hoover are the nominees
next year, or anyone that looks like Roosevelt or Hoover, we will have
us another candidate.”

He left almost immediately after the rally, even though the only
available eastbound train would carry him no farther along the road to
Louisiana than Dallas. From that point he and his two bodyguards motored
to Shreveport, where they were met by another of the bodyguards, George
McQuiston, who had been dispatched from Baton Rouge in a state-police
car to await the Senator’s coming.

They passed the night at the Washington-Youree Hotel, where the Kingfish
conferred with his local political satraps. The following morning he and
his entourage left for Baton Rouge, arriving in time to begin a
day-and-night series of meetings with Governor Allen, George Wallace,
Secretary of State Eugene Conway, and others. There Landry and the
Senator parted company.

“He said for me to go to New Orleans and rest there, and go on a
vacation if I wanted to,” Landry added. “He said something about all of
us going on a vacation soon, just as soon as things in Baton Rouge got
settled. If only I had stayed with him I might have been where I could
save his life! But the one thing that never came into my mind was that
anybody would try anything in Baton Rouge. Not in Baton Rouge, where he
was always surrounded by some of us ... not in Baton Rouge where you’d
think he’d surely be safe....”




5 ---- SEPTEMBER 3 TO SEPTEMBER 7

  “_There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to
  succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws._”

  ----MACHIAVELLI


Tuesday far into the night, throughout Wednesday, and again Thursday
until well past noon, Long labored with attorneys, officials,
secretaries, and typists, going over and over the measures to be
introduced when the forthcoming special legislative session was
convened. The streamlined rush with which such bills were speeded to
final enactment in less than five days did not allow for delays to
correct them once they had been dropped into the hopper.

The system that made this possible was not original with the Kingfish.
It had been devised by two astute parliamentarians, Oramel Simpson and
George Wallace, to meet the exigencies of a flood crisis in 1927.

By convening the legislature late at night, with all bills whipped into
final shape before the lawmakers assembled, having one member introduce
all the bills, suspending the rules to have them all referred at once,
and all to the same committee, regardless of content, what would
otherwise be delayed by being parceled out on two separate legislative
days could be accomplished in a matter of minutes.

Then, immediately after midnight, or even the next morning, the
committee could meet, gallop through the dossier, give all
administration-sponsored measures a favorable report, and turn thumbs
down on all anti-administration proposals (the record was forty-four
bills thus “considered” in an hour and seven minutes), report them back
to the House, and order them engrossed and put on the calendar for final
action the next morning. That would be another legislative day.

On the morrow the House would then pass the bills as fast as the clerk
could mumble a few words of the title and the members could press the
electric-voting-machine buttons. Immediately thereafter the bills would
be rushed across the corridor to the Senate, where the same routine
would be followed.

Thus the third legislative day in the House would also be the first
legislative day in the Senate, so that a few minutes after the fourth
midnight, the governor could sign the bills into law, each measure
having been read “in full” on three separate days in each house.

This was a brilliant device for meeting an emergency; the iniquity of it
lay in the fact that, when employed as routine, it shut off all real
study of the proposals, and barred opponents or representatives of the
public from being heard on them before committees.

       *       *       *       *       *

By Thursday noon, September 5, everything was in readiness for the
introduction at a moment’s notice of thirty-one administration- (i.e.,
“Long”) sponsored must bills--all this without one official word to
indicate that a special session was so much as contemplated. None the
less, among the press correspondents in the capitol gallery it was taken
for granted that such an assembly would be convened at the weekend; but
when they pressed Senator Long to confirm or deny the surmise, he
professed complete ignorance.

“As far’s I know,” he said blandly, “Oscar hasn’t made up his mind
about if he’ll call one any time soon. Leastaways he never said a word
to me about it.”

“When are you going to make up his mind so he can tell you?” quipped one
of the reporters.

“He’d near about kill you if he heard you say that,” chuckled the
Kingfish good-naturedly, “and his wife would finish the job.”

He spent some time then chatting informally with rural well-wishers,
while waiting for Murphy Roden, who had driven the Cadillac with License
Plate Number 1 from Washington to New Orleans and was to call for its
owner that afternoon in Baton Rouge. The Senator was due to make one of
his fiery radio broadcasts over a state-wide hookup that night at eight
in the Roosevelt Hotel. After a late lunch at the Heidelberg Hotel
coffee shop he read the first installment of a biographical sketch of
his career which had just appeared on the newsstands that day in the
_Saturday Evening Post_. Then at length, with a group of friends and a
cadre of bodyguards to see him off, he left for New Orleans. The
bystanders urged him in parting to “pour it on ’em, Kingfish ... give
’em hell, Huey, you’re just the boy that can do it!” The party reached
the Roosevelt barely five minutes before he was scheduled to begin
broadcasting.

He spoke that night for a little more than three hours, interrupting the
early portion of his program from time to time to say, as was his custom
on such occasions:

“This is Senator Huey P. Long talking, and since the lying newspapers
won’t tell you these things, I’ll get the boys to play a little music
for the next five minutes or so, and while they’re doing that you go
call some friends and neighbors on the telephone and let them know I’m
on the air, and if they really want the truth they can turn on their
radios and tune in.”

One of the major proposals he made public that night was a project for
enabling unusually gifted high-school students to continue their
education through college at virtually no cost to themselves or their
parents. Education for the underprivileged--e.g., the free-schoolbook
law--had been one of the most potent elements in the grand strategy of
his drive for popular support when he first entered public life. It
highlighted the last public address of his career as well.

“One thousand boys and girls,” he pledged, “will be given a practically
free college education at L.S.U. next year. We’ll select the ones that
make the best grades and send them through college, a thousand of them
for a starter. I already asked Dr. Smith [Louisiana State University
president] whether he could do it beginning this fall, if we came up
with a hundred thousand dollars extra for the University appropriation,
and he said, well, he might be able to do it, anyway he would try. So I
asked him could he do it if we gave him an extra two hundred thousand
dollars, and he said yes indeed he sure could. So I told him we would
give him _three_ hundred thousand dollars just to make sure he had
enough.”

Of course he attacked the Roosevelt administration at the national level
and for its intrusion via patronage into the local arena of Louisiana
politics; and equally of course he “poured it on” Mayor Walmsley,
Congressman Sandlin, “the whole old plunderbund that you’ve done got rid
of once and that Roosevelt is trying to saddle back onto you.”

At intervals the musicians would play “Every Man a King,” and Senator
Long, who claimed authorship of the lyrics but could not carry a tune,
would recite one chorus to the band’s accompaniment; and once he recited
a chorus of “Sweetheart of L.S.U.,” for which he had also written the
lyrics to music composed by Castro Carrazo, the state university’s
bandmaster.

At the end of his three-hour stint he was driven to his home in posh
Audubon Boulevard and spent the night there with his family. But he was
up and away early enough the next morning--Friday--to eat breakfast in
the Roosevelt Hotel coffee shop, talking with an uninterrupted
succession of callers while he was at the table, and again in his
twelfth-floor suite, access to which could be gained only if one were
passed by a succession of bodyguards. Technically, these were officers
of the State Bureau of Investigation and Identification, which had come
into being during Long’s term as governor.

The bill creating it was introduced by an anti-Long member as a
nonpolitical measure, at a time when Louisiana had no state
constabulary. The jurisdiction of each sheriff and his deputies was
restricted to his county. What the backers of the new measure sought was
the creation of a force which, working in conjunction with the F.B.I.,
would have state-wide jurisdiction.

Instead of opposing this, on the ground that it was inspired by
political opponents, Long espoused it enthusiastically, and then turned
it into a personal elite guard whose powers were broader than those of
any mere local peace officer. Certain particularly trustworthy members
of the group were assigned to duty as his bodyguards.

They screened all who sought to approach him in his twelfth-floor
retreat at the Roosevelt where he remained throughout Friday, busily
instructing influential leaders on how best to speed the work of the
special session which would be convened on the following night. Earlier
he had summoned Earle Christenberry from his home to the hotel, hoping
to straighten out his income-tax situation. Two ninety-day postponements
on making a return had already been extended to him by the Bureau.
However, there would be no further extensions, he was told. A return
would have to be made by September 15. None the less, an unending stream
of visitors made it impossible for these two to seclude themselves to
prepare the belated return.

Much of the day’s discussion concerned itself with the potential
candidates for the Long slate in the approaching January election. Most
of the minor officials--state auditor, register of the land office,
commissioner of agriculture, and the like--would be endorsed for
re-election as a matter of course. All had been Long stalwarts for
years. But under the constitution a governor was prohibited from
succeeding himself, and since Justice Fournet’s elevation to the state
Supreme Court, the lieutenant-governorship had been filled by an acting
president pro tem of the Senate.

A number of top-echelon figures in the Long organization each advanced
claims to selection as gubernatorial candidate. Each regarded himself as
the logical choice.

Meanwhile, as late as Friday afternoon, the Kingfish continued to insist
to reporters who inquired about the rumored special session that “Oscar”
had not yet told him when or whether a summons to such a legislative
assembly would be issued ... and even while he was telling the newsmen
this, highway motorcycle officers were delivering to every rural doorway
in the state a circular which had been rushed into print at Baton Rouge
two days earlier.

The text on one side of this fly-sheet followed the standard pattern of
a Long attack on all who might oppose the program to be furthered by the
special session, those who “want to put [us] back into the hands of
thugs, thieves and scoundrels, who loaded the state down with debt and
gave the people nothing, who kept the people in the mud and deprived
their children of education....”

The other side of the sheet bore an equally vehement excoriation of
President Roosevelt and his regime, which was using the weight of
federal patronage and federal tax money to defeat “our” movement ...
“the man who promised to redistribute the wealth, but we know now he is
not going to keep his word....”

He remained in his suite until dinnertime, when he joined Seymour Weiss
in the Fountain Lounge, and made an engagement to play golf with him at
the Audubon Park Club’s course in the morning. To Earle Christenberry’s
admonition about the inescapable need to file his income tax before the
fifteenth he said:

“Come up to Baton Rouge Sunday morning, and we’ll work in the apartment
in the State House where we won’t be interrupted. Bring the papers with
you.”

He slept well that night--Friday--and rose refreshed to drive out to
Audubon Park with Seymour Weiss in the latter’s spandy-new Cadillac,
which had been delivered only the afternoon before, and would be ruined
the next night by the reckless speed with which, not yet broken in, it
was driven to Baton Rouge after news of the shooting reached New
Orleans.

The morning was pleasant, and Senator Long enjoyed the game to the
fullest. An indifferent golfer at best, he played primarily for the
thrill of sending an occasional long drive screaming down the fairway.
Whenever he achieved this, and more particularly if in doing so he
outdistanced his friend Seymour’s drive, he shouted with a delight which
not even an ensuing flubbed approach could quench.

The game also gave him an opportunity to discuss current developments
and problems with one of the few friends he trusted completely. That
Saturday he and Weiss seated themselves on a tee bench, and let foursome
after foursome go through while they talked in the only relative privacy
available to them. What about the federal patronage impasse?

“I told him,” Mr. Weiss recalls, “that some of the leaders were
worrying. After all, if the Walmsley-Sandlin people were the only ones
who could give out those federal jobs.... And he interrupted me at that
point and asked me had I ever heard of the tenth article of the Bill of
Rights? Well, of course I had, and told him so. He said yes, everybody
had heard of it, but did I realize what was in it?

“Then he went on to explain that while it was only about three lines
long, it provided that anything not specifically permitted to the
federal government or forbidden to the states by the Constitution was
straight-out reserved to the individual states or to the people.

“I said something like all right, so what then, and he said, as nearly
as I can remember his words:

“‘So then there’s a bill going into that special session tonight--Oscar
must have done issued the call by this time--providing a thousand-dollar
fine and one hell of a heavy jail term for any federal employee who
interferes with Louisiana’s rights under Article Ten. So anybody that
uses federal funds to interfere with our program is going to be arrested
and tried under the law we’re about to pass. That’ll give them something
to think about up yonder.’

“I didn’t believe any such law as that could be made to hold water and
said so, and even he admitted that it was open to interpretation, though
he still thought it was perfectly sound. But he also said it wouldn’t
make any difference because long before the question could reach the
Supreme Court at Washington and be settled, that federal-patronage deal
would be so badly scrambled up it wouldn’t affect the outcome of our
election in January one bit. He also said he had been telling all our
people to take every slick dime of Washington money that was offered to
them, and then go to the polls and vote for our candidates, because his
program would do more for them than they ever would get out of those
lousy WPA jobs.

“The main thing he tried to impress on me that morning was that I could
forget all my worries about the presidential campaign. ‘Everything’s in
wonderful shape,’ he said to me. ‘It’s never been in better shape. All
the money we’re going to need we already have in hand, I mean we’ve got
it right now, not just pledges but cash; and on top of that we’ve got a
load of affidavits and other documents about some of the things that
have been going on, a stack of papers heavy enough to break down a
bullock.’

“As I remember, I asked if this was the material in the vaults of the
Riggs National Bank, and that was when he really surprised me. He said
no, everything had been taken out of the Riggs vaults just a few days
before he left Washington, and put in another place for safekeeping. But
he didn’t say where he had put it, and I didn’t ask. After all, he was
the one to decide where he wanted it, and why, and if the time ever came
when it was important for me to know where it was, he would tell me. And
besides, he was so confident about everything being in the best possible
shape, so sure things couldn’t be better, that I felt no anxiety about
it.

“‘We’re going to handle the campaign exactly the same way as we did in
the West for that double-crossing Roosevelt in 1932,’ he told me.
‘Between us, we’ll pick out the main towns in each state, and you’ll go
there five or six days in advance and try to line up someone who will
serve as chairman of the meeting when I get there.’ That is how we did
it in 1932, and it wasn’t always easy, because hunting for Democrats in
the Dakotas in those days, or in Minnesota, was exactly like the old one
about the needle in a haystack. In some of those towns there just wasn’t
a Democrat. But I would stick to it and find someone, no matter who. If
the only Democrat I could produce was a truck driver, all right. Huey
would have a truck driver for chairman of the meeting he would address
on behalf of Franklin Roosevelt for president.

“‘It’ll be a lot easier this time,’ Huey went on while we were talking
during that Saturday golf game, ‘because you know and I know I make my
best speeches when I’m taking the hide off of somebody. I never could
make a decent Fourth of July oration in my whole damn life. But give me
something to raise hell about and somebody to blame for doing it, like I
had when I was campaigning for Mrs. Caraway in Arkansas, and nobody can
stop me!

“‘Not only that, but you’ll get on the radio and give out interviews to
the newspapers before I hit town, with all that same old business about
this interesting and controversial personality that’s about to come to
town, the man they had been reading and hearing so much about, and they
would have this chance to come out and find out the truth for
themselves. Also what date he’ll be there and so on, and how he would
talk about a topic of importance to the whole country, and most of all
to them, with Joe Whoozis to preside over the meeting, and that’ll draw
a big crowd every time, no matter if they’re Democrats or what. And no
matter if they’re Democrats or what I’ll have every last, living one of
them talking and thinking and voting my way before I get through.’

“You see, all Huey ever wanted was to get a crowd in front of him. You
could leave the rest to him. He had done just that in Arkansas three
years before, and everything was better organized by 1935. Not only
would I be there with arrangements and interviews, but the boys would
have come to town and distributed literature and cartoon circulars to
every house in the place and printed copies of some of Huey’s speeches
about share-the-wealth and so on.

“‘We’ll do it just like Arkansas, only on a hell of a lot bigger scale,’
he said. ‘We’ll have all the copies we need of _My First Days in the
White House_ along with the Share-Our-Wealth book, which we didn’t have
in ’32, and when I come to town with the sound trucks and deliver the
speech of my life, you just watch them flock over to our side.... Yes,
sure, there’s enough money to pay for all those books and pamphlets and
everything else we’ll need.’

“How much money was in that box? I haven’t any idea, and I don’t think
anyone else ever knew. It came from all sorts of sources. State and city
employees contributed two per cent of their pay for campaign purposes.
Those were the so-called deducts. Then there were campaign contributions
from people who disliked Roosevelt and believed Huey could whip him, and
didn’t care whether he called himself Republican or Democrat or
Vegetarian, just so long as he licked Roosevelt or made it possible for
somebody else to lick him. Also, there were contributions from people
who were under obligations to Huey, like the banks he kept solvent in
Louisiana. I don’t believe even he had any idea how much the total came
to. A million, maybe; maybe several millions. All I know for certain
sure is that he said for me not to worry about financing the campaign,
that we had every round dollar we ever would need of campaign expenses
already put away for safekeeping after he took it out of the Riggs bank
vaults--and to this day nobody has ever been able to find out what
became of it!

“During the course of our game that morning, walking down the fairways,
we talked a lot about the governorship too. As I remember it, Huey
mentioned a number of names, and some he said just didn’t have what it’d
take to run a state, and about some he said he didn’t want to buck the
north Louisiana prejudice against voting for a Catholic for governor,
because there was no use making a campaign any harder than you
absolutely had to, even if you could win it anyway.

“The one thing he said we’d have to be careful about was that if he
picked one of the half dozen or so that regarded themselves each one as
the rightful Long candidate, he would make some of the others so sore
there would be a chance of a split in the party, and that was one thing
he wanted to avoid.

“Well, with all our time out for talking, it was about two o’clock in
the afternoon when we finished our round. He had certainly seemed to
enjoy it, both the exercise and the chance to talk without having every
Tom, Dick, and Harry coming over to interrupt and say he just wanted to
shake hands. Also it must have been a relief to be able to talk without
worrying about people listening in or repeating what he was supposed to
have said.

“We went back to the hotel for lunch. He said there was no need of me
coming up to Baton Rouge either that night or the next day, as the first
time the bills would come up for passage would be in the House on Monday
morning; it would be just routine up to that time. So I said Bob Maestri
[State Conservation Commissioner and later for ten years mayor of New
Orleans] and I would be in Baton Rouge on Monday morning, and then we
parted. Murphy Roden had been waiting to drive Huey to the capitol, and
they left, right after lunch. Everything indicated the going would be so
smooth and easy. Who could have dreamed that the next time I saw him,
only a day later, he would be waiting for Dr. Maes to come up from New
Orleans and try to save his life?”

       *       *       *       *       *

Baton Rouge’s hotel lobbies and the State House corridors alike were
crowded by the time Murphy Roden and the Senator reached the skyscraper
capitol, where they went at once to his apartment on the twenty-fourth
floor. He had the state maintain a suite for him there because he felt
that at that height the freedom from pollen and dust enabled him to
sleep better.

Most of the House members were already on hand, but many of the senators
did not trouble to put in an appearance until the following day. Since
all bills were to be introduced in the House, the Senate had nothing
more momentous on its agenda than to meet, answer roll call, listen to
the chaplain’s invocation, and appoint two committees. One of these
would solemnly inform the governor, and the other the House, that the
Senate of Louisiana was lawfully convened and ready for business. Having
conveyed this somewhat less than startling intelligence, the token
quorum by which a constitutional mandate had been fulfilled could, and
in fact did, adjourn until Monday afternoon, at which time all bills
duly passed by the lower house would be laid before them.

These would be headed by House Bill Number One, the anti-Pavy
gerrymander, and a somewhat similar measure which was designed to keep
Congressman J. Y. Sanders, Jr., from returning to his home in Baton
Rouge to run for a judgeship. His father, a former governor and
congressman, stood at the very head of Huey Long’s _bête noire_ list.
Another measure high on Long’s “must” roster made provision for the fact
that his current senatorial term would expire unless renewed in the fall
of 1936 by re-election.

But in one-party Louisiana, the Democratic primary was the only actual
election, even though technically it selected merely a party nominee.
Its date was fixed for September by the state election law as this
statute currently stood. Obviously, a campaign for a senatorial primary
to be held in the fall of 1936 would play hob with Long’s plans to run
against Roosevelt for the presidency that same season. Consequently, one
of Huey’s thirty-one must bills amended the state election law by
setting the primary’s date ahead from September to January. Thus Mr.
Long could win the Democratic nomination (equivalent to election in
Louisiana) for senator at the year’s outset; with that as paid-up
political insurance he would be free to devote the balance of 1936 to
his presidential campaign.

Another of the must bills is significant in this connection in spite of
the fact that it was rooted in a strictly personal grudge, because it so
strikingly exemplifies the savagery with which at an earlier stage of
his career Long made Negro affiliation the prime target of political
attack.

Dudley J. LeBlanc, a Southwest Louisiana Acadian, had run for governor
several times, had been a legislator off and on, and would one day
become a millionaire as author and high priest of a nostrum called
Hadacol. He and Long had been allies as members of the Public Service
Commission in the old days, but had fallen out and had been at swords’
points ever since.

Defeated by the Kingfish when he sought to retain his office, LeBlanc
organized a burial-insurance society of a type immensely popular among
the Negroes. Since he catered primarily to this segment of the
population, he put in a Negro nominal president of the “coffin club,” as
Long invariably called it. In the columns of his weekly newspaper, _The
American Progress_, Long thereafter lost no opportunity to reproduce
what purported to be one of the brochures issued by LeBlanc’s company,
showing pictures of LeBlanc and the Negro officers of the company
together. Ultimately, Long had a law passed banning from Louisiana that
type of insurance society.

LeBlanc thereafter moved the company’s home office across the state line
into Texas, and continued in business. Although no longer pillorying
opponents by reason of Negro affiliation, Long included in his must
bills a prohibition against publishing, printing, or broadcasting in
Louisiana any advertising matter by insurance companies not authorized
to do business in the state.

Occupied with these and a thousand and one other such minutiae of
legislative procedure, Long remained on the main floor of the capitol
that Saturday night until the House adjourned, trailing a nimbus of
bodyguards as he dashed back and forth between Governor Allen’s office
and the House chamber. Some of his leading supporters tried vainly to
keep up with him: Dr. Vidrine, “Cousin Jessie” Nugent, Dr. Clarence
Lorio, Louisiana State University president James Monroe Smith. These
had little to occupy them, for all the must bills were introduced by
their “official” author, Chairman Burke of the Ways and Means Committee;
and under a suspension of the rules, each was immediately referred to
Mr. Burke’s committee as quickly as he could say “Ways and Means” and
Speaker Ellender could utter a contrapuntal “Any objections? Hearing
none, so ordered!”

Thrill seekers behind the railings and in the gallery had anticipated at
least some show of oratorical fireworks. Disappointed when they found
the proceedings about as exciting as listening to a couple of clerks
take inventory in the kitchenware stockroom of a department store, they
drifted away and left the capitol for their homes, while Long and the
faithful Murphy Roden retired to the Senator’s twenty-fourth-floor
retreat.




6 ---- SEPTEMBER 8: MORNING

  “_Unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government
  shall be on his shoulder and his name shall be called Wonderful._”

  ----ISAIAH


Young Dr. Carl Weiss, his wife, and his baby son occupied a modest home
on Lakeland Drive, not far from the capitol, and therefore likewise
conveniently near Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, where he did most of
his surgical work. The capitol had been built on what was formerly the
state university campus. From its north façade the windows of the
governor’s office looked out across a small, artificial body of water,
still known as University Lake, to the big hospital on the opposite
bank.

Thus Dr. Weiss, Jr., and Huey Long were within but a few blocks of one
another when they rose early Sunday morning. Yvonne Pavy Weiss rose
early too. Together she and her husband woke, fed and dressed their
three-months-old son, Carl Austin Weiss III, and went with him to the
home of Dr. Weiss, Sr., where two doting grandparents fondly took over
the baby’s care, while the young couple went to Mass. As the elder Dr.
Weiss put it in a subsequent statement:

“I was with [my son] practically all day. He and his wife came with
their baby to our house early in the morning. They left the baby with me
and my wife while they went to St. Joseph’s Church for Mass. After
that, his wife returned to our house, while my son went to Scheinuk’s [a
Baton Rouge florist] to inquire about a patient who had consulted him
the day before.

“Mr. Scheinuk gave my son a bouquet of flowers, saying he had not sent
any flowers when the baby was born, and my son came home saying: ‘Look
what Mr. Scheinuk sent the baby.’ My son and his wife then went to their
home, and returned to take dinner at my house at 1 P.M.”

Dr. Weiss, Jr., was twenty-nine years old. He had been graduated at
fifteen from Baton Rouge High School and had begun his premedical work
at Louisiana State University, transferring to Tulane, where he received
his academic degree as Bachelor of Science in 1925, and his degree as
Doctor of Medicine in 1927.

“He served as an intern at Tulane,” his father once related, “and then
at the American Hospital in Paris. He studied under the masters at
Vienna, and after completing his work in Paris, served at Bellevue
Hospital in New York. The last six months of his stay at Bellevue he was
chief of clinic. He then came to Baton Rouge to practice here.”

He had sailed from Hoboken on the _George Washington_ on September 19,
1928, and returned to New York on May 19, 1930, aboard the _American
Farmer_. On his customs declaration, filed when re-entering the United
States, he listed $247 worth of purchases made during his twenty months
abroad, including twenty dollars’ worth of surgical instruments, a
forty-five dollar camera, five dollars’ worth of fencing equipment, old
swords for which he had paid six dollars, and a pistol for which he had
paid eight dollars, a small Belgian automatic, made on the Browning
patents.

In college and in his postgraduate work he devoted himself to his
studies with a single-mindedness that excluded athletics, though he
seems to have taken up fencing while abroad, a sport of many European
surgeons. One may therefore take it for granted that while at Tulane he
neither shared pilgrimages to the wide-open gaming establishments just
across the parish line from New Orleans in adjoining areas, nor
patronized the peep-hole Joe-sent-me establishments where needled beer,
home-brew, raisin wine, and cut whisky were retailed in the sanctified
era of national prohibition.

At one time a story was current that he had met Yvonne Pavy while both
were students in Paris. This was not the case. She did not leave for
France until a year after he had returned to the United States. An honor
graduate of Tulane University’s Newcomb College for Women, she had been
immensely popular in the social and sorority life of her student years.
In 1931 she was selected as one of a group of girls who were sent to
Paris to represent Acadian Louisiana. At the same time she was awarded
on a competitive basis a French-government scholarship to the Sorbonne,
and extended her Parisian sojourn to pursue language studies there.

Returning to Opelousas, she was appointed to a teaching position in the
grade school at St. Martinville, where Emmeline Labiche, who according
to Louisiana tradition was the prototype of Longfellow’s Evangeline, had
died nearly two centuries before. The following year she went to Baton
Rouge to study for her master’s degree at the state university, where
she taught a French class at the same time.

Short-lived as it then was, her professional teaching career did follow
a Pavy family tradition. Her sister Marie taught in one of the Opelousas
grade schools, and one of her father’s brothers, Paul Pavy, was
principal of the high school there until Huey Long, as inflexible in his
attitude toward the Pavy family as Judge Pavy was in his attitude toward
him, dismissed them out of hand by invoking one of the “dictatorship
statutes”--the one requiring the certification of every public-school
employee by a Long-controlled state board.

When Carl Weiss, Jr., returned to Baton Rouge, he joined his father in
the practice of medicine. However, he was so determined not to
capitalize on the wide esteem and affection in which the elder Dr. Carl
Weiss was held that for a time he called himself “Dr. C. Austin Weiss.”
It was not long, however, before he built up a substantial practice on
his own account.

During the course of her postgraduate year at Louisiana State
University, Yvonne Pavy had occasion to visit the office of the senior
Dr. Weiss for treatment of some minor ailment. When the physician
learned of her year at the Sorbonne he told her of his son’s studies at
the American Hospital in Paris. So they met, Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr.,
and the daughter of Judge Ben Pavy of Opelousas. They fell deeply in
love and were married in December 1933. In midsummer of 1935 their son,
the third Carl Austin Weiss, was born, and the sense of fulfillment this
kindled in the happy young parents was no greater than the affection
lavished on him by his grandparents.

       *       *       *       *       *

That same Sunday morning Huey Long ordered breakfast sent up from the
capitol cafeteria to his twenty-fourth-floor suite. He telephoned Earle
Christenberry in New Orleans, reminding him of their engagement
concerning the income-tax return that must be filed before another seven
days passed. Earle had already packed all the necessary papers, the
receipted bills, the canceled checks drawn by the Senator against his
two accounts, one in the Riggs National Bank at Washington and one in
the National Bank of Commerce at New Orleans. Earle customarily made out
all the checks for Huey to sign, and deposited the Kingfish’s senatorial
salary to Long’s account.

“Huey and I had signature cards on file at the Riggs bank in Washington
and the National Bank of Commerce in New Orleans,” Christenberry
explained. “The only checks he wrote were the ones he issued in New
York, and the first I would know of it was when the cancelled check came
with the monthly statement, or a call from the bank that the account was
overdrawn.”

Many persons were under the impression that Long also had a large
financial interest in a Win-or-Lose Oil Company but, says Christenberry,
“to my knowledge as secretary-treasurer of the company, he had no
interest in this corporation, and I so testified in federal court.
Months after Huey’s death one of the stockholders testified that one
certificate issued in his name in reality represented Huey’s holdings,
but if he received dividends they were paid to him in cash by the holder
of that stock certificate, by whom the canceled checks were endorsed and
cashed.”

Earle reached Baton Rouge some time before noon, and prepared to go over
all the papers with his friend and employer. But within a short time,
the work being little more than well begun, Long threw up his hands in a
characteristic gesture, as though brushing a distasteful matter out of
existence.

“He said to me,” reported Mr. Christenberry, “‘You know what this is all
about, don’t you?’ and I said I did. ‘Well, all right then,’ he told me,
‘you take all this stuff back to New Orleans with you and fill out the
forms, and then bring the whole thing back Monday or Tuesday, and I’ll
sign the damn papers and we’ll be rid of them. Look, I’m not even going
to stay here till the end of this session. I’ll leave Tuesday, maybe
even tomorrow, right after the House passes the bills, and come down to
New Orleans and sign them there. And you know what we’ll do then? We’ll
go on a vacation together, just you and me, no bodyguards or anything.
We’ll get in your car and go wherever we want to go without making one
single, slivery plan in advance.’

“After that, he and I went down to the cafeteria and had lunch.
Naturally, there was the same steady procession as always of people
coming to the table to say hello, but not so many as there would have
been any other time except Sunday noon. Most of the legislators and
out-of-town politicians would not be in till later that evening because
the Senate was to be in recess till Monday and the House wasn’t going to
meet till eight, and it was going to be just a short session to order
the bills put on the calendar for the next morning.”

       *       *       *       *       *

John Fournet was one of the out-of-town notables whose arrival that
evening was expected. He had been a member of the Long peerage for
years, but had refrained from political activity of that sort ever since
his elevation to the state Supreme Court a year or so earlier.

None the less, he had been Speaker of the House for four years, he had
been elected to the lieutenant-governorship on the Long-supported Allen
ticket in 1932, and was one of those whose name was frequently mentioned
as Long’s likely choice for endorsement to become Oscar Allen’s
successor.

Senator Long had requested him to come to the capitol for a conference,
and he had left New Orleans early that morning for the home of his
parents in Jackson, planning to invite his father to accompany him to
Baton Rouge. It would be a proud thing for the elder Fournet to see the
deference paid his son as a state Supreme Court justice, as an intimate
of the Kingfish, and perhaps as a candidate for governor of Louisiana.




7 ---- SEPTEMBER 8: AFTERNOON

  “This day may be the last to any of us at a moment.”

  ----HORATIO NELSON


The thirty-one must bills which were certain to be enacted into law
within no more than three more days were the subject of Sunday’s
mealtime talk throughout Louisiana that noon. Huey Long was expressing
complete confidence as to what these would do to “put a crimp into
Roosevelt’s notion he can run Louisiana.” Everyone who paused at his
table in the capitol cafeteria was given the same heartening assurance.

In private homes everywhere authentic information as to what the new
laws would provide was available for the first time on this day. In New
Orleans, Baton Rouge, Monroe, Alexandria, Shreveport, and Lake Charles
the morning papers had carried full accounts of the introduction of
these measures, giving the subject matter of each bill in summary form.

Thus the members of the Weiss family at last had before them full
information about the measure which would displace the father of young
Mrs. Weiss from the judicial position he had held continuously since
before she was born. But the table talk at the senior Dr. Weiss’s home
was anything but dispirited.

“My son ate heartily and joked at the dinner,” he said when referring to
the occasion; and this was borne out in a statement by Yvonne’s uncle,
Dr. F. Octave Pavy, who was in Baton Rouge for the session as one of
St. Landry parish’s three House members.

In any case, while the gerrymander was not ignored in the Weiss family
conversation, it was not looked upon as a disaster; and after dinner all
five--three men named Carl Austin Weiss and the wives of the two older
ones--motored to the Amite River where Dr. Weiss, Sr., had a summer
camp.

Frequently on such occasions, but by no means always, Carl and Yvonne
took with them the small-caliber Belgian automatic pistol he had brought
back from abroad and customarily kept in his car when he went out on
night calls. He and his wife would engage in target practice, shooting
at cans either while these were stationary or as they floated down the
placid current of the river.

But on this particular Sunday they did not bring the gun. Carl and
Yvonne went swimming and had a gay time of it, while the elders, seated
on the warm sand of the high bank, dandled their wonderful
three-month-old grandson.

“While they were swimming,” Dr. Weiss, Sr., recalled later, “I remarked
to my wife: ‘That boy is just skin and bones,’ and she said: ‘Yes, we
have got to make him take a rest, he has been working too hard lately.’”

Seeing them there, that pleasant afternoon, any observer would have
concluded that this was a family group whose members gave no indication
of being troubled by forebodings of an impending disaster.

Obviously the wonderful baby must have had a feeding and an occasional
change sometime during the afternoon, and no doubt he slept in his
mother’s arms once the party tidied up the camp ground, got into the
car, and headed homeward a little after sundown.

       *       *       *       *       *

In his high apartment Huey Long, who had not left the capitol since
Murphy Roden drove him to Baton Rouge from New Orleans on the previous
afternoon, gathered his top legislative and political leaders for a
consultation about the candidate his faction should endorse for
governor. His brother Earl was not among those present, nor was he under
consideration for any elective office. The breach between them stemmed
from the time Earl ran for lieutenant governor on an anti-Huey ticket
three years before.

Justice Fournet, who stood high in the Kingfish’s favor, was not present
at the conference either. He did not reach the capitol until well after
dark. Another absentee was Judge Richard W. Leche of the Circuit Court
of Appeal, but----

“Huey had telephoned me to come up for the session,” he said in
recalling what he could of the day’s events. “However, I had been thrown
from a horse just a fortnight or so before, while vacationing with Mrs.
Leche in Arizona. The fall fractured my left upper arm just below the
shoulder. Huey had joked with me about it, saying it was a pity I hadn’t
broken my neck instead, and I replied that this illustrated once more
his readiness to make any sacrifice for the good of the state.

“When he asked me if I would come to Baton Rouge for the session, I
assumed this was because I had been Governor Allen’s secretary and knew
all the legislators. But since it was hardly proper for a judge of the
appellate bench to be a lobbyist even on behalf of the administration to
which he owes his position, I told him that with my left arm in an
airplane splint it was almost impossible for me to get around, and that
I would have to stay in New Orleans right along to have dressings
changed, and the like. He didn’t seem pleased, but nothing more was said
about it at the time.

“However, when he called me at my home in Metairie Sunday afternoon he
had something else in mind. The first thing he asked me was: ‘Dick, what
the hell are you, outside of being an Indian?’ For a moment this had me
stumped. I couldn’t imagine what he meant. Then I remembered that two
or three years earlier, a group of us were chatting about one thing and
another, and the question of religion came up. That was one thing Huey
never bothered about. I mean what any man’s religious beliefs were.
Anyway, someone in the crowd asked me what my religion was. I answered
that as I saw it, religion was something that dealt with the hereafter,
and the only people who had a hereafter I thought I could enjoy were the
Indians. They believed in a happy hunting ground, and as for me, give me
a gun and a dog and some shells and you could keep your harps and your
wings. Anyway, I said I guessed that by religion I would be classed as
an Indian. So when Huey asked me over the phone what I was, aside from
being an Indian, I said:

“‘You mean you’re asking me what my religion is?’

“‘That’s exactly what I mean,’ he answered. ‘You’re going to be my
candidate for governor, and some of the boys here said I couldn’t run
you because you’re a Catholic and it’s too tough to swing north
Louisiana’s vote to a Catholic for governor.’

“‘Well, I was born a Catholic,’ I told him.

“‘You didn’t run out on them, did you?’ he demanded.

“‘No,’ I told him, ‘but I changed to the Presbyterian church a long time
back. Now listen, Huey. I’ve got no idea of running for governor. I’ve
got exactly the kind of position I like, and down here they make a
practice of re-electing judges who have not been guilty of flagrant
misconduct, so my future’s secure.’

“He said something about how I had better leave all that to him, and he
would see me in New Orleans as soon as the session was over and we would
talk further about it. That ended the conversation. I never spoke to him
again.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Another of the intimates Huey Long summoned to Baton Rouge that
afternoon was Public Service Commissioner (now Juvenile Court Judge)
James P. O’Connor. The reason for this was never disclosed, for when
O’Connor arrived “we just chatted about a lot of inconsequentialities.
One of the things he was all worked up over was writing some more songs
with Castro Carrazo for the L.S.U. football team.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The afternoon wore on. Apparently Judge Leche was the only one in whom
the Senator confided about the gubernatorial selection.

“Senator Long did not leave the capitol all day,” Murphy Roden says in
telling about the events in which he played so large a role. “As long as
he was in his apartment there was no break in the stream of people who
came to call on him. The House was to meet that night and approve the
committee’s favorable report on the bills so they could be passed and
sent to the Senate the next day.

“After he dressed, the Senator was in and out of the apartment, spending
some of the time in Governor Allen’s office. I brought his supper up to
him from the cafeteria, and several persons were there talking to him
while he ate, but no one ate with him. He went down to the governor’s
office about seven o’clock, even though the House wasn’t scheduled to
meet until eight.”




8 ---- SEPTEMBER 8: NIGHTFALL

  “_The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their
  friends hope or their foes fear._”

  ----THOMAS HUXLEY


Huey Long came down to the main floor of the capitol an hour before the
House was to go into session to arrange for an early morning caucus of
his followers the next day. Primarily he wanted to make certain that
there would then be no absentees among votes on which he knew he could
rely.

At regular sessions of the legislature, when House and Senate were
normally convened during the forenoon, such early conferences were daily
affairs. But since in this instance the ordinary routine did not apply,
he was bent on making assurance doubly sure.

Behind closed doors he always took charge of caucuses in person,
outlining step by step what was to be done on that particular day: who
should make which motions, at what point debate should be cut off by
moving the previous question, how the presiding officer was to rule on
certain points of order, should these be raised by the opposition, and
so on.

Since the next morning’s session of the House would be the only
genuinely important one of the current assembly, the one at which all
thirty-one must bills were to be passed and sent on to the Senate, he
was taking no chances on unexpected difficulties due to absenteeism.
Not only must every one of his partisans be in his seat when the Speaker
called the House to order, but all the House whips and other aides must
attend the morning’s caucus without fail, to rehearse in the most minute
detail every procedural step to be taken on the House floor, and every
counter to each procedural obstacle any anti-Long member might seek to
raise.

That Sunday evening, seated at Governor Allen’s desk, Long was sending
for his legislative leaders, one by one, and giving them the names of
the men they each had to bring to the caucus by eight the next morning.

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile, as nearly as can be determined, the five members of the Weiss
family returned from their Amite River outing shortly after nightfall.
The young physician and his wife left his parents’ home with the baby
for their own Lakeland Avenue residence. A composite of various
subsequent accounts pictures the scene there as one of tranquil
domesticity.

Yvonne prepared the baby for bed while Carl went out to the yard and
remained there for a time, petting the dog. Coming back indoors about
8:15, he made a telephone call to his anesthetist, Dr. J. Webb McGehee.
Yvonne assumed that this call was to a patient, but Dr. McGehee later
confirmed the fact that Dr. Weiss called “and asked me if I knew that
the operation for the following day had been changed from Our Lady of
the Lake Sanitarium to the General Hospital. I told him I knew that.”

Miss Theoda Carriere, one of the registered nurses later called to
attend Senator Long, lived not far from the home of Dr. Weiss. After a
twelve-hour day stint at the Sanitarium, in attendance on a
traffic-accident victim, she was taking her ease on the front gallery of
her home. She saw Dr. Weiss leave his house at this time, and depart in
the direction of Baton Rouge General Hospital. There he checked the
condition of the patient on whom he was to operate the next day.

In view of the time factor involved, he must have gone from the hospital
directly to the State House, leaving his car in the capitol’s parking
area, where it was found later. At least five eyewitnesses place him in
the north corridor of the Capitol’s main floor a little before 9:30,
waiting in a shallow niche opposite the double door to Governor Allen’s
anteroom.

       *       *       *       *       *

Charles E. Frampton is now manager of the State Museum at the Cabildo in
New Orleans, the building in whose _sala capitular_ the transfer of
Louisiana from France to the United States was consummated. But in 1935
he was one of the veterans of the press gallery at Baton Rouge. He
describes what he saw as follows:

“Some time after eight o’clock on this particular Sunday night I was
seated with Governor Allen at his desk when George Coad, then editor of
the _Morning Tribune_ in New Orleans, called me by phone from the office
and said a hurricane had wrecked a Civilian Conservation Corps camp in
southern Florida, and that a number of ex-soldiers had been drowned. He
asked me if Senator Long was there, and I said I believed he was in the
House chamber. Then he asked me to tell him about the storm, and the CCC
disaster, and get any comment he might want to make. I told Coad to hold
the line; I thought I could get Huey on the phone.

“I picked up another phone on the governor’s desk and called the House
sergeant-at-arms. Joe Messina answered and said yes, the Senator was
right there. I asked if I might talk to him, and he told me to wait a
minute. After an interval Huey got on the phone. I relayed what Coad had
told me, and asked if he cared to comment on it. He said, ‘Hell, yes!
Mr. Roosevelt must be pretty happy tonight, because every ex-soldier he
gets killed off is one less vote against him.’ We chatted for a minute
or so longer, and I asked whether he intended to do anything about this
when he got back to Washington, and he replied by asking where I was.
When I told him I was in Oscar Allen’s office, he said: ‘Wait there. I’m
coming there myself in just a few minutes.’

“I hung up, picked up the other phone, and relayed the conversation to
Coad, telling him that since Huey was on the way over I might have an
add for him, and to hang on the line. He said he would, and again I laid
down the phone without breaking the connection.

“Oscar and I talked for a couple of minutes, and then I thought to
myself I had better not wait for Huey to come to me; after all, he was a
United States senator and I was a reporter looking for a story, so maybe
I’d better go see him. Telling Coad to hang on, I then went out of the
governor’s private office into the big reception room adjoining it, and
opened one of the double doors leading into the corridor that extends
from the House chamber to the Senate. As I opened the door this whole
thing blew up right in my face.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Justice Fournet takes up the narrative at this point. Here is his
statement:

“In the late afternoon my father and I drove from Jackson to Baton
Rouge, and I went to the twenty-fourth floor of the capitol in search of
Huey. He was not in his apartment, so I returned to the main floor, and
looked into the House chamber, where I was informed the Senator was.
Sure enough, he was there on the House floor, followed or attended by
Joe Messina and talking to Mason Spencer.

“Just as I caught sight of Huey he rushed to the Speaker’s rostrum and
began to talk with Ellender. When he left there it looked to me as
though the House was about to adjourn. Huey rushed by Joe Messina and
me. We tried to follow as best we could and got into the north corridor,
into which the House and Senate cloakrooms, the Speaker’s and lieutenant
governor’s office, as well as the governor’s office and those of his
secretary and executive counsel all open.

[Illustration: 1 February, 1935: On the Speaker’s rostrum in the House
chamber at Baton Rouge, Huey Long is shown with Hermann Deutsch. Left,
Speaker (now U. S. Senator) Allen J. Ellender; right foreground (back to
camera) Executive Counsel George M. Wallace.

(LEON TRICE)]

[Illustration: 2 Official transcript (not the original) of customs
declaration filed by Dr. Weiss on returning to this country from medical
studies abroad. The seventh item on it is the Belgian automatic found
beside his lifeless hand after Huey Long was shot.]

[Illustration: 3 Dr. Weiss’s pistol, which normally holds seven
cartridges, contained only five unfired ones (and an empty, jammed in
the ejector) when it was picked up after the shooting.]

[Illustration: 4 & 5 The watch which was shot from Murphy Roden’s wrist
while he was grappling with Dr. Weiss. The dial shows the time of the
struggle, the dent in the back was obviously made by a small bullet.]

[Illustration: 6 No “small blue punctures” were left by the bullets of
bodyguards who mowed down Dr. Weiss in the niche where he had waited for
Senator Long. The photograph was made after authorities, seeking to
establish his identity, had turned over the body which fell face down.]

[Illustration: 7 The funeral cortege, moving from the capitol to a newly
prepared crypt which is now the site of a monument. Right foreground,
the L.S.U. student band playing “Every Man a King” in a minor key as the
Kingfish’s dirge.]

[Illustration: 8 Huey Long’s casket, as it was borne down the capitol’s
48 granite steps followed by members of his family. The two leading
pallbearers are (left) Seymour Weiss and Governor Oscar Allen.]

[Illustration: 9 Laborers work around the clock to prepare a vault in
time for Huey Long’s funeral, as crowds wait on the capitol steps to
file past the bier where his body lies in state.]

[Illustration: 10 & 11 Huey Long was enshrined as a saint by some of his
followers as shown by these personals from want-ad pages of the
_Times-Picayune_. The one at left appeared on March 26, 1936, the other
on January 11, 1937.

  Left hand advertisement:

  THANKS to the late Senator Huey P. Long for favor granted. Mrs. H.
  Gomme.

  Right hand advertisement:

  THANKS S^t. Raymond, S^t. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long favor granted.
  ROSE ANDERTON.

“There was not a soul in that corridor when we got there except Louis
LeSage and Roy Heidelberg, who were seated on the ledge of the window at
the east end of the corridor. I asked them where Huey had gone and they
said he was in the governor’s office, so Joe and I walked to the door of
that office at a leisurely pace, and as we approached the door I could
hear a voice which I recognized as that of Senator Long ask:

“‘Has everybody been notified about the meeting tomorrow morning?’ and a
voice which I identified as that of Joe Bates of the Police Bureau of
Identification answered: ‘Yes, Senator.’

“At this point I noticed three or four people lined up against the
marble recess in the corridor wall opposite the door to the governor’s
anteroom. I don’t remember the exact number but I definitely recall
there were more than one. Just then Huey walked out of the office door
of the governor’s secretary and....”

       *       *       *       *       *

The third eyewitness to what took place was Elliott Coleman, on special
assignment as one of the Senator’s bodyguards and later for many years
sheriff of Tensas parish. He says of the night in question:

“I was an officer of what was then known as the Bureau of Criminal
Identification, which was headed by General Louis F. Guerre. He had
directed me to come from my home in Waterproof for duty at the state
capitol during the special session of the legislature. There was nothing
specific of an alarming nature, but there was a general feeling of
uneasiness in view of the murder-plot probe against the Senator earlier
that year, after the Square Deal Association disorders.

“Nothing particularly noteworthy happened on Saturday, but on Sunday
night, when the special session was meeting, I went into the House
chamber and was standing back of the railing with State Senator Jimmie
Noe, and he was trying to get me to help him in his effort to get Huey’s
endorsement as a candidate for governor in the campaign that was about
to begin.

“Huey was in the House, circulating about the floor, talking to this
member and to that, with Murphy Roden and George McQuiston remaining
outside the railing but as near to him as they could. Huey was talking
to Mason Spencer and they were probably joking with each other, or
telling a funny story, because they laughed, and then Huey went up on
the rostrum and sat with Speaker Allen Ellender for a time. All this
while I was outside the railing with Jimmie Noe, and he was talking
about getting Huey to back him for governor.

“While Jimmie was talking to me, Huey jumped up all of a sudden, from
where he was seated on Ellender’s rostrum, and hurried down the side to
the corridor. I figured the House was about to adjourn, so I left Jimmie
and turned to hurry into the corridor myself. There were not many
persons there and I saw Huey, followed by Murphy Roden, go into Allen’s
office, and it seemed to me like he wasn’t in there hardly at all, that
it was almost as if he had turned right around and come back out. He was
met as he came out by Justice Fournet, and they were walking toward the
elevator and toward where I was standing, with Murphy Roden following.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Judge James O’Connor’s testimony logically follows that of Sheriff
Coleman. He says:

“I was in the House chamber when Huey came sort of storming in and sat
down beside Allen Ellender on the rostrum. I was standing in the space
between the railing and the wall, chatting with friends, when Huey
beckoned to me as though saying: ‘Come on over, I want to talk to you.’

“When I got there he said something that struck me as unusual, because
he had not been smoking in months, maybe not in as much as a year. He
said: ‘I want you to get me half a dozen Corona Belvedere cigars.’ I
asked him where to get those, and he said: ‘Downstairs in the cafeteria.
They have a box of them there.’

“When I came downstairs something else struck me as very peculiar. There
wasn’t a soul in that basement on this Sunday night. I walked into the
cafeteria. They had just air-conditioned it, and the new glass doors
were very heavy. There was no one in that restaurant either, except
three or four of the girls behind the counter. I got the cigars and then
sat down to drink a cup of coffee, and was about to finish it, when I
heard a noise like cannon crackers going off. It was coming faintly
through those heavy glass doors....”

       *       *       *       *       *

Murphy Roden, who recently retired as Superintendent of State Police
with the rank of colonel, is last of the surviving eyewitnesses to take
up the tale. A graduate of the F.B.I. school and therefore a specially
trained observer, his memory is sharp and vivid in recalling what took
place during the violent interlude in which he played so large a role.
He says:

“Whenever the Senator returned to the governor’s office I would wait in
the anteroom, and as he went out I would leave just ahead of him, and
Elliott Coleman would walk just behind him. He made several trips into
the House chamber and back while the House was briefly in session that
night.

“On the last such trip the Senator spent a little time on the floor,
talking jocularly to several of the members, and then sat for a time
with Speaker Ellender on the rostrum. At such times I would follow his
movements as best I could from outside the railing, and when he hurried
out I would try to anticipate his movements so as to be just ahead of
him when he left the hall. The House seemed to be about ready to adjourn
then, and he rose and hurried from the rostrum toward the governor’s
office. I was ahead of him and when he turned in I went into the
anteroom and waited for him there. He went into the inner office where
Governor Allen was. Joe Bates, a special agent of the Bureau of Criminal
Identification and Investigation, and A. P. White, the Governor’s
secretary, were in there too, along with some other persons whose
identity I do not recall except for Chick Frampton of the _Item_, who
was standing over Allen’s desk and using the telephone in there.

“Senator Long was in that office only a moment or two. It seemed to me
as though he had walked right in, turned around, and gone right out,
going through the anteroom and heading back toward the hallway. I
realized he was going back out, and managed to get into the hall just
ahead of him, so as to be in front of him when he got out there. But he
was walking fast and caught up to me and was just about beside me at my
left. We are speaking now in terms of my being just one step ahead of
him as he came out.

“Judge Fournet was standing at the partly opened door that led from the
hallway directly into the governor’s inner office, a private entry and
exit to that office. Behind us was Elliott Coleman. Chick Frampton had
also hurried out of the governor’s outer office and anteroom right
behind us. The Senator was going back in the direction of the House
chamber from which he had just come, and from which people were just
beginning to move out. But at the private door to Governor Allen’s inner
office he stopped, and we were standing still as Judge Fournet came up
and started to talk to him. I have no idea what they were talking about,
because I was not watching them or paying attention, but looking around
us as always to see what other persons nearby were doing.

“One of them was a young man in a white linen suit....”

       *       *       *       *       *

It is 9:30. One floor below, in the otherwise deserted basement
cafeteria, Judge O’Connor is still sipping the last of his coffee when,
muffled by distance and the heavy glass doors of the restaurant, he
hears a noise like exploding cannon crackers.




9 ---- SEPTEMBER 8: 9:30 P.M.

  “_Do we ever hear the most recent fact related in exactly the same way
  by the several people who were at the same time eye-witnesses to it?
  No._”

  ----LORD CHESTERFIELD


The stage is set for a violent climax. Huey Long has turned through
the anteroom of the governor’s office, where Chick Frampton,
bending over the desk with his back to the door, is preparing once
more to lay down the telephone without breaking the long-distance
connection to New Orleans. He has told his editor, Coad, to hang on
while he--Frampton--goes in search of the Senator, and does not see
Huey just behind him. Intent on his conversation with Coad, he has
heard neither the Senator’s question as to whether everyone has been
notified about the morning’s early caucus, nor Joe Bates’s affirmative
reply.

By the time he puts down the telephone and turns, Huey Long has already
dashed out into the hallway where John Fournet steps forward to greet
him. The Senator stops momentarily to talk to A. P. White in the partly
opened private doorway to the inner office. He has noticed, while
looking over the House from the Speaker’s rostrum, that some of his
legislative supporters are absent, and asks White where the hell this
one, that one, and the other one are, adding: “Find them. If necessary,
sober them up, and have them at that meeting because we just might need
their votes tomorrow!” Then he turns, facing the direction of the House
chamber.

For that one fractional moment every actor is motionless: Huey Long,
with John Fournet at his left elbow and Murphy Roden just behind his
right shoulder; Chick Frampton in the very act of stepping into the
corridor from the double doors of the governor’s anteroom; Elliott
Coleman down the hall in the direction of the House, near the door of
the small private elevator reserved for the governor’s use; and among
three or four individuals standing in the marble-paneled niche recessed
into the wall opposite the double doors where Frampton is standing, a
slim figure in a white suit.

The fractional moment passes. Let us turn once more to Murphy Roden’s
graphic account of what transpired:

“... a young man in a white linen suit, who held a straw hat in his hand
loosely before him, and below the waist, so that both of his hands
seemed to be concealed behind it. He walked toward us from the direction
of the House chamber and I did not see the gun until his right hand came
out from beneath his hat and he extended the gun chest high and at arm’s
length. In that same instant I realized that this was no jest, no toy
gun, and leaped. I seized the hand and the gun in my right hand and bore
down, and as I did so the gun went off. The cartridge ejected and the
recoil of the ejector slide bruised the web of my right hand between
thumb and forefinger, though I was not conscious of the hurt and did not
see the injury, a very minor one, until later.

“I tried to wrest the gun away, but saw I could not do it in time, so
shifted my grip on it from my right hand to my left and threw my right
arm around his neck. As I did this, my hard leather heels slipped on the
marble floor and my feet shot out from under me, so that we both went
down, the young man and I, with him on top. That is the last pair of
hard leather heels I have ever worn. While we were falling, my wrist
watch was shot off, but again I was not conscious of it. I did not even
miss my watch until I was being treated at the hospital, later that same
night.

“It has always been my belief that it was Dr. Weiss who fired a second
shot as we were falling and that it was this one which shot off my
watch. There are several reasons for this conclusion on my part.
Firstly, his gun was of small caliber, 7.6 millimeter, which is about
the equivalent of our .32-caliber automatic, a Belgian Browning which he
had brought back with him from abroad. When it was examined later, it
had only five cartridges in it. Normally it holds seven. I have always
had a deep conviction that Dr. Weiss fired twice, and that I saw the
first shell ejected. When his gun was recovered from the floor, a shell
was found caught in the ejecting mechanism which I am convinced was the
second shell. The dent on my watch, which was later recovered and which
I still have, was made by a small-caliber bullet.

“As we were falling--Dr. Weiss and I--I released his gun hand, and
reached for my pistol, a Colt .38 special on a .45 frame, loaded with
hollow-point ammunition, which I carried in a shoulder holster. By the
time we hit the deck I had it out and fired one shot into his throat,
under his chin, upward into his head and saw the flesh open up. I
struggled to get out from beneath him, and as I partially freed myself,
all hell broke loose. The others may have waited till I got partially
clear before they fired, for I think I got to my knees by the time they
started, and that probably saved my life. But I was being deafened and
my eyes were burning with particles of powder from those shots.

“Moreover, for all I knew this might have been an attack in force, which
was why I was struggling so desperately to get to my feet. But by the
time I really was on my feet, I could not see any more because of the
muzzle blasts from other guns. While I did not learn this until later,
shots had passed so close to me that the powder burns penetrated my
coat, shirt, and undershirt, and burned my skin beneath, all along my
back. I felt my way blindly down the hall in the direction of the Senate
chamber, with my left hand on the corridor wall and my gun still in my
right hand, till I turned a corner and reached a niche where there was a
marble settee. This was right near the stairway where Huey had gone
down, as I learned later. I was practically blinded for the time. The
settee had a padded seat, and I waited there till Ty Campbell, a state
highway patrolman, saw me and took me to the hospital.

“It was there that I missed my watch and saw the furrow plowed across
the back of my wrist where the scar of it is still visible; also the
pinch or scratch in the web between my right thumb and index finger. I
did not know for two days what had become of my watch, but it was
returned to me later by King Strenzke, chief of the Baton Rouge city
police. Someone had picked it up off the floor at the scene of all the
shooting, and had turned it over to the police while authorities were
still trying to establish the identity of Dr. Weiss.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Justice Fournet’s statement differs from Roden’s at several points, as
it does from the accounts of Coleman and Frampton, each of which differs
in one detail or another from all the others. Just as it was given, with
none of the discrepancies modified, altered, or omitted, the Fournet
account of what took place continues in the narrative which follows:

“... Just then, Huey came out of the door to the office of the
Governor’s secretary.” (Actually, he had come out of the main double
doors of the anteroom, and was merely pausing at the other point to
impress on White the importance of getting in touch with certain
absentee members.) “We walked toward each other, but instead of the
usual air of greeting I saw a startled, terrified expression, a sort of
look of shock, and simultaneously I saw this fellow who had been
standing in the recess oppose Huey with a little black gun. This was
right within a foot of me, so I threw my hands at him to grab him, just
as he shot, and Murphy Roden--I don’t know where he came from but I
presume he had followed the Senator out into the hall from the inner
office--anyway, at the same instant when I threw my hands and the shot
was fired, Murphy Roden lunged and seized the gun and the man’s hand in
his left hand. This must have been at almost the very instant the shot
was fired, for Murphy’s hand kept the shell of the little automatic from
ejecting, which is why the man whose body was later identified as that
of Dr. Weiss could not fire another shot.

“It is hard to describe in sequence all the things that were happening
in practically one and the same instant. As Murphy grappled with Weiss,
the gesture I had made to push the man away was completed, and my hands
pushed the two struggling men partly to the floor. Weiss had both hands
around his gun, trying to fire again, and this time at Roden; and Roden,
while holding his desperate clutch about the gun which was waving wildly
this way and that, was trying to get his own gun from his shoulder
holster, and I was still standing there with my hands outstretched from
pushing them, when Elliott Coleman from quite a ways down the hall fired
the second shot I heard that night, as well as two others.

“In that same instant of general confusion that boiled up I heard Huey
give just one shout, a sort of hoot, and then he ran like a wild deer. I
bent over to help Roden disarm Weiss, and twisted a muscle in my back so
that for a moment I could not move in any direction. It was then I saw
that one of Elliott Coleman’s bullets had shot away Murphy Roden’s wrist
watch, but the next two hit Weiss. At the first one his whole body
jerked convulsively--like this. At the second it jerked again in a great
twitch as he sank into himself and slumped forward, face down, his head
in the angle of the wall and his legs extended diagonally out into the
corridor.

“It was not until after Weiss was dead that other bodyguards came up and
emptied their pistols into the fallen body. Meanwhile I caught a glimpse
of other armed men, state police and bodyguards, charging from the
[House chamber] end of the hall toward where the body was lying, and I
caught one flash of my father wrestling around with some of them because
he thought I was in trouble and he wanted to stop the shooting. I saw
the crowd down there and I went into the other cross hall [the one in
the direction of the Senate chamber] where there were stairs to the
basement, and asked the girl at the telegraph desk which way Huey had
gone, and she pointed down the stairs....”

There is general agreement here that of the first two shots, by whomever
fired, the first one penetrated Long’s body, the second ripped Roden’s
watch from his wrist, and that the next two killed Dr. Weiss. The only
discrepancy between the accounts of Murphy Roden and Justice Fournet is
as to who fired these shots. According to Roden, the first two were
fired by Weiss, the third by himself and the fourth by someone else,
presumably Coleman. According to Justice Fournet, the first one was
fired by Weiss, who never fired again; while the second shot, the one
which according to both versions shot away Roden’s wrist watch, was
fired by Coleman, who thereafter also fired the two shots that took Dr.
Weiss’s life.

       *       *       *       *       *

How does Sheriff Coleman’s account of what took place compare with these
two? There is one marked point of difference. It involves a blow with
the fist which no one else describes. Here, then, is that portion of
Coleman’s narrative of what took place:

“... At this point a slight young fellow in a white linen suit stepped
forward and stretched out his hand with a gun in it and pressed it
against Huey’s right side and fired. Everything happened very fast then,
because the House had just adjourned, seemingly; anyway, people were
coming out. I reached the young man about the same time Roden did, and
hit him with my fist, knocking him down. He was trying to shoot and
Murphy was grappling with him, so that he fell on top of Murphy when I
hit him. I fired one shot. By that time Huey was gone, and I learned
later he had gone down the stairs and had been taken to the hospital.

“The young man in the white linen suit, whom none of us knew at the
time, was dead, and the gun was lying on the floor several inches from
his hand. It was then that I saw why he had not fired again. A cartridge
was jammed in the ejector. After that a lot of things happened, and
there was a lot of shooting.

“They called me into the governor’s office. Some fool had run in there,
and Allen said to me: ‘Coleman, I understand you hit that party. Huey
isn’t much hurt, he’s just shot through the arm.’ I said: ‘The hell he
is! The man couldn’t have missed him. He shot him in the belly, right
here.’ Allen said: ‘But they say you hit him and deflected the bullet.’
And I said: ‘I never hit him till after he shot.’ All of this stuff
about a bullet from one of the bodyguards is a lot of ----! Those boys
all had .44s and .45s and if one of those bullets had gone through him
it would have made a great big hole. Anybody knows that. Besides, when
all the bodyguard shooting was going on, Huey was gone from that place
and on his way downstairs.”

       *       *       *       *       *

This last is also borne out by Frampton, whose account of the actual
shooting includes the following observations:

“While the conversation” (i.e., between Long and A. P. White about
making sure that all Long supporters would be present at the early
caucus and the morning House session) “was going on, this slight man I
did not know but who had been leaning against a column in the angle of
the marble wall, sort of sauntered over to him, and there was the sound
of a shot, a small sound, a sort of pop. Huey grabbed his side and gave
a sort of grunt, and I think he may have said ‘I’m shot!’ while running
toward the stairs. He disappeared by the time Murphy Roden materialized
out of somewhere--I never did see where he came from--and seized the
man’s hand. There were two shots and he crumpled forward, and fell with
his head on his arm against the pillar where he had been standing, and
his legs projected out into the hall. Huey had already disappeared
around the corner and, as I learned later, down the stairway. The small
automatic had slid out of Dr. Weiss’s hand and lay about four inches
from it on the floor by the time the other bodyguards came up, among
them Messina and McQuiston, and emptied their guns into the prostrate
figure.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Meanwhile Jimmie O’Connor, with Huey’s Corona Belvedere cigars in the
breast pocket of his coat, jumped up as he heard a sound, muffled by the
heavy glass doors of the newly air-conditioned cafeteria, “like cannon
crackers going off.”

“I started to walk out,” he recalls, “and as I opened the door I saw
Huey reeling like this, with his arms extended, coming down those steps
that were near the governor’s office. He was all by himself, and I ran
over to him and asked: ‘What’s the matter, Kingfish?’ He spit in my face
with blood as he gasped: ‘I’m shot!’ They put in the paper next day he
said: ‘Jimmie, my boy, I’m shot! Help me!’ but he never said a damn word
like that. All he said was ‘I’m shot,’ and he spit blood over me so that
I thought he had been shot in the mouth.

“With that I grabbed him and I heard more shooting going on. They were
still shooting at the fallen body of Dr. Weiss, as I found out later.
But it shows how quickly it all happened. As fast as that. He had no
blood on his clothes at all at that time, other than what he had spit
out of his mouth.

“So I half carried and half dragged him outside to the driveway. They
had a fellow out there with an old sort of a beat-up Ford automobile,
and I said: ‘Take me and this man over to the hospital.’ It was an
open-model car, not a sedan. Going over to the hospital Huey said not a
word, just slumped and slid in my arms. When we got over there, I opened
the car door and halfway got him out and got him on my shoulder, and
whoever was in the car just blew. They were gone. Right by the entrance
on the side they had a rolling table. I put him on that and rang the
bell. One of the sisters came down and cried: ‘Oh, oh! What is this?’
and I said: ‘The Senator.’

“She said: ‘Wheel him into the elevator.’ I did that. She operated the
elevator and when we got out--I don’t remember what floor it was--she
and I wheeled him into the operating room, where an intern hurried over
to us. Huey was wearing a cream-colored double-breasted suit,
silky-looking, and I said to the intern: ‘He’s been shot in the mouth.’
The intern pulled down the Senator’s mouth, swabbed it out, and said:
‘He’s not shot there, that’s just a little cut where he hit himself
against something.’ I suppose he stumbled up against the wall while
reeling around the turns going down the stairs.

“Then the intern was beginning to open the Senator’s coat when Dr.
Vidrine popped in, and he and the intern opened the coat. There was very
little blood on the shirt, and when they opened that and pulled up the
undershirt we saw a very small hole right under the right nipple....
While his shirt and coat were being cut off, he asked the Sister to pray
for him. ‘Sister, pray for me,’ he said, and she told him: ‘Pray _with_
me.’”

By this time frantic telephone calls to physicians in Baton Rouge and
New Orleans, to Seymour Weiss and Earle Christenberry, to the Long
family, to Adjutant General Fleming, and to a host of politicians had
jammed the switchboards. Both the big buildings facing one another
across the width of the old University Lake--the Sanitarium and the
State House--were swarming hives of confused activity. In the hospital
various officials and others in the top echelon of the Long organization
were crowding the hallways around the wounded Senator’s room, and later
even the operating room itself, while the constant arrival of more and
yet more cars clotted into an all but hopeless traffic snarl in the
Sanitarium’s small parking lot.

Others made their way to the capitol building as word of the shooting
spread, but here General Louis F. Guerre, commandant of the Bureau of
Identification, and Colonel E. P. Roy, chief of the highway police,
acted promptly to restore some semblance of order. Part of the confusion
stemmed from the fact that up to that very moment no one had been able
to identify the body which later proved to be that of Dr. Weiss; almost
everyone who asked to see if he might perhaps recognize the slight
figure in the bloodstained white suit was admitted to the corridor where
the corpse remained until Coroner Thomas Bird arrived. As described by
Frampton----

“A number of people came around after the shooting stopped. Among them
were Helen Gilkison, the _Item_ and _Tribune_ Baton Rouge correspondent
and Colonel Roy. I remember that the Colonel took hold of the fallen
man’s head and lifted it so that the features were visible. He asked
first me and then Helen if we knew him. We did not. I had never seen him
before, as far as I knew then or know now.

“Then I suddenly remembered that George Coad in New Orleans, who was
still on the phone line I had left open, must have heard the shooting
and was likely going mad. So I went in and picked up the phone and told
him Huey was shot, and the man who fired at him had been killed by the
bodyguards, but that the body had not yet been identified, so he had
better go with just that much for an extra.

“I then ran back out into the hall and found that Dr. Tom Bird, the
coroner, was there. Colonel Roy and the state police were starting to
clear the corridor of everyone: spectators, newspaper people,
legislators, and all. But Dr. Bird deputized Helen as an assistant
coroner, and she was permitted to stay. I then followed Huey’s course
down the stairs by the route I was told he had taken, and learned for
the first time he really had been shot, because on the marble steps I
saw a few drops of blood.

“I ran out the back door and was told he had been taken to the hospital
by Jimmie O’Connor, so I ran around the end of the lake all the way from
the capitol to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, climbed the front steps,
went up to the top floor, where Huey was lying on one of those surgical
tables in the corridor outside of a room at the east end of the hallway.

“Right away I thought of Urban Maes and Jim Rives, and asked Colonel
Roy, who had come there in the meantime, to get the airport lighted, as
I would try to get Maes and Rives to fly up with Harry Williams. I put
in calls for both of them and left messages about what had happened, and
for them to get hold of Harry Williams and fly to Baton Rouge, where the
airport had been lighted.... Actually, this had not yet been done, as I
learned later. Colonel Roy could not raise any airport attendant, so he
drove out there, kicked in a window, and turned on the lights himself.”

By that time Dr. Maes and his associate, Dr. Rives, were already en
route to Baton Rouge by automobile. They had been called at once by
Seymour Weiss, who then jumped into his new Cadillac with Bob
Maestri--the latter lived at the Roosevelt--and together they ruined the
engine of the car by driving at top speed to Baton Rouge.

At that time no one yet had given out any reasonably authoritative word
as to whether Long was the victim of a major or minor injury; whether
the prognosis was hopeful or a matter of doubt; whether his condition
could be described as undetermined, satisfactory, or critical.

But so widespread was public interest in the Kingfish, who had
challenged Roosevelt, and who only a month before had said the New Deal
was at least cognizant of a plot to murder him, that newspapers in many
distant cities lost no time in dispatching special correspondents and
photographers to Baton Rouge to cover the day’s top news story. The
fight to save the Kingfish’s life was just beginning.




10 ---- SEPTEMBER 8-9: MIDNIGHT

  “_He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of
  fearing death._”

  ----SHAKESPEARE


Among the first of the Long hierarchs to reach the hospital to which
Jimmie O’Connor had rushed the fallen Kingfish were Dr. Vidrine, Justice
Fournet, and Acting Lieutenant Governor Noe. As a matter of fact,
O’Connor had not yet left the capitol’s porte-cochere when Fournet and
Noe reached it.

“I heard Huey and Jimmie O’Connor talking before I saw them in the
darkness there,” Justice Fournet relates. “Jimmie asked: ‘Where did he
hit you?’ and Huey said: ‘Hell, man, take me to the hospital.’ I reached
them just as they got into the car of a man--his name was Starns, I
think--and I tried to get into the car with them, but it was just a
two-door affair, and I could not get in. By that time Jimmie Noe had
come down, so he and I managed to get to the hospital in another of the
cars around there. They had Huey sort of strapped to a wheeled table, an
operating table, I suppose, by the time we got there and found out what
floor he was on.

“Dr. Vidrine was there, and starting to take off some of the Senator’s
clothes; but I took out my pocket knife and said: ‘Here, cut it off.’ He
slashed through the clothes and laid them back. I saw a very small
bluish puncture on the right side of Huey’s abdomen, and it was not
bloody. And I saw Dr. Vidrine lift up the right side of Huey’s back, but
he did not lift it very far. Dr. Vidrine put us in a room with a nurse,
then, and gave instructions to let no one else come in.

“Meanwhile other doctors were taking his blood pressure and pulse rate.
Huey asked one of them what it was, and he told him. Naturally, I don’t
remember the figures, but I do remember Huey saying: ‘That’s bad, isn’t
it?’ and Vidrine or one of the others”--[it was Dr. Cecil
Lorio]--“answered him, saying: ‘Well, not _too_ bad, yet.’ Vidrine asked
him what doctors he wanted called, and he said Sanderson from
Shreveport, and Maes and Rives from New Orleans. While they were waiting
for their arrival, Joe Bates came in. He was allowed to come there so he
could tell Huey who had shot him. He said it was a young doctor named
Weiss.

“‘What for?’ Huey asked. ‘I don’t even know him.’

“‘He’s a fanatic about you,’ Bates replied. ‘But he is friendly with a
lot of others in the administration.’”

Pending the arrival of surgeons from New Orleans, some semblance of
order was being restored about the hospital. Highway motorcycle officers
unsnarled the traffic jam in the Sanitarium’s small parking lot, set up
guarded barriers, and thereafter admitted to the grounds no one who did
not have a special permit.

It was during this interlude, too, that Ty Campbell finally brought
Murphy Roden from the capitol to the hospital for treatment.

“One of the interns washed my eyes out first,” Roden remembers. “They
were smarting and there must have been some powder residue in them.
There were powder burns on the skin of my back, burns that had gone
through my coat, my shirt, and my undershirt. These were cleaned and
swabbed with antiseptic. But it was not until several weeks later, after
a place on my back kept festering, that I went to my family doctor in
Baton Rouge, and he finally removed a small fragment of the copper
jacketing of a bullet, from where it had lodged just under the skin.

“After the interns finished with me, Ty went to the Istrouma Hotel and
brought me back some clothes, and I changed in the hospital. After that
we went back to the capitol with General Guerre, who took me to the
office of the governor’s executive counsel where General Ray Fleming,
head of the National Guard, had set up his headquarters, and we talked
nearly an hour or so, with me telling all I could recall. From there I
went to my quarters and to bed.”

When he returned to the capitol with Roden, General Guerre had the State
House hallways cleared.

“Once I satisfied myself that the Senator had been taken to the hospital
and was in the hands of physicians,” he explains, “I gave orders to my
men to clear the capitol’s lower floor as quickly as possible, and allow
no one else to come in without special authorization from me. I put
officers in charge to see that the body of the assassin was not touched
until the coroner got there. Even Dr. Bird did not know who the man was
till they removed his wallet and saw his identification there.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Unaware of what had taken place in Baton Rouge, Earle Christenberry
reached his New Orleans home shortly after 9:30, having driven in from
the capitol without special haste. His neighbors, seeing the car turn
into the Christenberry driveway, flung open a window and told him
someone in Baton Rouge was trying to get in touch with him. His phone
had not answered, whereupon the caller secured from the telephone
company the number of the adjoining house, asking that when Earle
arrived he be requested to call back immediately.

Then, adding a bit of news they had heard a short time earlier over the
radio, they told him Huey Long had been shot.

Christenberry did not pause to call Baton Rouge. Without leaving his
car, he backed out of the driveway and headed for the capitol. He made
but one stop en route. That was at Lousteau’s combination sandwich
counter and automobile agency, where the Airline Highway cut across the
government’s newly completed Bonnet Carre Spillway over a bridge a mile
and an eighth long, spanning the dry channel through which the
Mississippi River’s flood waters could be diverted into Lake
Pontchartrain. Final inspection of the structure had not yet been made;
hence it was not open to general traffic. Wooden highway barriers
blocked entry to it.

However, Christenberry directed the highway patrolman on duty there to
open the barriers for him, since this would save at least six miles on
the road to Baton Rouge. After ascertaining that Mrs. Long and the three
children had not yet passed this point, he instructed the motorcycle man
to remain on watch for their car, and open the barrier to let it pass
over the bridge too.

Approximately seventy minutes after leaving his home, he parked at Our
Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.

       *       *       *       *       *

Earlier that afternoon, in New Orleans, General Ray Fleming, Adjutant
General of Louisiana, had taken part at Jackson Barracks in a polo game
between teams representing the 108th Cavalry and the famed Washington
Artillery. During one of the late chuckers a hard-hit ball had banged
against the General’s left foot, inflicting an injury not in itself
serious, but so painful that before retiring for the night he borrowed a
pair of crutches from the post infirmary and secured a left shoe he
could cut to accommodate the swelling which had followed the mishap.

“Hardly had I retired,” he relates, “than I received a phone call from
Governor Allen, who in a very excited voice said to me: ‘Huey has been
shot!’ Realizing that I must have certain information to deal with such
a situation, I demanded that the Governor stay on the telephone at
least long enough to answer one question before I took action.

“The question was: ‘Is this an action involving many persons or is it
the act of just one individual?’ This I had to know in order to
determine what troops, if any, were needed to handle the situation.

“Governor Allen immediately informed me that it was the spontaneous
action of just one individual. With this information in hand, I started
almost at once for Baton Rouge. In a remarkably short time I reached the
capitol, where I immediately set up headquarters in the office of the
executive counsel. From then until about 2 A.M. I talked to a great many
persons regarding events leading up to, during, and after the
assassination.

“One of the reasons for this inquiry was that I had to make a decision
as to whether or not we were faced with the necessity of dealing with an
armed insurrection on the part of a considerable number of individuals.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Early that Sunday night Judge Leche, still inclined to make light of his
conversation with Senator Long some hours before, was leaving Baptist
Hospital, where his physician, Dr. Wilkes Knolle, had just changed the
dressing of the airplane splint in which his left arm was immobilized.

“Our chauffeur was driving Tonnie [Mrs. Leche] and me home from the
hospital,” his account of the day’s events continues, “and as we drew up
in front of my house in Metairie I could hear the phone ring. I tossed
my keys to the chauffeur and said: ‘Hurry up and answer it, and tell
whoever it is I’ll be there as soon as I can work my way out of the
car.’ He did so, and I got out awkwardly, my left arm being held rigidly
horizontal at shoulder height with the elbow bent, and when I got to the
phone it was Abe Shushan telling me Huey had just been shot. I called
out to the chauffeur not to leave, we were going to Baton Rouge right
away, and I told Tonnie I would send the car back for her and she could
come up the next day, if that seemed indicated.

“I went directly to the governor’s office, and Oscar Allen was there,
very nervous and visibly shaken. He was talking on the telephone and
picked up a sheet of paper while holding the other hand over the
mouthpiece, and said: ‘This is what I am going to release to the press.’
At the time I thought he said he had already released it. In brief, the
statement said for everyone to remain calm, this had been merely the
irresponsible act of one individual, and that it did not mean more than
just one individual’s crazed action.

“I tore the paper up and handed the pieces back to him, saying: ‘Huey
has been charging in Louisiana and in Washington that there was a plot
on foot to kill him, and that he surrounded himself with bodyguards for
that reason. He conducted a formal investigation into a murder plot with
witnesses who said they had won their way into the confidence of the
plotters, and named them, and carried on an investigation in New Orleans
for days.... How in the world can you take it on yourself to proclaim
officially that this was all twaddle, and that only one individual was
responsible for what happened?’

“He said very excitedly: ‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right!’ I
left, and was driven over to the hospital, but by that time the
operation was either over or in progress, so I did not see Huey. I
stayed in the hotel, and Tonnie joined me there the next day.”

       *       *       *       *       *

The operation was begun at 11:22 P.M., but Drs. Maes and Rives were not
present. What happened is told by Dr. Rives in the following account:

“Dr. Maes had been called, I have forgotten by whom, and he was asked to
fly to Baton Rouge as Huey Long had been shot; a chartered plane would
be waiting for him at the New Orleans airport, and a highway car at the
one in Baton Rouge. He asked me to go with him to assist him if he had
surgery to do, and I told him there was no sense in flying to Baton
Rouge, because I could drive him there in the time it would take to
drive out to the New Orleans airport, and then, after the flight, from
the Baton Rouge airfield to the hospital. This proved to be not right.

“We were in my car and I was driving. The road then ran beside the old
O-K Interurban Line tracks, and just outside of Metairie an S-curve
crossed the tracks, a black-top road with graveled shoulders. Just
before we entered this S-curve another car, coming from the opposite
direction, swept through it and put its bright lights right into my
eyes. I was going about forty-five or fifty. I was not racing, in other
words, but I got my right wheel into the loose gravel of the shoulder,
and ended up skidding completely around and facing back in the direction
of New Orleans on the old gravel road beyond the S-curve.

“My differential housing was caught on the high center of this old
gravel road, with only one rear wheel on the ground. We did no damage to
the car, but with only one wheel on the ground, a car is helpless. We
finally flagged someone driving back toward New Orleans and asked him to
send a wrecker to pull us back on the road. Actually they sent only a
truck, but it took us off the high center and then we went on. I should
say we lost not more than half an hour, but I think we would not have
reached Baton Rouge until after the operation even if we had not met
with this accident.

“We did not have permission to use the completed but not yet opened
Airline Highway beyond Kenner, so I took the old River Road. As we
finally drove into Baton Rouge, there wasn’t a soul in sight, aside from
a policeman or two. No one was abroad on the streets; lights in the
houses, yes, but no people or cars on the streets. To outward
appearances, it was the most deserted community I ever saw, and going to
Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium we had to drive right through the center
of town.

“At the hospital we were met by highway police, identified ourselves,
which was required, and then we were conducted to the entrance where
someone else took us up to the ward where Huey had been placed....”

       *       *       *       *       *

Word of the shooting of Huey Long had spread through the capitol’s
corridors and offices with almost explosive speed. The minute she heard
the report, Lucille May Grace (Mrs. Fred Dent in private life), Register
of the State Land Office, tried to telephone Dr. Clarence Lorio, who,
though not Senator Long’s physician, was one of his closest friends in
the Baton Rouge area. Mrs. Dent (since deceased) was devoted to Huey
Long, for he had supported her father for re-election to the office of
Land Register, a post which he held for more than thirty years. Upon her
father’s death Long appointed her to serve in Mr. Grace’s stead for the
unexpired balance of his term, since she had been his principal
assistant almost from the very day she was graduated from Louisiana
State University.

Since she had retained, and even added to, her father’s tremendous
personal following among the voters, Huey decided at the end of her term
of office in 1932 to put her name on the Allen slate, which would carry
his imprimatur as the “Complete-the-Work” ticket. Hoping to induce Long
to rescind this decision, one or another of the rival aspirants spread a
completely baseless rumor to the effect that Mrs. Dent’s ancestry was
tainted with a touch of Negro blood.

Huey Long’s almost obsessive response to this sort of aspersion was a
matter of common knowledge; it is only because what ensued may have some
bearing on the motive behind the assassination that this particular
incident is worth giving in some detail.

Though he had already consented to put the name of Lucille May Grace on
the slate that would carry his endorsement, he lost no time in
retracting this agreement, and made it crystal clear forthwith that
unless she could show to his complete satisfaction that the rumor which
had gained considerable circulation was without even the semblance of a
foundation, he would place another’s name on the ticket for the position
she, and before her her father, had held.

Miss Grace, the niece of an Iberville parish priest, enlisted the
latter’s aid and that of the late John X. Wegmann, a universally
respected New Orleans insurance man and perhaps the foremost Catholic
layman in Louisiana at the time. Thus birth and baptismal records going
back for generations along the Grace family tree were produced, and they
conclusively demonstrated the utter falsity of the canard. Satisfied,
Long restored her name at once to his personally approved
“Complete-the-Work” ticket of candidates, headed by the name of Oscar K.
Allen for governor.

       *       *       *       *       *

Miss Grace (she did not become Mrs. Dent until a year later) had
attended Louisiana State University with both Clarence and Cecil Lorio,
and knew how close the former’s friendship with Senator Long was. She
began at once to call him, but he was not at his farm in nearby Pointe
Coupee parish, and the telephone at his Baton Rouge residence was
apparently out of order. So she called his brother, Dr. Cecil Lorio.

“Suppose you let me tell the whole story, exactly as I recall it,” the
latter began, when asked about his recollections of what took place in
the operating room of Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium when Huey Long was
admitted there as a patient that September night. Dr. Cecil Lorio and
Dr. Walter Cook were, at the time of this inquiry, the only surviving
physicians who were present throughout all the ensuing surgical
procedure.

“When she failed to reach my brother Clarence,” Dr. Lorio continued,
“Lucille May Grace called me at my home, and I left at once for Our Lady
of the Lake Sanitarium. Huey’s clothing had been removed by the time I
got there, and he was in bed in his room at the east end of the
third-floor corridor. He was fully conscious and we talked quietly from
time to time during the next hour. He was particularly distressed by the
thought that he might now be unable to carry out his plan to screen
students for L.S.U., so as to make it possible for all exceptionally
bright high-school graduates, however needy their families, to receive
the advantages of college education.

“I took his blood pressure and pulse every fifteen minutes; he had
evidently learned something about the significance of this, for when he
asked me what the readings were, and I told him his pulse rate was
getting faster and his blood pressure was dropping a bit, he said:
‘That’s not good, is it?’ and I answered him by saying: ‘No, but it
isn’t too bad yet, either.’ ‘It means there’s an internal hemorrhage?’
he then asked. I said he was probably hemorrhaging some, but that the
relation between blood pressure and pulse rate was one that could also
be attributed to shock. He was very curious about who had shot him,
saying it was someone he had never seen before.

“He had visibly a small blue puncture on the right side of his abdomen,
and another on the right side of his back where the bullet emerged. Both
were very small. But it was obvious some emergency surgery would have to
be performed sooner or later. I was told that Dr. Sanderson had been
summoned from Shreveport, and that Drs. Urban Maes and James Rives were
already en route from New Orleans. Dr. Maes had been appointed to the
chair of surgery at L.S.U.’s new medical college, of which Dr. Vidrine,
also present in Baton Rouge at the time, was dean, along with his
position as superintendent of Charity Hospital. He was in general charge
of the patient’s case. At some point in the proceedings word was brought
to us that a motoring accident had forced Dr. Rives’s car off the road,
and that they would be delayed some time by the difficulty of securing
service at that time of night to have their car dragged back to the
highway. When informed of this, Dr. Vidrine decided not to wait any
longer.”

Huey’s very close friends, Seymour Weiss and Conservation Commissioner
Robert Maestri, had reached Baton Rouge some time prior to this. It is
Mr. Weiss’s clear recollection that the decision to wait no longer
before performing an emergency operation was reached “by all of us”
before word was received of the mischance encountered by Drs. Maes and
Rives.

“As I recall the circumstances,” Seymour Weiss says, “Huey’s condition
was getting worse by the minute. Dr. Vidrine insisted that any further
delay was progressively lessening the Senator’s chances. The other
physicians present agreed that the outlook was not hopeful. Vidrine was
the physician in charge and the rest of us were laymen. The time came
when we either had to agree to let the operation be performed at once,
or take upon ourselves the risk of endangering the man’s life. Mrs. Long
and the children had not yet reached Baton Rouge, but in view of the
medical opinions, the rest of us--all being individuals who were close
to Huey--were just about unanimous in agreeing that the doctors should
proceed.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Amid the almost inconceivable confusion in and out of the hospital, one
person seems to have kept her head, and that was Miss Mary Ann Woods,
now Mrs. Arthur Champagne, the supervisor of nurses. Assigning floor
nurses and trainees to duties so as to make the best possible
disposition of available personnel, she set out to provide four special
attendants for the critically injured Senator, two to serve at night and
two by day.

The first one she called from the register was Theoda Carriere, who
responded at once, even though she had just come off a twelve-hour tour
of duty. The other three were Loretta Meade, Helen Selassie, and Mrs.
Hamilton Baudin. Miss Carriere was one of the first to reach the
hospital, as she lived nearby; and since by that time Senator Long had
been taken from his third-floor sickroom to the operating theater on the
floor above, she scrubbed up at once and reported for duty there.

According to her recollection, Dr. Cook was working on the patient, who
was anesthetized by the time she arrived. Being short of stature, she
had difficulty in seeing the operating table, and therefore placed a
stool so that, by standing on it, she could look over the shoulders of
those surrounding the patient.

Dr. Cook said to her: “This is a gunshot wound; get me some antitetanus
serum.” Miss Carriere left the room for the pharmacy section downstairs
where such supplies were stored, and when she returned with the desired
serum, and gave it to Dr. Cook, Dr. Vidrine was just entering the
operating room.

“Dr. Cook looked up,” she relates, “and said: ‘Well, my relief has
arrived,’ and left the operating room. Dr. Ben Chamberlain assisted Dr.
Vidrine during the balance of the operation.”

In this respect Miss Carriere’s recollections are in direct conflict
with those of every physician who was present, and with the operation
report attached to the hospital chart, as well as with the statement of
Dr. Cook himself, when he testified later that he assisted at the
operation.

As operating procedure was begun in the Sanitarium, neighbors of Dr.
Clarence Lorio, seeing his car parked in front of his home, and
realizing that under normal circumstances he of all men would have been
at the hospital with his gravely wounded friend, managed to rouse him.

“I had been working for thirteen hours straight,” he explained
subsequently, “and I was bone tired. When I got home I not only went to
bed, but took the telephone off the hook so as not to be disturbed. I
had come to the point where I simply had to rest. Naturally, when some
of my neighbors woke me and told me what had happened, I lost no time in
dressing and rushing off to the Sanitarium, but the operation was
already under way when I got there.

“Let me say this about Arthur Vidrine: that man faced one of the
toughest decisions that night anybody ever confronted. If he sat idly
by, waiting for someone else to take over the case, while Huey bled to
death, his associates and Huey’s friends would never forgive him, and he
would never forgive himself, either. On the other hand, if he performed
an emergency operation, and it was discovered later that the critically
wounded patient would have had a better chance for recovery if some
other procedure had been followed, he would still be blamed for a great
man’s death. No one could confront a more harrowing choice.”

On the other hand, it can be taken for granted that Arthur Vidrine must
at least momentarily have entertained the thought of the rewards and
renown that would be his portion if by timely, courageous, and skillful
surgery he, rather than others, saved the life of the Kingfish of
Louisiana. Be that as it may, the decision to operate at once was made;
when it was submitted to Senator Long, he concurred in it; in fact,
according to a monograph by Dr. Frank L. Loria of New Orleans, Huey
himself said: “Come on, let’s go be operated upon.”

Dr. Cecil Lorio described the incident more prosaically in the following
terms:

“Someone told him that it had been decided to operate and that Dr.
Vidrine would perform the operation if Huey had no objection. He
indicated that he was willing for this to be done. Dr. Vidrine selected
Dr. William Cook to assist him, and Dr. Henry McKeown as the
anesthetist. It was this latter choice that brought me back into the
operating room and kept me there, for I am a pediatrician, not a
surgeon.

“Baton Rouge--in fact, all Louisiana--was bitterly divided into Long and
anti-Long factions at this time. One of the most violently partisan
anti-Long individuals in all Baton Rouge was Henry McKeown. He really
hated Huey, though he had many friends among the people who were close
to the Senator.

“Only two or three nights earlier, he and I were both sitting in at a
poker game in the Elks’ Club, when someone said something or other about
Long--probably something in connection with the special session of the
legislature that might be called any day. Dr. McKeown said in jest, the
way any person might in the course of a sociable card game: ‘If ever he
has to have an operation, they better not let me give the anesthetic,
for I’ll guarantee he’d never get off that table.’ Let me say again, and
with emphasis, that this was not a threat, but a jest, something to
underscore the man’s uncompromising anti-Long partisanship.

“Naturally, when within a matter of days he actually was summoned to
serve as anesthetist for an operation to be performed on Huey Long, he
demurred. He pointed out that Huey was a bad operative risk in any case,
and for all anyone knew to the contrary, might already be dying from a
wound which was in itself mortal. ‘If the man dies during the
operation,’ Dr. McKeown pointed out, ‘many of those who have heard me
pop off about him might actually think I killed him.’ No one who knew
Henry McKeown, of course, would think any such thing. Finally he agreed
to serve, provided I watched and checked every move he made.

“I told him I would do so, but while I looked now and then across the
operating table to its head, where he was standing, and saw what he was
doing, I really paid no attention to it, nor did he stop to see whether
or not I was checking on him.

“Later, while the operation was in progress, Dr. Clarence Lorio, my
brother, came in and stood beside Dr. McKeown to the end of the
operation. On the side of the table at Huey’s left stood Dr. Vidrine.
Opposite him was his assistant, Dr. Cook. Beside Dr. Vidrine at his
left, I stood, handing him instruments and materials as he called for
them. As I said, I am not a surgeon, but a pediatrician.

“The operating room was a strange sight. All sorts of people, mostly
politicians, I assume, had crowded into the small room. It was not an
amphitheater, and they ranged themselves all along the walls, not even
being suited up. As Mother Henrietta, the head of the hospital, said
later, after she had vainly tried to keep all who were not physicians or
properly gowned out of the operating chamber, it was anything but normal
surgical procedure.”

It is indeed a pity the original chart, such as it was, could not have
been preserved. But as in the case of most hospitals, the time came when
the absolute limit of storage capacity was exhausted, and the charts on
file were microfilmed. In making these microfilms it was customary in
many hospitals not to include the nurses’ bedside notes in the filmed
record. Hence these do not appear in the film of the chart of Huey Long
at Lady of the Lake.

But even what does remain is fragmentary, and in many cases unsigned. As
Dr. Rives observed many years later: “The situation that night, even
after I arrived, which was after the operation was completed and Huey
was back in his room, could only be described as chaotic. Several
physicians seemed to be on hand, and in the case of a critically injured
patient, when no one of the attending doctors is actually in command and
giving the orders to the crew of which he is the captain ... well, all I
can say is that even during the four hours or so when I was there
between about 1 A.M. and the time I started back for New Orleans which I
reached at daybreak, the situation was nothing short of chaotic.”

A transcript of the microfilm was made by Dr. Chester A. Williams, the
present coroner of East Baton Rouge parish. According to this document,
the admitting note, set down on a plain sheet of paper, is not even
signed; obviously the last two lines were added by someone else after
the operation was concluded. It is preceded on the record by a standard
summary form which reads:

  Hospital No. 24179. Sen. Huey P. Long, 42 yr.w.m.

  Admitted Sept. 8, 1935, to Dr. Vidrine.

  Diagnosis: Shot wound abdomen, perforation of colon, Room 325.

  Died Sept. 10, 1935.

The unsigned “admitting note” on its plain sheet of paper, which follows
the foregoing summary, reads:

“Pt. admitted to O.R. at 9:30 P.M. Dr. Vidrine present. Exam made by Dr.
Vidrine shows wound under ribs rt. side, clothes and body with blood.
Pulse volume weak and faint. Fully conscious, very nervous. Given
caffeine and sodium benzoate 2 cc by hypo. Dr. Cook present. Put to bed
in 314 at 9:45 P.M. Foot of bed elevated. M.S. gr. ¹⁄₆ by hypo for pain.
Asked for ice continuously. Dr. Cecil Lorio present. External heat, Pt.
in cold sweat. After consultation, patient to O.R. at 11:20, pulse weak
and fast, still asks for ice.”

Then follow the words, obviously added after the operation:

“Dr. Vidrine, C. A. Lorio, Cecil and Dr. Cook present, and put to bed in
325 at 12:40 A.M. Foot of bed elevated.”

The Operating Room record of the chart reads:

  Surgeon: Dr. Vidrine.

  Anesthetist: Dr. McKeown.

  Assistants: Dr. Cook, Dr. C. A. Lorio, Dr. C. Lorio.

  Anesthesia: N₂O started at 10:51 P.M. ended 12:14 A.M. Pulse during
  anesthesia 104-114

  Operation begun 11:22 P.M., ended 12:25 A.M.

  What was done: Perforation--2--Transfer [_sic!_] colon.

  [Signature not decipherable]

In the monograph previously referred to, Dr. Loria of New Orleans
compiled a more detailed technical description of the surgical
procedure. This was published in 1948 by the _International Abstracts of
Surgery_ (Volume 87) as a treatise dealing with 31,751 cases of
abdominal gunshot wounds admitted to Charity Hospital during the first
forty-two years of the present century. Dr. Loria appended to it a
series of reports on notable personages in American history who had
succumbed to such wounds, including President Garfield, President
McKinley, and Senator Long. Referring to the Senator’s case, he wrote in
part:

“The bullet which struck Senator Long entered just below the border of
the right ribs anteriorly, somewhat lateral to the mid-clavicular line.
The missile perforated the victim’s body, making its exit just below the
ribs on the right side posteriorly and to the inner side of the
midscapular line, not far from the midline of the back.

“... At the hospital, arrangements were made for an emergency laparotomy
with Vidrine in charge.... Under ether anesthesia the abdomen was opened
by an upper right rectus muscle splitting incision. Very little blood
was found in the peritoneal cavity. The liver, gall bladder and stomach
were free of injury. A small hematoma, about the size of a silver
dollar, was found in the mesentery of the small intestine. The only
intra-peritoneal damage found was a ‘small’ perforation of the hepatic
flexure, which accounted for a slight amount of soiling of the
peritoneum. Both the wounds of entry and of exit in the colon were
sutured and further spillage stopped. The abdomen was closed in layers
as usual.”

About one o’clock that morning Drs. Maes and Rives arrived, and somewhat
later Dr. Russell Stone, another noted New Orleans surgeon. None of
these saw any part of the operative procedure, all surgery having been
completed before their arrival. But a sharp difference of opinion
between Dr. Vidrine and Dr. Stone was followed by the latter’s prompt
return to New Orleans without so much as looking at the patient. Dr.
Stone told some of his New Orleans associates and close friends that
Vidrine had given him the details of the abdominal operation and had
also said that the kidney was injured and was hemorrhaging.

“Did you see the kidney?” he asked Vidrine, and added that the latter
replied: “No, but I felt it.” An acrimonious interchange followed and at
its climax Vidrine said something to the general effect of “Well, go on
in and examine him for yourself.” Stone replied: “Not I. This isn’t my
case and he isn’t my patient. Good night.” Thereupon he returned at once
to New Orleans.

Dr. Rives’s account of his experiences clearly illustrates on what he
based his opinion that the procedure was “chaotic.”

“Dr. Maes and I were taken into a room next to the one Huey was in,” he
related, “and there I stopped. Dr. Maes was taken on into the patient’s
room, while I got off into a corner, making myself inconspicuous. At
this time there was still no suggestion that anyone but Dr. Weiss had
shot or even could have shot Huey Long. Meanwhile, people were going in
and out of the sickroom, apparently at will. I did not know many of
them, and certainly most of them were not physicians. Finally someone,
and I think it was Abe Shushan, asked me had I been in the room where
Huey was, and I said no, I was only there to assist Dr. Maes in the
event there was any surgery he had to perform. He said: ‘In something
like this we want the benefit of every doctor’s advice,’ and led me in
there.

“I did not see the wound of entrance, and I was told by one of the nuns
or one of the nurses that the wound of entrance was beneath the clean
dressing on his belly; and from the location of this dressing it was
clear to me that there was a good chance the bullet might have hit a
kidney.

“I asked the nurses if there were any blood in his urine. That was the
only contribution I could make. Whoever it was, she said she did not
know. I said that if they did not know, he ought to be catheterized at
once. Later that night, some time before I left for New Orleans, I was
told he had been catheterized and that there was blood in his urine.
That was an absolute indication of injury to the kidney. It was not
necessarily a critical injury, or a hemorrhage that would not stop. But
it did mean that there was an injury, and that if hemorrhage continued,
that was the place to look for it.”

Dr. Maes said there would be no further surgery, and hence while he
would stay through the day, Monday, there would be no need for Dr. Rives
to do so. The latter thereupon drove back to New Orleans.

According to Dr. Loria’s monograph, the “postoperative course of the
case continued steadily on the downgrade. Evidence of shock and
hemorrhage appeared to become steadily worse ... the urine was found to
contain much blood. At this time [Dr. Russell] Stone’s opinion was that
another operation to arrest the kidney hemorrhage would certainly prove
fatal....”

Whether it was Dr. Rives or Dr. Stone who first suggested
catheterization is immaterial. The fact remains that until one or the
other of these physicians, neither of whom was directly connected with
the case, proposed this procedure, nothing of the sort seems to have
been done; according to the progress notes on the microfilm chart, it
was not done until 6:45 A.M., almost nine hours after the shooting, and
six hours after the emergency operation had precluded the possibility of
further surgery. Even after it was discovered that the kidney hemorrhage
was massive and continuing, medical opinion was unanimous on the point
that additional surgery would unquestionably prove fatal.

Control of such hemorrhage involved removal of the injured kidney, in
order to tie off the vessels supplying it with blood. This in turn would
mean the cutting of ribs to make room for the requisite mechanics of
kidney removal. Such an operation on a patient already in shock from a
bullet wound and from the major abdominal surgery which followed, would,
it was agreed by all, inevitably bring about the patient’s death. All
that remained was to hope for a miracle--and none manifested itself. In
the words of Dr. Cecil Lorio:

“The patient never really recovered consciousness. He was in shock, and
under sedation, until he died. As the day [Monday] wore on, and Huey’s
blood pressure continued to fall, a transfusion was ordered. It may have
been earlier that the transfusion was given. The hospital records would
show.”

Unfortunately, the hospital record shows only one transfusion, given at
8:15 Monday night, nearly twenty-four hours after the shooting. However,
it must be borne in mind that in those days, long before blood and
plasma banks had been established as standard hospital facilities,
transfusions were by no means the routine procedure they are today. In
the case of Huey Long, a chart note signed by Dr. Roy Theriot records
the fact that five hundred cubic centimeters of citrated blood were
given, that before transfusion approximately three hundred cubic
centimeters of normal saline solution were given intravenously at a
time when the pulse was very thready, and that the transfusion was
followed by a continuous intravenous drip of glucose in normal saline.
Even after this the patient’s blood pressure was only 114 over 84, while
the pulse rate was still a frightening “170-plus.”

Almost as soon as Senator Long had been brought to the hospital,
volunteer blood donors were typed, and their blood cross-matched with
that of the patient. According to the laboratory report incorporated in
the hospital chart, J. A. Vitiano, Eddie Knoblock, Colonel Rougon, J. R.
Pollett, M. E. Bird, George Castigliola, and Paul Voitier were marked
“incompatible”; C. J. Campbell, John Kirsch, “no name,” Joe Bates,
Senator Noe, Bill Melton, and a Mr. Walker were found to be compatible.
In addition, “no name,” Bates, Noe, and Melton were also marked with an
“O.K.”

Senator Noe was the first and apparently only donor, and it is my
recollection that we met in the Heidelberg Hotel elevator Monday night
when he told me he had “just given blood to Huey.” Mrs. Noe was with him
at the time, said she was sure Senator Long would recover, and expressed
the hope that future installments of the _Saturday Evening Post’s_
biographical portrait would “do him proud.”

A little after two o’clock that afternoon Dr. Maes had prescribed a
rectal instillation of laudanum, aspirin, brandy, and normal saline
solution. Once this was given, the chart notes: “Resp. less labored,
less cyanosis, P 148 Temp. 103⁴⁄₅ axilla. Quieter.” During the handling
that was incident to the instillation, Senator Long awoke and asked Dr.
Maes whether he would be able to take the stump in the approaching
campaigns. “It’s a little early to tell, yet,” the physician replied. As
before, the patient lapsed into drugged slumber the moment the handling
that had roused him came to an end.

As concerns the one transfusion recorded on the hospital chart, Dr.
Cecil Lorio reports:

“I recall clearly the fact that the young physician who was to give the
transfusion was so nervous, and his hands were shaking so, that he was
having difficulty placing the needle in the vein that was to receive the
blood; and my brother Clarence said to me, knowing that I frequently
gave transfusions to children: ‘Dr. Cecil, haven’t you your equipment
here so that you might assist in transfusing the Senator?’ I said I had,
and of course to me, accustomed to performing this with the small veins
of children, it was child’s play to place the needle in the large vein
of a man. A number of volunteers--everybody wanted to volunteer--had
already been typed, and one of those whose blood matched was State
Senator James A. Noe. He was the first donor.

“But as the day wore on it became evident that the patient was losing
blood about as fast as we were transfusing it into him, and while there
were no external evidences of bleeding, the conclusion was that he must
be hemorrhaging from the apex of the right kidney. So Dr. T. Jorda Kahle
of New Orleans [head of the urology department of Louisiana State
University’s College of Medicine] was sent for. He got to Baton Rouge
Monday night and thrust a needle just under the skin of the kidney
region and drew out a syringeful of blood. That made it evident the
Senator’s case was hopeless, barring a miracle. The only way to stop
such a hemorrhage would have been to remove the kidney, and that would
certainly have killed him.

“At the end, the dying man threshed wildly about the oxygen tent that
had been put over him. A little after four in the morning his breathing
stopped.”

       *       *       *       *       *

Mrs. Long and the three children--Rose, Russell, and Palmer--did not
reach Baton Rouge until after the operation was over, in spite of the
fact that the Airline’s new bridge across the Bonnet Carre Spillway was
opened to the passage of their car, thanks to Earle Christenberry’s
directions to the highway guards at Lousteau’s. Since the Senator was
never really conscious after he left the operating room, the members of
his family had little or no communion with the man who to them was not
merely a public figure, but husband and father.

They were given rooms directly across the hall from the one in which
physicians strove unremittingly to save Huey Long’s life. He had not
been a very devoted family man. He was away from home too much in the
pursuit of objectives it seemed impossible for him to share with the
Rose McConnell he had met when he was a brash young door-to-door
salesman of Cottolene.

Those days were now so long in the past, the happy days of shared trial
when every penny had to be stretched to the uttermost. Success had come
so quickly--the big ornate home in Shreveport, the new Executive Mansion
at Baton Rouge of which Rose had been the first chatelaine, the
elaborate residence on Audubon Boulevard, the days of triumph and
rejoicing that followed the effort to impeach him....

All of it was now slipping away forever, while Huey Long’s blood seeped
slowly but relentlessly out of his body, with no possibility short of a
miracle of halting its ebb as some physician, now forever anonymous,
made on his hospital chart a final entry to the effect that even “the
oxygen tent discontinued as pt. grew very restless under it--delusions
of photographers, etc.”

Once hope for the patient had been abandoned, it was Seymour Weiss who
was the nuncio bringing to the members of Huey’s family, in the room
across the hall, tidings of great grief. Himself emotionally shaken to
the depths of his being, he told Mrs. Long and the three children as
gently as possible that the end was very near. They followed him across
the hall to the bed where the dying man, barely conscious, was drawing
in and expelling shallow, noisy breaths. He made no effort to speak; but
as each of the four laid a hand on the bed beside him, he managed weakly
to pat it in a final, caressing gesture of farewell.

They returned to their room to await the end. Seymour Weiss accompanied
them, giving voice to whatever comforting phrases he could muster, and
then returned to the sickroom. One vital point remained to be cleared
up.

“Huey, Huey, can you hear me?” he asked.

There was a faint stir of response.

“Huey, you are seriously hurt. Everything that can be done to help you
is being done, but no one can ever say how such things will turn out.
Now is the time to tell me where you put the papers and things that you
took out of the bank vault. Where did you put them? Tell me where they
are, Huey. Please don’t wait any longer.”

Thus the final thoughts he carried with him out of his life concerned a
political campaign, his campaign for the presidency of the United
States. Hardly audible was the faint breath that whispered:

“Later--I’ll--tell--you--later....”

They were his last words. The secret of what became of the affidavits,
the other documents, and the campaign funds that were to provision his
presidential race was one he took with him to an elaborate tomb newly
constructed in the very center of the landscaped park around the capitol
he had built for Louisiana.




11 ---- THE AFTERMATH

  “_And this was all the harvest that I reap’d--I came like water and
  like wind I go._”

  ----THE RUBÁIYÁT


A few hours after Huey Long had breathed his last, Dr. Weiss was buried
with requiem services at St. Joseph’s Church, where he and Yvonne had
gone to Mass only three days before. John M. Parker and J. Y. Sanders,
Sr., two former governors prominent among leaders of the political and
personal opposition to the Kingfish regime, attended the funeral, and
were bitterly assailed by Long partisans for doing so. Dr. McKeown, the
anesthetist during the emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine, was
one of the pallbearers.

Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, a member of the House of Representatives, had
been delegated by the Weiss family to act as their spokesman in meeting
with reporters who had swarmed into Baton Rouge from near and far. It
should be noted that at this time no one had as yet voiced the slightest
doubt about Dr. Weiss having fired the shot that ended Long’s reign.
Only the question of motive was the subject for argument and dispute.

“There was absolutely nothing premeditated about what Carl did,” Dr.
Pavy told newsmen gathered at the little cottage he shared with Judge
Philip Gilbert when in Baton Rouge. “On Sunday, while his parents sat on
the beach of their camp with their baby grandchild, Carl and Yvonne
sported about the water. When he returned home, he bade his wife an
affectionate good-by, as he left about 7 P.M. for a professional call.
He even phoned the Lady of the Lake Sanitarium to make an appointment
for an operation Monday morning.

“He was an earnest lad, and lived for humanity, but he was sorely
distressed about the suppressive form of government he felt existed in
Louisiana. He never talked much about it, and he certainly never
confided to his family or anyone else any plan to kill Long. Our only
explanation for his action is that this suppressive type of rule preyed
on his mind until it unhinged, and he suddenly felt himself a martyr,
giving his life to the people of Louisiana. He must have felt that way,
else how could he have left the wife and baby that he loved above
everything?”

To a question as to whether the gerrymander that would oust his wife’s
father from the honorable office he had held for so many years could
have prompted the decision to shoot Long, Dr. Pavy replied:

“In the first place, none of us would kill anyone over such a matter as
the loss of a public office. It is my understanding that while the bill
aimed at my brother’s judgeship was discussed at the Weiss’s dinner
table Sunday, it was treated lightly rather than otherwise.”

The legislature of which Dr. Pavy was a member had remained in session.
“We’re going to pass every one of ol’ Huey’s bills the same as if he was
still here with us,” was the majority watchword. In addition to these,
the members also adopted a concurrent resolution authorizing the fallen
leader’s interment in the capitol grounds, and the construction there of
a proper tomb to receive the great bronze casket, this to be topped by a
monument later. They also adopted a concurrent resolution “recognizing
and commending and according due recognition” to the valued services and
help of the Senator’s bodyguards, mentioning by name specifically
George McQuiston, assistant superintendent of the state police, Warden
Louis Jones of the state penitentiary, and officers Murphy Roden,
Theophile Landry, Paul Voitier, and Joe Messina.

During one of the interludes when the House was in session, I took
occasion to go to Dr. Pavy’s desk and ask whether he had reached any
conclusion as to Dr. Weiss’s motive other than the one he had mentioned
on the previous Monday. I had heard vague reports that it was felt in
some quarters Huey Long was planning to revive an old racial campaign
canard against Judge Pavy. This was the allegation made in 1908 by the
then Sheriff Swords to the effect that one of the Judge’s
relatives-in-law had an ancestor of other than purely Caucasian blood.

The old slur had long since been forgotten by most persons, since it
dated back to 1907-8. In that era, though the quadroon ball had long
since lapsed from the quasi recognition once accorded it, Northern
magazines still published muckraking articles about miscegenation in the
South. On the other hand, memories of relatively recent carpetbag evils
were so vivid that the “taint of the tarbrush” was fatal to any
political aspirant. Thus the fact that in spite of Sheriff Swords’s
allegations in a milieu of that sort, Judge Pavy was not only elected,
but re-elected for five or six consecutive terms, testifies eloquently
to the universal disbelief this imputation encountered.

Naturally, I did not spell all this out to Dr. Pavy. I merely made a
casual reference to the general spread of all sorts of rumors about Dr.
Weiss’s motives, and asked whether he had any information on this score
other than what he had told us on the morning after the shooting.

“I tell you again,” he replied with profound conviction, “that this was
an act of pure patriotism on Carl’s part. He was ready to lay down his
life to save his state, and perhaps this entire nation, from the sort of
dictatorship which he felt Long had imposed on Louisiana.”

None the less, in many minds--my own, for one--the feeling that there
might be some substance to the racial motive would not down. Many
Louisianians, for example, well knew that in his weekly, _American
Progress_, Long never referred to the scion of a certain socially
prominent family as anything but “Kinky” Soandso.

Even more recent in public memory was his insistent conjunction of
Dudley LeBlanc with Negro officers in his “Coffin Club,” the outlawed
burial-insurance society. Moreover, the knowledge that a derogatory
allegation was untrue never deterred Huey Long from trumpeting it forth
at least by innuendo on every stump during a political campaign. For
example, an office seeker opposing the candidacy of a man Long had
endorsed was in the business of installing coin-activated devices for
jukeboxes and an early type of vending machine, but Long never referred
to him in his tirades as anything but Slot Machine Soandso.

Amid a fog of conflicting rumors and surmises, the first note of doubt
that Carl Weiss, Jr., had even tried to kill Senator Long was sounded by
the young physician’s father, in a statement he made at an inquest into
the circumstances of his son’s death. Such as it was, this probe was
conducted by District Attorney John Fred Odom, one of the leaders of the
Square Deal Movement. It developed little more than one possible
explanation of the contusion, abrasion, or cut visible on Long’s lower
lip when he reached the hospital.

“Was Senator Long bleeding from the mouth?” District Attorney Odom asked
Dr. William A. Cook, after the latter stated that he had assisted Dr.
Vidrine in the emergency operation on the mortally wounded patient.

“Dr. Henry McKeown, who was administering the anesthetic,” responded
Dr. Cook, “called my attention to an abrasion on Senator Long’s lower
lip. It was an abrasion or brush burn. When it was wiped with an
antiseptic, it oozed a little.”

“Did it appear to be a fresh abrasion?”

“Yes.”

Attorney General Porterie, a pro-Long leader, asked Dr. Cook:

“A man having been shot as Senator Long was, and making his way down
four winding flights of stairs, could perhaps have struck against an
angle of marble or iron?”

“Any contusion or trauma could have caused such a bruise,” was Dr.
Cook’s reply.

Only one new development of any potential significance was brought out
by the inquiry. Sheriff Coleman testified that he struck twice with his
fist before firing on Weiss and that “the first time I missed him and
struck someone else, but the second time I hit him and knocked him down
when Roden was grappling with him.” Conceivably, the “someone else” of
the first blow could have been Huey Long, although none of the other
eyewitnesses mention such a blow. As for the remainder of the
investigation, only one brief moment of emotional tension marked its
course. That was when the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, a paid organizer of
the Share-Our-Wealth movement, took the stand. He had been dropping
hints here and there indicating his entire readiness to take over the
Huey Long movement as its new leader. The moment he reached the witness
stand he burst out dramatically to the effect that “my leader whom I
worshiped has been killed. He was my hero. I respect this court, but I
do not respect the district attorney, who was one of the co-plotters of
this assassination, and I shall refuse to answer any questions put by
him.”

Mr. Odom said he had no questions to ask, adding: “I care nothing about
him or his statements, but merely wish to state that whoever says I
plotted to kill Huey Long is a willful, malicious, and deliberate liar.”

Neither on this occasion, eight days after the event, nor for a long
time thereafter did anyone deny, or offer to deny, that Carl Weiss had
entered the capitol armed with a pistol and had fired it at Senator
Long. Even the bitter-enders among Long’s political foes came up with
nothing more in the way of exoneration for the young physician than the
suggestion that there had been two bullets, and that the second one, a
wild shot or a ricochet from the gun of one of the bodyguards during the
furious fusillade which followed the initial shot, had inflicted the
wound that proved mortal.

True, Carl Weiss’s father, testifying at the inquest, had expressed the
opinion that his son was “too superbly happy with his wife and child,
and too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a
murder.” But this was generally accepted as a natural expression of
paternal love and grief, and therefore not to be taken as refuting the
uncontradicted testimony of eyewitnesses and physicians.

The inquest conducted by Coroner Tom Bird into the death of Huey Long
occupied only a few minutes. The family had refused to authorize a
necropsy, the results of which might well have confirmed or silenced
proponents of the two-bullet theory. These still emphasize the fact that
no small-caliber bullet was ever found among the projectiles picked up
from the floor of the corridor where the shooting occurred. They argue
that if a small-caliber bullet were found to be still in Huey’s body,
the wound of exit must necessarily have been made by yet another
missile.

Huey’s corpse was viewed by a coroner’s jury at the Rabenhorst Funeral
Home, where it was being prepared to be laid out in state in the
capitol’s memorial hall for two days before the funeral. Thomas M.
Davis, now a laboratory supervisor for an oil refinery, was one member
of that five-man panel. Speaking in the living room of his modest home
in the Goodwood subdivision, he recalls that----

“I was an L.S.U. freshman at the time. My daddy had come to Baton Rouge
from Alabama to work as a brickmason at the Standard Oil plant. Dr. Tom
Bird, the coroner, was a friend of ours, and knew I wasn’t too well
fixed, so for as long as I was in college, he would appoint me to these
coroner’s juries because he knew the two-dollar fee I got helped me to
stay in school.

“The day of the inquest--it was a Tuesday and raining like
everything--we met at Rabenhorst’s and were taken out in back where
Long’s body lay under a sheet. The sheet was lifted and then Dr. Tom, he
raised up the right side of the body to show us the wound in the back.
It was so small I doubt we’d have even seen it had it not been pointed
out to us. But they wouldn’t let us get too close to the body, no more
than from here to the other side of the room [indicating a distance of
approximately twelve feet]. They never did let us feel around to see
could we get out another bullet. They did show us the little old Spanish
[_sic!_] automatic that belonged to Dr. Weiss, and then Dr. Tom filled
out the report and we all signed it, and went home through the rain that
was still pouring. That afternoon Dr. Weiss was buried.”

Long was buried two days later. Throughout the day and night, Tuesday
and Wednesday, his body lay in state as thousands upon thousands filed
slowly past the casket in an apparently endless procession to look their
last upon him. From near and far came floral offerings: elaborate
professional set pieces of broken columns, gates ajar, open schoolbooks,
and the like, with ornately gold-lettered, broad ribbons of white or
lavender silk; but there were likewise many simple wreaths of garden
blossoms, plucked by the hands of those who revered ol’ Huey as the
avatar who had been put on earth to brighten and better the lot of the
common man. Large as it was, Memorial Hall could not begin to hold the
flowers. When they were set up outdoors in the landscaped capitol park,
they occupied literally acres of the grounds.

Beginning with daybreak on Thursday, mourners began to stream into Baton
Rouge from all sections of the state; by special train from the cities,
by chartered bus, by glossy limousine and mud-spattered farm pickup.
Looking westward from the observation gallery atop the capitol’s
thirty-one-story central section, it is possible to see for nearly seven
miles along one of the state’s principal highways. No bridge had yet
been built to span the Mississippi at this point. Consequently, as far
as the eye could see from this lofty lookout platform, a solid line of
vehicles was stalled. They moved forward only a bit at a time, as the
Port Allen ferries, doing double duty, picked up deckload after deckload
for transfer to the east bank.

Mrs. Long had asked Seymour Weiss to make all funeral arrangements, and
because Huey, though nominally a Baptist, was not a church member and
thought little of ministers as a class, the problem of selecting an
ordained churchman to conduct the services was a sticky one. Religious
prejudice was no part of Long’s make-up. He had known Dick Leche as a
close friend for years. Yet on the last day, when casting about for a
gubernatorial candidate, he did not even know whether this close friend
was or was not a Catholic.

Looking back on what happened, and still chagrined by the memory of his
decision to select Gerald Smith as funeral chaplain, Seymour Weiss
relates that “I didn’t know what to do. If I picked a Catholic priest, a
Protestant minister, or a rabbi, I’d offend those that weren’t
represented; even if I picked all three for a sort of joint service,
those who felt that Huey was neither a Catholic nor a Jew might resent
their inclusion, and in addition, the funeral service would be dragged
out too long with three obituary sermons to deliver. Then I happened to
recall that Gerald Smith had severed his connection with a Shreveport
church of which he had been the pastor before being employed by the
Share-Our-Wealth movement as an exhorter.

“So I went to him and said: ‘You’re a kind of free-lance preacher
without portfolio, and that’s why I’m going to give you the biggest
honor you’ve ever had. You’re going to conduct Huey’s funeral service’
... and that was the worst mistake I ever made in all my life.”

Not that anything untoward occurred to mar the service. Under direction
of highway-department engineers, special crews had labored around the
clock to have the vault ready. From the great bronze doors of the
capitol the cortege was led by Castro Carrazo and his Louisiana State
University student band. With drums muffled and the tempo of their march
reduced to slow-step they played “Every Man a King,” so artfully
transposed to a minor key that what was and still is essentially a
doggerel became an impressive and moving dirge. The service that
followed was simple and dignified.

In Baltimore, Henry L. Mencken, ever ready to sacrifice fact for the
turn of a sparkling phrase, predicted that ere long Louisianians would
dynamite Huey’s ornate casket out of its crypt and erect an equestrian
statue of Dr. Weiss over the site. The truth is that a monument to the
fallen apostle of Share-Our-Wealth has been built above the vault, and
that elders still make worshipful pilgrimages to the spot.

Indeed, there have been those who literally canonized the memory of the
man who once proclaimed himself Kingfish. Among the personal
advertisements in the daily newspapers of South Louisiana one finds
cards of thanks to this or to that favorite saint. “Thanks to St. Rita
and St. Jude for financial aid.” “Thanks to St. Anthony for successful
journey.” “Thanks to St. Joseph for recovery of father and husband.” And
among them have appeared such cards as this: “Thanks to St. Raymond,
St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long for favor granted.” The last one cited
appeared in the New Orleans _Times-Picayune_ of June 11, 1937.

Even those who make up a younger generation to whom Huey Long’s name
already has become as impersonal as that of, let us say, Millard
Fillmore, still visit the statue, much as they would pause to look at
any other historical monument in their travels.

Within twenty-four hours of the most elaborate funeral ever held in
Louisiana, attended by approximately 150,000 participants in the solemn
rites of lamentation, Huey’s Praetorian Guard were up in arms against
one another. Ready to yield instant obedience to their Kingfish, they
were one and all determined never to render such homage to anyone of
their own subordinate rank.

The climax came about three o’clock one morning, when Gerald Smith not
only proclaimed himself the new head of the Share-Our-Wealth movement,
but announced the ticket which he and his followers had endorsed and
would back in the forthcoming January primary. None of the names Huey
had been considering appeared thereon. It was headed by the names of
State Senator Noe for governor and Public Service Commissioner Wade O.
Martin, Sr., for United States senator.

Reverend Smith issued his pronouncement from the Roosevelt Hotel, but
was incautious enough to tell such people as Ray Daniell of the New York
_Times_, Allen Raymond of the New York _Herald Tribune_, and myself that
the Huey Long organization would move forward with even greater strides
as soon as it had rid itself of the Jews in it.

The reaction was so immediate it must have shocked even him. The first
obstacle he encountered was the announcement by Earle Christenberry that
no one not specifically authorized to do so by himself as copyright
owner, could use either Share-Our-Wealth or Share-the-Wealth as party
designations, and that he proposed to turn over the only membership
rolls of that organization to Mrs. Long.

The next came when the other Long bigwigs, realizing the ominous
implications of Smith’s bid for the scepter, submerged all their
intramural antagonisms in order to prevail on Judge Leche, as the
candidate the late Kingfish himself had tapped, to head an “official”
Long organization ticket. By way of making this ticket’s status all the
more authentic, it also carried the names of Earl Long as candidate for
lieutenant governor, Oscar Allen as nominee to serve out Huey’s
unexpired term in the Senate, and Allen Ellender as candidate for the
ensuing full six-year term, for which Huey himself would have run as
curtain raiser to his bid for the presidency.

In addition, Russell Long, then only seventeen years old, was enlisted
as one of the speakers who would campaign on behalf of the official
ticket. This was to be his initial bid for political recognition; he was
put on the first team, campaigning right alongside his uncle and Judge
Leche. Gerald Smith, on the other hand, was relegated to obviously
subordinate rank. Realizing the hopelessness of a maverick’s lone foray
against such odds, to say nothing of his inability to secure funds from
the Share-Our-Wealth organization, he returned to the fold, and was
assigned to address rural meetings in small country churches and the
like.

By and large the platform of the authorized Long ticket was simple: from
the stump and in circulars, over the radio and in newspaper advertising,
the anti-Long slate was branded the “Assassination Ticket.”

Its backers were additionally handicapped by having Congressman
Cleveland Dear, an Alexandria attorney and a very inept campaigner, as
their candidate. His insistence that he headed a “Home Rule Ticket”
which proposed to return to individual communities those rights of
self-government which dictatorship had usurped, fell upon deaf ears.
Even had Dear and his fellows been skilled and adroit campaigners, their
prowess would have availed little against the hysterical determination
of the great mass of voters to express by their ballots how deeply they
disapproved of assassination--especially of the assassination of their
idolized ol’ Huey.

There was actually a pathetic overtone to Cleveland Dear’s declaration
that the hotel conference “was attended by about 300 of as fine men as
can be found, who registered openly at the hotel desk, conducted their
conversations openly in rooms and in hallways and not behind locked
doors. There was hardly a meeting at that time where the possibility of
bloodshed was not mentioned, but I heard no discussion of it at that
hotel conference.

“Yet the governor is going around this state preaching hatred, and
charging that the murder plot was hatched there. If he believes that, he
should have me arrested. I challenge him to have me arrested!”

This sort of defensive jeremiad fell very flat when in country-school
assembly halls, in churches, in fraternal-lodge rooms and other small
rural meeting places, administration speakers became emotional over
basins of red dye, lifting the fluid in cupped hands and letting it
trickle back in the lamplight while declaiming: “Here it is, like the
blood Huey Long shed for you, the blood that stained the floor as it
poured from his body. Are you going to vote for those who planned this
deed and carried it into execution?”

It soon became obvious to even the most optimistic leaders of the
self-styled Home Rule faction that something must be done to stem the
“assassination” tide. The climax was reached when Mayor Walmsley was
booed to the echo by the throng that had come to see the first bridge
ever built across the Mississippi at New Orleans formally dedicated and
opened to traffic. The official name of the structure, and so marked on
War Department maps: the Huey P. Long Bridge. The chorus of boos drowned
out every word that Mayor Walmsley uttered at the dedication, and was
maintained until he resumed his seat.

Whether or not this incident precipitated the final effort of the Home
Rulers to escape the assassination onus in that cheerless campaign no
one can say at this late date. But a charge by Dear in his next address
before a large meeting gave birth to the bodyguard-bullet story, or at
least brought about its acceptance as factual in many circles to this
day.

“Isn’t it true that one of Huey Long’s bodyguards is in a mental
institution this very minute?” he cried dramatically. “Is he not
muttering to himself over and over again: ‘I’ve killed my best friend!
I’ve killed my best friend! I’ve killed my best friend!’?”

This was not true. Dear did not name the bodyguard supposedly thus
afflicted, and the newspapers thought so little of his outburst, or were
so reluctant to risk a libel suit, that they did not even include the
quotation in their accounts of the rally. But for some reason which now
escapes the memory of those who recall the incident, it was taken for
granted that the candidate had referred to Joe Messina.

Marching steadily toward a landslide victory by a larger majority than
had ever been cast for any other Louisiana candidate for governor--even
for the Kingfish himself--Judge Leche was asked whether he knew anything
about the basis, if any, of the Dear statement; specifically, whether
Joe Messina was then or had been confined recently to a mental
institution.

“I’d say yes to that,” he replied. “At least, he is one of the
doorkeepers at the executive mansion, and whenever I think of how crazy
I am to give up a quiet, peaceful, dignified place on the appeals bench
for a chance to live in that mansion four long years, I’d definitely
class it as a madhouse.”

None the less, the charge--a countercharge, really--that the bullet
which ended Huey Long’s life came from the gun of one of his bodyguards
was repeated so often thereafter, and with so many elaborations, that it
was permanently embedded in the twentieth-century folklore of Louisiana.

The Long machine, for the moment an invincible political juggernaut,
rolled on to total victory; but without Huey’s genius for organization,
for expelling undesirables and recruiting replacements, and above all
for having his absolute authority accepted by those serving under him,
it ground to a halt and collapsed within three years.

Beyond doubt another factor in the swiftness with which a monolithic
organization of incipiently national scope crumbled into nothingness was
the realization that its treasury had disappeared. Naturally, every
effort was made to trace this hoard of dollars and documents. In
November of 1936, while the Long estate was still under probate, the
safety-deposit box which the Riggs National Bank at Washington still
held in the late Senator’s name was opened in the presence of Mrs. Long,
the deputy Register of Wills, Earle Christenberry, a bank official, and
a representative of the Internal Revenue Service. It was found empty,
stripped of the trove which Long told Seymour Weiss he had removed to
another and secret place of concealment.

With no clue to the new depository to which the contents of this vault
had been transferred, the search for it was as prolonged as it was
bootless. Every key on the ring turned over to Mrs. Long by the Lady of
the Lake Sanitarium after her husband’s demise was examined. Only one of
them proved to have any possible relation to safety-deposit boxes. On
August 11, 1936, Earle Christenberry made a tracing or rubbing of this
key, and sent it to the Yale and Towne Company at Stamford, Connecticut.

Four days later W. W. Herrgen of that firm replied: “The key which you
sent to me ... is for one of our No. 3401-C safety deposit locks, and a
search of our files shows that this key could be for use in a lock at
the Whitney National Bank of New Orleans.”

The Whitney, largest and most independent bank in New Orleans at the
time, was for that very reason the last one Huey Long would have been
likely to select. In any case, its officials reported that the key in
question was not for any of the boxes in their vault. Of the money,
aggregating what may well have been several million dollars--enough to
finance an entire presidential campaign on the lavish scale to which
Huey Long was accustomed--no trace has ever been found.

Even the sale of _My First Days in the White House_ was pitifully small
compared to what it would have been had its author lived to issue it as
a campaign document.

Up to this day no one has been able to hazard a guess as to what was
done with this accumulation of currency. Long had always levied a
political tribute of two per cent on the salaries of all state
employees. No effort was made to conceal this. Indeed, the Kingfish
boasted that his support came from the people in small, regular
individual contributions, and not in huge individual gifts from the
swollen corporations, the money barons, and something called “the
interests.”

From 1919 to 1946 Elmer L. Irey was chief of the Treasury Department’s
Intelligence and Enforcement Division. Among other and perhaps lesser
achievements, he had directed the investigation that finally landed Al
Capone behind bars for income-tax evasion. In a 1948 book by Irey, “as
told to William J. Slocum,” one chapter deals with the Roosevelt
administration’s efforts to secure a thorough investigation of the
income-tax returns filed (or not filed) by Huey Long, his top aides, and
even some of their subordinates.

“We decided that the technique that had put Al Capone and his gang in
jail would be reasonably applicable to Huey Long and his gang,” the
Irey book avers in telling of the investigation that Treasury Secretary
Morgenthau ordered within three days after he took office.

Evidence was gathered against the smaller fry first, and with former
Governor Dan Moody of Texas as counsel for the Treasury Department, one
of these lesser lights was convicted and sentenced to Atlanta in April
1935.

By autumn more evidence had been gathered against Long himself.
According to Irey’s memoir, it “convinced Moody. ‘I will go before the
grand jury when it meets next month and ask for an indictment against
Long,’ Moody told us.... That conversation was held on September 7.”

This was the very day on which, in the course of a round of golf, Huey
Long confided to Seymour Weiss not only that enough cash and other
campaign material was in hand to finance his presidential race, but that
all this accumulation had been removed from the safety-deposit box
he--Long--had rented under his own name in the Riggs National Bank in
Washington.

It must not be forgotten that Long too had a highly proficient
intelligence service, and that therefore he was beyond question well
aware that the T-men were busily seeking evidence to be used against
him. He knew who their operatives in Louisiana were, where their
headquarters office in the Masonic Temple Building was, and in general,
exactly how the Irey unit functioned. He had no illusions about their
knowledge of his Riggs Bank safety-deposit box. He knew how they had
traced such depositories in other cases, and also that, in the past,
variations of “this money does not belong to me, it is merely the
political campaign (etc., etc.) fund of our association” had proved to
be no valid defense.

Whether or not that is why he stripped the Riggs Bank box of its
contents no one can say. But it is certain that if Long had lived, and
Dan Moody had impounded the contents of this box for evidence of
unreported income, he would have made a water haul.... The T-men brought
to trial only one other of the indictments pending against Long bigwigs;
they considered it their strongest case, but the jurors found the
defendant “not guilty.” It was not until the government filed charges of
using the mails to defraud that convictions were obtained some three or
four years later.

What it all came down to is this: the apparently impregnable political
structure created by Huey Long, and the hard-and-fast line of cleavage
that separated Long from anti-Long while the Kingfish was present to
maintain his dictatorial hold on all phases of his organization, began
to disintegrate at 4:06 A.M. of September 10, 1935. As is almost
invariably the case, the dictatorship died with the dictator. After the
Leche landslide majority of 1936 the governor-designate epitomized the
result rather ruefully by observing:

“They didn’t vote for or against a live governor; only for or against a
dead senator.”

Today the Long faction, what there is of it, is just another loosely
knit political coalition. The number of those who still recall the
self-anointed Kingfish of the Lodge becomes smaller with each passing
day.... In the spring of 1962 Johnny Carson, then a television
quizmaster, asked a couple of contestants on his “Who Do You Trust?”
program this question:

“What statesman who was elected governor in 1928, was assassinated at
Baton Rouge in 1935?”

The two contestants, who had otherwise proved themselves reasonably well
informed, simply looked blank. Neither of them could give the answer.

Before many more years have gone by, Huey Pierce Long will be just
another vague figure out of a history text, and there will no longer be
any disputes about the architect of his assassination, the manner in
which it was carried out, or the motives that prompted it. But in the
meantime----




12 ---- SUMMATION

  “_One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels._”

  ----WOODROW WILSON


The various versions of “what really happened” during the assassination
of Huey Long can be grouped into four general classes under some such
headings as the following:

  Dr. Weiss, unarmed, entered the capitol and merely struck at Long,
  being gunned down at once by the bodyguards, one of whose wild shots
  inflicted a mortal wound on the man they were seeking to defend.

  Dr. Weiss was armed, did fire one shot which missed its target. In the
  ensuing fusillade which riddled the young physician’s body, a wild
  shot inflicted on Long a wound which proved fatal.

  The small-caliber bullet from Weiss’s weapon did not pass completely
  through its victim’s body, and was never found, being buried with him.
  The fatal bullet, a ricochet or stray shot from the gun of a
  bodyguard, was the missile that emerged from Long’s body in the back,
  creasing the kidney in its passage and initiating what later proved to
  be a fatal hemorrhage.

  Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber weapon fired the only shot which struck Huey
  Long, passing through the right side of the abdomen, and injuring the
  right kidney just before emerging at the back. It is possible that
  surgery to remove this kidney, rather than the frontal laparotomy
  which was performed, might have halted the fatal hemorrhage and thus
  have saved Long’s life.

Taking these up individually and in sequence, it becomes a relatively
simple matter to dispose of the first assumption. This rests on the
undeniable fact that Senator Long’s lower lip bore an abrasion on its
outer surface, and a small cut inside of his mouth; also on the
statement of one nurse who is quoted as saying she heard the patient say
in the hospital: “He hit me.”

But there is abundant evidence to support the belief that if this bruise
was the result of a blow, it was not struck by Dr. Weiss. There is, for
one thing, the testimony of Sheriff Coleman, that he struck at Senator
Long’s assailant twice, that the first blow missed the assassin and
struck someone else, and that the second felled Weiss, who by that time
was grappling with Murphy Roden.

There is likewise the statement of the first physician to examine the
gravely wounded man at the hospital, when Judge O’Connor voiced the
belief that Long had been shot in the mouth because of the bloody
spittle that stained his clothing. After an examination the young doctor
declared “that is just where he hit himself against something.”

There is the unanimous testimony of Justice Fournet, Sheriff Coleman,
and Murphy Roden that the assailant later identified as Dr. Weiss did
have “a small black pistol” and did fire it, as well as the testimony of
Frampton, Justice Fournet, and Coleman that this pistol was lying a few
inches from Dr. Weiss’s lifeless hand immediately after the shooting.

But above all, the belief that the young physician was unarmed and
merely struck Long with his fist is proved fallacious by one
circumstance: the identity of the bullet-riddled body on the floor of
the corridor where the shooting took place was not established until
long after the weapon was found, in fact, not until the coroner arrived
and examined the contents of the dead man’s wallet.

It goes without saying that if Dr. Weiss came unarmed to the capitol,
some other person must have brought his gun there from the car where his
father testified he carried it. The argument is advanced that this was
done by a bodyguard, a highway patrolman, or an officer of the state
bureau of identification, to direct suspicion away from the “fact” that
a wild shot from one of the bodyguards was the only missile that
inflicted a mortal wound on Long.

But this presupposes that those who could not identify a riddled body on
the marble floor of a capitol corridor were none the less able to pick
out the slain man’s automobile from among the hundreds, possibly
thousands, of cars parked on the capitol grounds and along every nearby
street, search it for a weapon, and place that weapon surreptitiously
where it was picked up by the authorities moments after the shooting.
This so far transcends even the most remote possibility, that any
version based on the assumption that Weiss, unarmed, merely struck at
Long with his fist, can be discarded out of hand.

The second category includes all versions of the proposition that Carl
Weiss did fire one shot, but missed. There is even one account which
holds that, at the time, Long was wearing a bullet-proof vest which
Weiss’s small-caliber bullet could not penetrate.

Everyone who knew Huey Long well, who traveled with him on his campaign
tours, stopped at the same hotels with him, and so on, can testify to
the fact that he was never known to wear a bullet-proof vest. He
surrounded himself with armed guards wherever he went; a cadre of
militiamen in full uniform, with steel helmets and side arms,
accompanied him to the washroom in what is now the building of the
National Bank of Commerce while he was conducting one of his murder-plot
probes there. But he wore no armor.

Of my own knowledge I can testify that I have seen him in his suites at
the Roosevelt and at the Heidelberg when, after breakfast, he bathed and
dressed for the street, that I have traveled with him during his
campaigns through Louisiana and through Arkansas, that I have been with
him in his home on Audubon Boulevard, and that never, from the day I
first met him in 1919 to the day of his death in 1935, have I known him
to wear anything that remotely resembled a bullet-proof vest.

But to make assurance doubly sure, I checked this point with Earle
Christenberry and with Seymour Weiss, his two closest friends.

“I can’t imagine how that story got about,” Christenberry said, “but I
know exactly on what it must be based. About six months before Huey died
I got the bright idea that it would be a smart thing for him, when he
went out stumping the country in the approaching presidential campaign,
to wear a bullet-proof vest. So without saying a word to him about it, I
wrote to Elliott Wisbrod in Chicago, a manufacturer of such equipment,
and asked that a vest of this type be sent to me for the Senator’s
approval.

“The thing was delivered in due course, and I put it on and went to his
room and showed it to him, and suggested that on occasion it might be
wise to wear it as a protection against some unpredictable attack. He
told me to send the damn thing back, adding ‘it would be ridiculous for
me to wear it. I don’t need no goddam bullet-proof vest.’ So I sent it
back and that was the end of it.

“I have never spoken about this incident from that day to this. I didn’t
think another soul knew about it. But evidently the story must have
leaked out somewhere; from the manufacturers, I suppose. At any rate, I
was the one that wore the bullet-proof vest, one day for a few minutes.
He never did in all his life.”

Seymour Weiss, the sartorial mentor who weaned Long away from the flashy
clothes in which he first came to public notice, put it more succinctly.

“Huey wouldn’t have known what a bullet-proof vest looked like,” he
said.

Other aspects of the available evidence cover not merely the category of
stories about Weiss’s bullet missing its target, being deflected by a
bullet-proof vest, etc., but the next category as well. This embraces
what is far and away the most widely believed and oft repeated version
of what took place. It holds that a bullet from the gun of a bodyguard
inflicted the mortal wound of whose effects Huey Long died, even though
Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber missile likewise struck him.

Three points are the ones most frequently stressed by those who cling to
this theory.

The first is that “no small-caliber bullet was ever found.” This has
been interpreted to mean that the Weiss bullet was still in Long’s body
and, no autopsy being authorized, was buried with him. There is general
agreement on one point. The fatal injury was sustained near the wound of
exit, in the region of the right kidney. It was there that a continuing
hemorrhage was the immediate cause of death.

The argument runs that Weiss’s bullet of small caliber never having been
found, and therefore remaining in the body of the victim, the wound of
exit must have been made by some other bullet. No other bullet was fired
by anyone except the bodyguards, who discharged a wild barrage of pistol
fire which left the body of Dr. Weiss riddled with wounds, and pocked
the marble walls of the corridor with bullet scars which for years
official guides pointed out to visitors touring the capitol. The injury
near the point of exit was the only demonstrably fatal one; ergo, a
bodyguard’s bullet killed Long.

The view that the Kingfish perished from the effects of a bullet-wound
inflicted by one of his own guards also had a certain superficial
plausibility that appealed strongly to dedicated leaders of anti-Long
factionalism and their followers. It carried with it an overtone of
Matthew’s “All-they-that-take-the-sword-shall-perish-with-the-sword”
retributive justice. Finally it was labored in season and out by the
Home Rule campaign speakers who sought to rid themselves of the
Assassination Ticket stigma by proving that Long had died at the hands
of one of his own men.

It would be difficult to overestimate the fashion in which all this
tended to perpetuate what began as a campaign legend. For example, Elmer
Irey, whose career as postal inspector and finally chief of the Treasury
Department’s Intelligence Division spanned more than a generation,
assuredly must be accounted a professional in the realm of gathering,
sifting, and assaying evidence. Yet in his book he reports that----

“Weiss had a .22 calibre pistol in his hand when Long’s bodyguards mowed
him down. Long died as the result of a single bullet wound made by a .45
calibre slug. Nobody has explained that yet.”

To cite still another instance, I happened to meet both Isaac Don Levine
(author of, among other works, _The Mind of an Assassin_) and Dr. Alton
Ochsner at a medical gathering some years ago, not long after Dr.
Vidrine’s death. The talk turned on the events of the night when Huey
Long died.

“Why, I always thought it was a bodyguard, not Dr. Weiss, who killed
Long!” exclaimed Levine. When I spoke of some of the contradictions to
which this view was open, Dr. Ochsner expressed amazed disbelief that
any presumably informed person could entertain the slightest doubt that
Long’s death was due to a bodyguard’s bullet or bullets.

And yet the weight of all real evidence is wholly against this
hypothesis; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult to select a point
of approach to it. For a beginning, then, one must take into account the
“small, blue punctures” a bullet left on Huey Long’s body as the mark of
its passage. Only one photograph of Dr. Weiss’s body was ever taken. The
official photographer of the State Bureau of Identification made this
picture, which has never before been published. It shows the great
gaping wounds left on his torso by the .44- and .45-caliber bullets of
those who fired into his already lifeless body. Most of the
large-caliber cartridges also carried hollow-point bullets, which have a
mushrooming effect. (Cf. Murphy Roden’s “I saw the flesh open up,” when
he fired into Weiss’s throat as they were locked in a fierce struggle on
the corridor floor.)

Granted that a wildly ricocheting bullet from one of these guns could
have entered into the same wound made by Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber
bullet, unlikely as this may seem, it could by no stretch of the long
arm of coincidence have made its exit as a small bluish puncture. Even
if it alone caused the wound of exit, leaving a small bullet still in
the body of its victim, the point at which it plowed its way out of
Long’s back would have been a gaping orifice and not, as Thomas Davis
graphically described it, “so small I doubt we’d have seen it had it not
been pointed out to us.”

Another fact not to be overlooked is that the moment Dr. Rives saw the
clean dressing that had been placed over the wound and the operational
incision in the anterior wall of Long’s abdomen, he came to the
conclusion that any bullet entering at that point in the manner
described, most probably emerged in the area of the kidney, and was
likely to have damaged that organ. It was for this reason that he asked
whether any blood had been found in the patient’s urine, learning to his
astonishment that the critically wounded man had not even been
catheterized to determine the existence and extent of kidney damage.

The visible abdominal trauma disclosed by the Vidrine operation was
small; so small that only a small-caliber bullet could have caused it.
Two holes had been left in the large bowel at the bend where it turns
horizontally across the abdomen from right to left. These holes were so
small that there was “very little soilage.” Reports that when the
abdomen was opened by Vidrine it was “a mass of blood and fecal matter”
were simply fabrications into which a minute fragment of fact was
expanded, like some of Huey Long’s murder-plot charges.

Finally, the available evidence is conclusive in one respect: By the
time the bodyguard fusillade began, Huey Long had fled the corridor
where the shooting took place. Coleman, Frampton, and Fournet are
unanimous on that point. Roden, blinded by the searing muzzle blasts of
his comrades’ guns, could no longer see what was going on, but testifies
that the other guards waited until he had struggled to his knees from
beneath the lifeless body of Carl Weiss, before they started their
volley. O’Connor describes how the firing was still audible after Huey
had reeled down four short flights of steps and was being led out of a
ground-floor door into the porte-cochere.

In sum, every item of credible evidence--surgical, circumstantial, and
the testimony of eyewitnesses--indicates that Huey Long could not have
been struck by a bullet from the gun of one of his bodyguards. That
leaves but one other conceivable hypothesis, namely: Huey Long died of
the effects of a bullet wound inflicted by Carl Weiss and no one else.

Disregarding the physical circumstances, an intangible consideration
virtually compels the acceptance of this view. We have in the testimony
of all the eyewitnesses a substantial agreement on what took place.
Roden, Fournet, and Coleman saw the gun in Weiss’s hand and saw him fire
it. Frampton, Coleman, and Fournet saw and describe Long’s flight before
the crashing salvo by the other bodyguards began.

Their stories differ in detail. Frampton says Huey gave “a sort of a
grunt” when he was shot; Justice Fournet describes it as “a hoot.” He
also says the first shot was fired by Weiss, the next three by Coleman;
Roden says the first two shots were fired by Weiss, the third by
himself, and the fourth by someone else (obviously Coleman). Coleman
says Huey was attended by Roden, McQuiston, and himself on his final
visit to the House chamber, Fournet says he was accompanied by Messina,
and Frampton reports that Messina answered the telephone in the office
of the sergeant at arms, which opens off the Speaker’s rostrum and is
entirely separate from the House chamber.

These discrepancies are natural; only the absence of such variations
would lay the testimony of witnesses to a violent incident open to the
suspicion, nay the certainty, of collusion. Take for example the three
mutually contradictory versions of what happened when the two
principals, Roden and Weiss, locked in literally a life-and-death
grapple, fell struggling to the floor. Roden says his hard heels slipped
on the marble paving; Justice Fournet says he threw out his hands in a
gesture that overbalanced the two; Coleman says a blow of his fist
felled Weiss, who, clasped in Roden’s grip, pulled the latter down
beneath him.

But on the main point--namely, that the two fell to the floor, and that
Weiss was not killed until after they were down--all are in complete
agreement. If it is assumed that this is a concocted story, made up to
divert suspicion from one or more of the bodyguards as having fired so
wildly that one of their bullets brought about their leader’s death, the
following must likewise be accepted as true:

Somewhere and sometime before the first of these four witnesses told
what he saw, all of them would have had to agree on the specific
untruths they would tell.

But at no time was there any opportunity during those initial frantic
moments for the four to have met, either to concoct and agree on a false
story or for any other purpose. Indeed, Frampton was already telephoning
his first story of what had occurred, while the others are all accounted
for elsewhere: Coleman describing to Governor Allen what he had seen,
Justice Fournet in the hospital, Roden out of action and temporarily
blinded until taken to the hospital himself by Ty Campbell.

Furthermore, after treatment, and not having spoken to any others in the
meantime, Roden gave his statement that night to General Guerre, and
later to General Fleming. These accounts agreed in almost every detail
with one another and with the one he gave me, twenty-four years later,
in the presence of Generals Fleming and Guerre, who verified that this
statement differed in no essential respect from what he had told them at
the scene when questioned by them on the night of September 8, 1935.

Except for one detail, it also agrees with the testimony he gave on
September 16 of that same year, at the Odom inquest. It was his belief
at first that Dr. Weiss fired but once. However, mulling the violent
images of that night over in his mind, he later came to the conclusion
that the doctor fired twice; this, incidentally, is the only conclusion
that would square with the two minor injuries he sustained on his right
hand and left wrist.

In any case, the possibility of conspiratorial collusion among these
four in time to have agreed on a falsified account of what took place
before their eyes, would appear to be ruled out in its entirety. The
inevitable corollary of such a proposition is that the otherwise
uncontradicted testimony of these four witnesses is a factual account
of what took place.

None the less, one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility, however
remote, that evidence can be framed, as it has been in documented
cases--Sacco-Vanzetti, Tom Moony, Leo M. Frank; and that circumstantial
evidence, even where no single link in the chain appears weak, leads now
and then to false conclusions. But it can be said that in this instance
the overwhelming weight of available evidence indicates that Weiss’s
bullet was the cause of Huey Long’s death, and that no bullet from the
guns of one or another of his bodyguards was a contributing factor in
putting an end to his career.

The available evidence likewise appears to indicate beyond a reasonable
doubt that the emergency operation was a contributing cause of death in
the following respect:

Had a decision to perform a frontal laparotomy been deferred, and had in
its stead a removal of the damaged right kidney made possible the tying
off of the blood vessels supplying this organ to halt the hemorrhage
that was draining off the victim’s life blood, Huey Long might none the
less have died of peritonitis, from “soilage” into the abdominal cavity
by the two small punctures of the large bowel.

But once the decision to operate from the front was carried into effect,
the only door to possible--by no means “certain,” but possible--recovery
was irrevocably closed. Even Dr. Vidrine realized that a second
operation to halt the kidney hemorrhage was something his patient could
not survive.

By way of conclusion it is logical to say that on the basis of available
testimony and with due regard for the imminence of human error, the
following facts appear to be established by the overwhelming
preponderance of evidence:

Dr. Weiss was armed when he went into the capitol building on the night
of September 8, 1935, carrying with him the small-caliber Belgian
automatic he had brought back from France and which he customarily took
with him in his car on night calls.

According to the integrated testimony of four eyewitnesses who had no
opportunity for collusion prior to giving their accounts of what they
saw, he held the gun in one hand, concealing it with the straw hat he
held in the other, so that it was virtually impossible for him to have
struck a blow with his fist.

Every trustworthy piece of testimony appears to make it clear that only
four shots were fired while Huey Long was on the scene: two by Weiss,
one each by Roden and Coleman; that by the time the general bodyguard
fusillade began, the Senator was already on his way down a flight of
stairs opposite the Western Union office, which is around a corner from
the site of the shooting; and that the fusillade was still in progress
while Long was being led out of the building by Judge O’Connor.

Medical testimony is unanimous on the point that only one bullet, and
that one of small caliber, traversed Long’s abdomen, leaving small blue
punctures at the points of entry and exit; that the primarily fatal
injury was caused when, just prior to its exit, the bullet damaged the
victim’s right kidney at a point where only removal of the maimed organ
could have halted the ensuing and ultimately fatal hemorrhage.

Granted then, if only for the sake of argument, that there no longer is
either mystery or even reasonable doubt concerning _who_ killed Huey
Long, one big, crucial question remains unanswered. It is this:

“_Why?_”




13 ---- THE MOTIVE

  “_Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient
  premises._”

  ----SAMUEL BUTLER


The difficulty encountered when seeking to rationalize the assassination
of Huey Long is implicit in two circumstances. The first is the total
absence of fact or testimony about the motive for it, so that
conclusions are necessarily based on surmise.

The second is the apparently irreconcilable disparity between the known
nature of Carl Weiss, the man, and the obvious nature of his act. Why
would someone whose closest personal and professional associates
unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of
violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if
from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a
mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of
a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to
sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of
another?

In this instance the problem is not merely one of drawing sufficient
conclusions from insufficient premises. Conclusions must be drawn from
_two_ mutually contradictory sets of insufficient premises.

Barry O’Meara, the Irish ship’s surgeon aboard the vessel that brought
Napoleon to St. Helena, volunteered to remain there with him, but was
one of the first to be deported when Sir Hudson Lowe subsequently took
over the governorship of the island. He was one of the fallen emperor’s
few confidants during the desolate days of that terminal exile. In his
memoirs of their association he quoted Napoleon as saying:

“A man is known by his conduct to his wife, to his family, and to those
under him.”

The members of Carl Weiss’s family are still not convinced, or at least
are still unwilling to admit, that he took Long’s life. The nurses who
were his principal subordinates, and many of whom still survive, looked
on him not merely as a physician, but as a teacher. To this day they
agree he could not have done what all available evidence conclusively
proves that he did.

Miss Theoda Carriere, the first registered nurse called to attend
Senator Long after the shooting, now lives in a piny woods retreat near
Amite. “Dr. Weiss just wasn’t the kind of person who would do a thing
like that,” she insists. “He taught us chemistry when we were in
training, and every girl in our class looked on him as one of the
gentlest and kindest of men. None of us believe he was the one who shot
Long.”

Admittedly, Dr. Chester A. Williams, Jr., the present coroner of East
Baton Rouge parish, cannot be regarded as a Long partisan. It was he who
pronounced Earl Long insane in 1959 while the latter was still governor,
and committed him to a mental institution. Yet he set down the following
restrained obiter dictum after transcribing and studying the microfilmed
hospital chart of Huey Long’s final hours:

“Most of the doctors who lived in Baton Rouge and are still living do
not feel that Dr. Weiss shot Long.”

In a strictly technical sense, only Carl Weiss himself, his lips
irrevocably sealed within seconds after he did what “his family and
those under him,” not to mention his professional associates, still
regard him as incapable of doing, could have given a conclusive solution
to this paradox.

Since that is out of the question, the best that can now be done is to
list the various possible motives which either have been or could be
considered as impelling Dr. Weiss to sacrifice his own life in order to
put an end to that of Huey Long. From the roster thus compiled, the
obviously impossible and then the logically infirm assumptions can be
eliminated one by one, to see whether any hypothesis which might fit
such of the facts as are ascertainable will withstand searching
scrutiny.

Four motives have been or can be imputed to Dr. Weiss in connection with
the shooting of Long. They are:

  The young physician was the executioner chosen by a group of plotters
  in a cabal of which he was a member, to carry out the death sentence
  there secretly decreed against an otherwise invincible political
  oppressor.

  The assassination was an act of reprisal for the gerrymander which
  would bring to an abrupt end the twenty-eight-year judicial career of
  Yvonne Weiss’s father through a fraudulent mockery of legislative
  procedure deliberately rigged to deny the parish of St. Landry the
  free exercise of home rule.

  An abstract idealism inspired a quixotic young patriot to sacrifice
  himself on the altar of the common weal by destroying a dictatorship
  through the death of the autocrat who stood at its head.

  Haunted by anxiety born of a suspicion that, in campaigning against
  Judge Pavy, Long would raise the specter of an all-but-forgotten and
  long since refuted racial slur against the Pavy family, Dr. Weiss paid
  with his life for the assurance that libelous words resurrecting the
  false stigma would never be uttered.

The first of these four propositions can be given short shrift. The
Senate speech in which Long sought to implicate the Roosevelt
administration, and in effect President Roosevelt himself, in a “plan of
robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” was the latest of several
revelations charging others with plotting his murder. It happened also
to be the last one because within a month after making this charge in
the Senate, he was assassinated.

But significant factors must not be overlooked. The first is that after
none of these spectacular accusations of murder plots was anyone ever
formally charged before any court with conspiracy to commit murder.

The second is the undeniable fact that the so-called murder conference
in the De Soto Hotel was neither more nor less than a political caucus
of the type customarily held behind closed doors in order to facilitate
full freedom of discussion about personalities, political prospects, and
the like.

The third is that when all the verbiage about patronage plums and job
distribution and endorsement of candidacies is sifted for substance, a
pitiably small modicum of grain is recovered from a mountain of chaff.
Here are the only specific references to the infliction of bodily harm
by those hotel conferees actually quoted by Long in his Senate speech:

Oscar Whilden is reported as saying: “I am out to murder, bulldoze,
steal, or anything else to win this election.” An unidentified voice
said: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would only
take one man, one gun, one bullet.” Another unidentified voice said: “I
haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who
killed Long.” And still another unidentified voice said: “The best way
would be to just hang around Washington and kill him in the Senate.”

These four remarks were sandwiched in among two days of political
discussion about an approaching state campaign, the selection of
candidates, the use of federal patronage, and matters of that sort! By
way of illustration, a remark in a recent magazine article about another
Louisiana representative, Congressman Otto Passman, would offer a much
firmer foundation for a conspiracy charge along the lines followed by
Long.

Passman has dedicated himself, in season and out, to opposing and
reducing foreign-aid appropriations, and President Kennedy is quoted as
asking at the signing ceremony of one of these bills: “What am I going
to do about Passman?”

“Mr. President,” a bystander is reported as replying, “you’re surrounded
by a lot of well-armed Secret Service Men. Why don’t you have one of
them shoot him--by accident, of course? In fact, Mr. President, if you
promise me immunity, I’ll do it myself.”

No one who read that statement took it in its literal sense; no one
regarded it as a serious proposal to authorize, commit, and condone the
murder of a legislator. Yet that is precisely the construction Huey Long
put on four similar remarks made at intervals during a two-day caucus in
a New Orleans hotel.

All this would tend to cast doubts upon the complicity of Carl Weiss in
a murder conspiracy, even had he been the sort of person to whom a deed
involving assassination would normally have been possible. However, what
removes the assumption that he was the chosen executioner of a political
camarilla from serious consideration is this:

Carl Weiss was virtually unknown outside of his immediate professional,
social, and familial circle. Not one of the leading supposed “plotters”
of the hotel conference spoke of him during that meeting, none of the
leaders who were asked about him later could recall having heard of him,
although his wife’s father and uncle were known to virtually all of
them.

In sum, the hotel meeting of which Long sought to make great capital
was not a murder conference, and no one dreamed of bringing to book on
charges of criminal conspiracy any of those who took part in it; and
even had it been such a conspiracy, the name of Carl Weiss was not even
remotely connected with it.

The second proposition would have it that Carl Weiss assassinated Long
in reprisal for what the latter was doing to Yvonne’s father by having
him gerrymandered out of office, and virtually out of public life. There
are those who go so far as to say that Yvonne goaded her young husband
into exacting satisfaction from the despot who was persecuting her
family, who had brought about the dismissal of her uncle Paul from a
school superintendency, and of her sister Marie from a position as
teacher, and who was now implacably going to any lengths to close her
father’s long and honorable career as judge.

The whole idea of such a reprisal motive runs directly counter to every
fact known about the way the Weiss families passed that last Sunday: the
young couple leaving the baby with their elders while they attended
Mass, the family dinner at which the gerrymander was indeed the topic of
conversation, but in a light, rather jocular vein; the young couple
“sporting in the water” at the elders’ camp in the afternoon, while the
latter fondled their precious grandson, the domestic routine that
preceded Carl’s departure for a professional call....

As nearly as anything human can be certain, it is sure that neither Dr.
Weiss nor any of the Pavy clan would ever have dreamed of taking upon
their consciences the killing of a fellow being, even in the heat of
passion, over such a matter as the loss of a public office, a
development they had discussed almost jocularly only a few hours before.

Only two theoretical assumptions thus remain as to the motive of Dr.
Weiss in committing a violent act contrary to all that was known of his
nature. One is the idea advanced by Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, that this
was “an act of pure patriotism.” In 1935, when Dr. Pavy served as
spokesman for the Weiss family, he felt that his niece’s husband was
deeply troubled by “the suppressive type of government” that had been
imposed on Louisiana; that he brooded over this until “his mind
unhinged,” and he determined to put an end to the dictatorship even at
the cost of his life.

Supporting this view are certain plausible factors. Carl Weiss was
indeed an idealist of the type who might voluntarily have sacrificed his
life in the furtherance of any noble cause, such as the liberation of
his community from the thralldom imposed upon it by a ruthless
authoritarian. Negating this view, however, is the fact that he took no
active part in politics, though at that time Baton Rouge, his home, was
the focal point of fiercely contested Long and anti-Long rivalry.

It is simply not conceivable, in the general sense of that word, that
anyone so deeply and earnestly concerned with “pure patriotism” should
not have been known to a single member of the press gallery at the
capitol, to a single member of the State Bureau of Identification, to so
well known a leader of the anti-Long movement in Baton Rouge as Dr. Tom
Bird--a fellow physician--and above all, to Huey Long himself, a man
whose memory for names and faces was truly phenomenal.

While Carl Weiss could well have been a crusader for any idealistic
cause, it is difficult to accept unreservedly the proposition that one
who had so very much to live for, whose happiness was so nearly
complete, the best and most rewarding years of whose life still lay in
the future, would give up all this and burden his conscience with two
mortal sins--murder and what was tantamount to self-destruction--for an
abstract concept of the general good.

It would seem almost self-evident that no man would voluntarily make
such a sacrifice except in seeking to protect from harm those whom he
held dear.

And there must have been some such motive in the haunting suspicion
that, while campaigning against Judge Pavy, Huey Long would revive that
long-buried, long-refuted tarbrush bugaboo which had been brought up
unsuccessfully as involving one of Judge Pavy’s relatives-in-law thirty
years before.

In view of Long’s past obsession with racial issues of this sort, Carl
Weiss had good grounds for apprehension on that score. In past campaigns
and polemics Long had never hesitated to use such innuendos, as when he
referred to a prominent Orleanian as “Kinky” Soandso in issue after
issue of his weekly newspaper, _The American Progress_. Nor had he
hesitated to make direct attacks on this front, as in his campaigns
against Dudley LeBlanc in the matter of the latter’s Negro fellow
officers of his burial-insurance society.

In his fancy the young physician could readily imagine Long’s insistence
that “this isn’t what I’m saying; I’m not even a-saying it’s so. All I’m
telling you is this is what Sheriff Swords said time after time....”

If Long, true to form, had made up his mind to drag this rejected canard
back into the open, there was one sure way in which Dr. Weiss could keep
him from his purpose and prevent a single syllable of that baseless and
forgotten slander from being uttered. True, he could accomplish this
only at the cost of his life. Surrounded as the Kingfish was by heavily
armed guards, anyone who attacked him, even though he cut him down with
the first shot, was sure to die himself, in the next instant, under a
rain of bullets. Carl Weiss “just wasn’t the sort of person that would
ever do a thing like that,” for any ordinary motive. But to shield the
wife he adored and the infant son he idolized from a slander, groundless
though it be, that would impute to them by innuendo a remote trace of
Negro blood, he could--and in the opinion of many he did--lay down his
life.

In that case, the real tragedy inherent in his act was not the sacrifice
of his own future, so rich with promise, nor even the extinction of Huey
Long, one of the most notable, challenging, and controversial figures in
the public life of his era. Unschooled in the labyrinthine windings and
turnings of politics in general and more particularly the ins and outs
of Louisiana’s politics during that hectic era, Dr. Weiss had no
intimation of the fact that nothing could have been farther from Huey
Long’s plans than raising any racial issue at this time.

He did not know that Long was preparing to challenge Franklin
Roosevelt’s bid for re-election by running against him for the
presidency; that he was no longer campaigning merely in the Deep South
where Negroes, disfranchised ever since the final rout of carpetbaggery
in the 1870s, were kept from the polls first by force, then by the
Grandfather Clause, and after that by the Understanding Clause, but
above all by the one-party device of settling campaigns not at a general
election but in a Democratic (i.e., white) primary.

Running for office as the nominee of what in all likelihood would have
been a new coalition party--the Share-Our-Wealthers?--Louisiana’s
Kingfish would need all the minority-group votes he could attract to his
standard. Primarily this meant the heavy Negro vote of Harlem in New
York, Chicago’s black-and-tan belt, and other such concentrations in
Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, and so on.

Looking forward, planning far ahead, he had already begun to rid himself
of the “racist” label customarily applied to every far-Southern
politician. As an initial step he abolished the poll tax in Louisiana,
issuing poll certificates free to all applicants, regardless of color,
provided they could meet the age and residential requirements.

True, this was quite meaningless insofar as enfranchising the Louisiana
Negroes went. The law provided that no one would be permitted to
register or to vote unless he could show poll-tax receipts (or later,
free poll certificates) for each of the two years directly preceding any
given election. Its intent was primarily to keep floaters from being
brought into the state from Mississippi or other adjacent areas, on
election day. But this was by no means the only prerequisite for voting.
One must also be registered, each parish registrar being the sole
arbiter as to whether the applicant had correctly interpreted a section
of the state or federal constitutions.

In theory the Democratic Party was a private organization, like the
Fifth Ward Athletic Guild, and could thus choose its members at
pleasure, excluding whom it wished not to admit. Coupled with this was
an unwritten agreement to settle political differences not between
parties, but between factions of the Democratic Party, with all hands
pledged to support the Democratic nominee in the ensuing general
election, even if that nominee “happens to be a yellow dog!”

Abolition of the poll tax did nothing to alter this situation, which
obtained until the Supreme Court invalidated it, many years after Long’s
death. None the less, Negroes queued up by the thousands and treasured
the essentially worthless but to them invaluable slips of paper
officially issued to them.

The next step was Huey’s Share-Our-Wealth promise that this movement
would recognize no racial bars of any sort, that the division of shared
wealth would include black as well as white on equal terms. “Five
thousand a year and a span of mules,” the poor and underprivileged of
both races told one another ecstatically. “With what I’m making now and
the five thousand Huey Long’s going to give us, we’ll be in high cotton
for true!”

The final step would have been some sort of a second Emancipation
Proclamation, issued as a campaign document to a mammoth 1936
Share-Our-Wealth convention to be held in Detroit, or possibly St.
Louis. The unmistakable augury of this was Huey Long’s published apology
during the summer of 1935 for having used the word _nigger_ in the
course of a national network broadcast. A “race” tabloid, referring to
the word he had used as “the epithet n----r,” sent a reporter to him in
his suite at the New Yorker Hotel, and published the ensuing interview
under a two-column headline on its front page. In his statement Long
made it plain his use of “the epithet n----r” was a slip of the tongue,
and was not meant to be derogatory in a racial sense; also that he would
exercise due care not to use the epithet again in either public or
private speech.

It is all but impossible to convey to non-Southerners how radical a
departure from the _mores_ of Winn parish in central Louisiana was this
sort of retraction. Efforts were made to use the interview as an
anti-Long campaign document. Facsimiles of the front page of the Negro
tabloid were printed by some of the rural weeklies, but it didn’t work.
The Negro Share-Our-Wealthers throughout the land rejoiced. The whites
in the organization shrugged it aside as fabricated anti-Long propaganda
inspired by “the interests” or passed it off with: “As long as I get my
five thousand a year, what difference does it make who else gets it
too?”

It should not be overlooked that in the case of Judge Pavy, Long needed
no resort to ancient libels to accomplish his longtime opponent’s
defeat. The gerrymander would make it impossible for Ben Pavy to be
re-elected. Long would take the stump against him, of course, in order
to claim the foreordained victory as another personal triumph; but once
St. Landry parish was put into the same judicial district with Acadia,
Lafayette, and Vermillion parishes, even the slightest possibility of a
Pavy election was precluded. Huey Long would no more have gone to
needless lengths to win an already certain victory at the risk of
alienating any large section of the prospective Negro presidential vote
than he would have belabored a dying horse at an S.P.C.A. picnic in an
effort to make the animal run.

Taking all the foregoing into account, it would seem clearly impossible
to accept either the hypothesis that Carl Weiss, Jr., was the chosen
instrument of a political murder cabal to whose membership he was almost
wholly unknown, or the proposition that his was a nature sufficiently
ruthless to take the life of a fellow being in reprisal for the loss of
a long-held political office by his wife’s father.

As concerns the idea that Dr. Weiss was motivated by the “pure
patriotism” ascribed to him by his wife’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, there can be
little doubt that this was possible. But it is also not to be doubted
that there is a basis beyond parental affection for the elder Dr.
Weiss’s statement at the inquest into his son’s death that “my son was
too superbly happy with his wife and child, too much in love with them
to want to end his life after such a murder.”

On the other hand, no such contradiction is an integral part of the
hypothesis that he made this sacrifice to shield his wife and his son
from exposure to groundless odium. This would appear to be the only
assumption in full accord with all the known circumstances, even though
Dr. Weiss’s belief that Huey Long would exhume a long-buried slander
reflecting on his loved ones was tragically erroneous.

On the basis of the situation as he saw and understood it, the only way
to safeguard them was to silence Long before he could utter the libel.
If the only price at which this assurance could be purchased was the
forfeit of his own life, the compulsive paternal urge to protect his
beloved baby son might well be strong enough to overcome every
inhibition that was normally part of his character and background. He
took no one into his confidence, realizing that anyone to whom he
confided would inevitably thwart his plan. Thus we may picture him
leaving to his family the happy memory of an afternoon of carefree
affection, and departing alone to weigh in solitude one factor of the
situation against another, as he understood them.

Should he thereupon have decided that “this man will never slander my
son as he has slandered others in the past if I can silence him,” we can
only surmise that it was with this thought in mind that he entered the
marble-walled corridor where he died to make certain that some words
Huey Long never intended to utter would remain unsaid.




EPILOGUE

  “_Finality is not the language of politics._”

  ----DISRAELI


To the Huey Long murder case the preceding chapters offer a solution
which fits every determinate fact of what took place in Baton Rouge on
September 8, 1935, everything pertinent that led up to the climactic
moment of violence, and what followed. Yet it goes without saying that
many will reject this rationalization of available evidence. The
arguments will go on and on.

We are prone to cherish certain myths. As though in wish-fulfillment we
still tell our children Parson Weems’s absurd fable of the boy
Washington, the cherry tree, and “I did it with my little hatchet.”
Similarly, the myth of the bodyguard’s bullet, product of a compulsive
necessity for political escape from the onus of assassination, will
retain adherents and win fresh believers, despite the obvious fact that
wherever else the truth may lie, the bodyguard-bullet hypothesis is
false.

Paradox remains a continuing footnote to Huey Long’s career. Surrounded
by fanatically loyal bodyguards, he was none the less done to death by a
shy, retiring young stranger in whom neither he nor his myrmidons
recognized any trace of menace. His injuries were critical and might in
any case have proved fatal; but it was a decision on the part of the
same Arthur Vidrine whom Huey Long had elevated to high command which
sealed the Kingfish’s doom. True, the alternative Dr. Vidrine chose was
one many another physician, confronted by the same circumstances, might
have selected inasmuch as mere delay in taking action could have proved
fatal.

On the other hand, it is not to be disputed that Dr. Vidrine’s decision
to operate by a frontal incision made it impossible for him or any one
else thereafter to save Huey Long’s life. In consequence, he fell under
the ban of the Long faction’s permanent and extreme displeasure. As soon
as he took office in 1936, Governor Leche appointed Dr. George Bel to
the superintendency of Charity Hospital, thus automatically displacing
Vidrine from that position. Within the year, Dr. James Monroe Smith,
president of the State University, speaking for its Board of
Supervisors, notified him that Dr. Rigney D’Aunoy had been made acting
dean of the medical school but that he--Dr. Vidrine--might retain a
place on the faculty as professor of gynecology.

Rather than accept such a demotion he resigned in August of 1937.
Returning to Ville Platte, he founded a private hospital there, and
maintained it until his retirement in ill health from active practice in
1950. Five years later he died.

Death also thwarted Long’s design to place the Pavy gerrymander at the
head of what became his last demonstration of dictatorship as the
legislature’s Act Number One. It became Act Number Three, since the
first two were concurrent resolutions, one expressing the grief of House
and Senate over the leader’s untimely end, the other creating a
committee to select a burial place on the capitol grounds for what
remained of his physical presence among them.

       *       *       *       *       *

As for the gerrymander, it never really took effect, though it
automatically became law twenty days after the legislature adjourned. To
be sure, it did provide for an additional judge in a newly enlarged
judicial district, he to be chosen some fourteen months later at the
time of the Congressional election of November 1936.

But a new legislature, meeting in May 1936, adopted another statute,
superseding this law and reshuffling Louisiana’s judicial districts once
more to add a new one--the twenty-seventh--consisting of St. Landry
parish alone. This act, a constitutional amendment, would not become
operative until ratified by popular vote at the November elections. That
obviously made it impossible to elect a judge at the same time, so the
new bill provided that within thirty days after its ratification, the
governor should _appoint_ a judge for the new district, his term not to
end until that of the judges _elected_ in 1936 should have run its
course. In other words, the appointee would serve for six years.

Needless to say, the appointee was not Benjamin Pavy.

       *       *       *       *       *

Another facet of the Long paradox is presented by the saint-or-sinner
image which his contemporaries and their successors yet seek to
preserve. Until the Kingfish’s name has lost all popular significance,
debates will be waged over the issue of whether the man was an
uninhibited genius, or merely a conscienceless opportunist endowed with
exceptional mental agility. On this point the testimony of one of the
three brothers Huey so heartily disliked might well shed some light.

Some days after the fallen leader’s funeral, and while the legislature
was still in session, a number of the Long satraps were gathered in
Governor Allen’s office, lamenting the confusion into which a virtually
leaderless assembly (in the sense of having too many leaders) had
fallen.

The leitmotiv of the parley held that things weren’t like that in the
good old days when the Kingfish was around to issue orders and see to it
that they were carried out. The conversation finally veered to what a
remarkable thing it was for a little bit of an old town like Winnfield
to have produced a superman like ol’ Huey, especially when you realized
it had never given to the world anyone else of comparable stature.

Earl Long, himself one of the thus disprized other products of
Winnfield, listened in morose silence for a time to these observations.
Finally he got up, moved to the door, paused, and said:

“You folks are right, of course. Huey was the only smart one from
Winnfield. No manner of doubt about it.” He scratched his chin
meditatively and then added: “But I’m still here!”

       *       *       *       *       *

On the other hand, those who casually dismiss Long as a conscienceless
political gangster overlook the number of respects in which he was far,
far ahead of his time. It is only since the mid-century’s turn, for
example, that clamor has become general to provide special advanced
training for school children with well-above-normal mentality. Long
proposed a program of this sort for Louisiana State University in his
last broadcast, delivered two nights before he was shot. One of his last
rational statements, expressed only moments before he lapsed into the
drugged stupor from which he never really returned to consciousness, was
a lament that he would be unable to carry out this project.

He enormously increased Louisiana’s public debt with what proved to be a
remarkably sound system of funding dedicated revenues into bonds, in
order to give the state a highway network geared to the impending
expansion of motorized traffic. In the 1960s the federal government
followed the same line by laying out and constructing a vast system of
interstate super-highways.

Almost without formal education himself--he never finished high
school--he was like one possessed in his determination to put schooling
within the reach of all by providing free textbooks, free
transportation, free lunches, and the like. The medical school he
founded at Louisiana State University, as though merely to spite Tulane
for not conferring upon him at least one honorary degree, has won a
recognized place as a great center of research and instruction; it fills
what admittedly became a genuine need ... and while today’s income and
inheritance levies do not set arbitrary limits like those proposed by
Long in the early 1930s, the underlying principle of decentralization of
wealth by heavy upper-bracket taxes is basically what he advocated.

None of this mitigates the heritage of corruption in public life that he
bequeathed to Louisiana, or his ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and other
reprehensible qualities. But he was very far from being merely another
gangster.

       *       *       *       *       *

The fact that the sons of both men whose lives ended so abruptly in
September 1935 followed brilliantly in their fathers’ footsteps may well
be part of this same pattern of paradox.

Russell Long, only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, enlisted
in the Navy as a seaman during World War II, serving with distinction in
the invasions of Africa, Sicily, and Italy (at Anzio), and advancing
through promotion until he was a lieutenant at the time of his
demobilization in 1945. In the election of January 1948 he supported the
successful gubernatorial race of his uncle, Earl K. Long. In September
of that same year, when Senator John H. Overton died with two years of
his term yet to run, Governor Long supported his nephew for election to
the vacancy.

He barely won by the slimmest sort of majority. The city of New Orleans
cast a majority of twenty-five thousand votes against him. But he
received much more ponderable support when he ran for the full Senate
term two years later, and a more impressive vote still when he was
re-elected in 1956. Finally, he was swept back into office in 1962 by a
veritable landslide, receiving some 84 per cent of the votes cast.

In part this was a response to his generally independent stand on both
local and national issues. In 1952, for example, he supported one of his
father’s uncompromising opponents, T. Hale Boggs, for governor against
the candidate backed by his uncle Earl, then nearing the end of his
first term as governor. But four years later he vigorously supported
Earl against Mayor deLesseps Morrison of New Orleans when the latter
made the first of two unsuccessful races for the governorship.

Beyond doubt, at least part of Russell’s steadily growing strength was
also due to the unmistakable fashion in which he proved himself an
exceptionally able member of the Senate, being one of the first ranking
figures in United States officialdom to recognize in Castro’s rise to
power a sinister portent, and to advocate immediate revision by this
country of the sugar quota to counter the _Fidelista_ drive toward
Communist affiliation.

Following his sweeping victory in the late summer of 1962, he issued a
modest victory statement in which he said in part:

“The most striking feature of my [re-election] was the majority recorded
for me in New Orleans. In some of the wards where I had been defeated by
a margin of seven to one fourteen years ago I was given a majority of as
much as six to one. This could never have happened without a lot of
people casting their first vote for a man who bears my family name.... I
shall always appreciate those tolerant and generous persons who have
seen fit to endorse me as the first member of my family to enjoy their
support.”

Dr. Carl Austin Weiss III, who was but three months old at the time of
his father’s death, was taken to New York by his mother when she left
Louisiana to make her home in the East. He was graduated from Columbia
in 1958, and set out to make general surgery his field of medical
practice. He was a full-time resident at St. Vincent’s hospital for two
years, but in July 1961 decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, and
entered the same hospital--Bellevue--where his father had been chief of
clinic thirty years before.

He was married in 1961, and early in 1962 was called to active military
service, being assigned as an air-force surgeon with the rank of captain
to duty at Barksdale Field. This base is in Bossier parish, Louisiana,
directly across the Red River from Shreveport, the city where Huey Long
was married and where Russell Long was born. Thus the son of Carl Weiss
was practicing medicine in Louisiana at the time the son of Huey Long
won an overwhelming victory there in a campaign for the Senate seat
formerly held by his father.

       *       *       *       *       *

Long’s presidential aspirations left his friend and secretary, Earle
Christenberry an embarrassing $28,000 debt to pay.

“It is my firm belief now, and was my belief then,” Christenberry
asserts, “that Huey would not have been a candidate for president
himself prior to 1940. He told me in 1935 that he intended to stump the
country, sounding out sentiment before deciding whom he would support
_against_ Roosevelt.

“To that end he had me purchase from Graybar one sound truck which was
the last word in mobile loud-speaker installations. It came in a day or
two before his death, and I sweated it out for many a month, raising
some $28,000 to pay for it. Graybar looked to me for payment because I
had placed the order. My recollection is that the money was not
forthcoming until late in the Leche campaign, for I would not let them
use the truck until it was paid for.”

       *       *       *       *       *

In retrospect, two predictions about Huey Long hold a certain interest.
One, by Elmer Irey, is merely academic, since it deals with what
_would_ have happened. In closing his chapter on “The Gentleman from
Louisiana” Mr. Irey notes that to him the “important thing about the
Huey Long gang’s downfall” is the following:

“I hope this story will destroy for all time one of the blackest libels
ever made against the American system of democracy. This libel states
that had not Dr. Weiss (or somebody) assassinated Huey Long, our country
might well have been taken over by the Kingfish as dictator. The
inference is clear. Our country was no match for Huey’s genius and
ruthlessness.

“I would suggest that the bullet that killed Huey ... merely saved Huey
from going to jail.... Huey had broken the law and was to be indicted
for it when he was killed.”

When evaluating this forecast, the first thought that comes to mind is a
matter of record: within a month of Long’s death one of his top-echelon
supporters was brought to trial on a tax-evasion indictment. Mr. Irey’s
organization had selected this particular indictment because it was
regarded as the government’s strongest case against any Long
administration official. At the trial’s close the jury verdict was “not
guilty”!

In the light of past experience the conjecture that Long would in time
have gained the presidency is not one casually to be shrugged aside. Had
he ever attained “My First Days in the White House,” subjection of the
large cities (not the rural areas) would have been his primary
objective. Just as New Orleans was the last foothold of the
carpetbaggers in the 1870s, Boston, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia,
Chicago, and others might have learned what it is like to live under the
rule of force from without.

       *       *       *       *       *

The other prediction referred to above was made by Mason Spencer in the
course of a bitter address on the floor of the House of Representatives
in April 1935. Spencer withdrew from public office at the close of this
legislative term, as did also Dr. Octave Pavy. Both died of heart
attacks within weeks of one another in the summer of 1962. But whereas
Spencer forsook politics almost altogether, Dr. Pavy retained a very
active quasi-Warwickian interest in parochial campaigns.

He retired from forty years of the practice of medicine at an advanced
age, and moved from his home at Leonville on Bayou Teche to Opelousas.
But his popularity along the bayou-side, where by that time he had
delivered more than fifty-eight hundred babies, was so widespread that
patients demanded he continue to treat them, so that he had to establish
a small office. From this GHQ he successfully brought about the defeat
of an opposition sheriff, winning a scandalously large sum of money in
bets on the outcome of the election. He converted most of his winnings
into currency, packed them into an ordinary water-bucket, and carrying
this, he marched triumphantly around and around the Opelousas courthouse
square, shouting his exultation to the four winds.

He had been among the first to cheer Mason Spencer’s closing remarks in
April 1935 at a special session during which the Kingfish brought about
the enactment of a bill which to all intents and purposes gave him the
sole right to appoint every commissioner and other polling-booth
official in every voting precinct for every election throughout
Louisiana.

“I am not one of those who cries ‘Hail, Caesar!’” Spencer said in slow
and measured tones, “nor have I cried ‘Jail Caesar!’ But this ugly bill
disfranchises the white people of Louisiana.... I can see blood on the
marble floor of this capitol, for if you ride this thing through, it
will travel with the white horse of death. In the pitiful story of Esau
the Bible teaches us it is possible for a man to sell his own
birthright. But the gravestones on a thousand battlefields teach you
that you cannot sell the birthright of another white man!”

Within five months there was blood on the marble floor of the capitol.




  Transcriber’s Notes


  The source document uses the word capitol both for capitol and for
  capital; this usage has been retained. Inconsistent spelling and
  grammar have not been standardised.


  Changes made

  Some obvious minor typographical and punctuation errors have been
  corrected silently.

  The text underneath Figs. 10 and 11 has been transcribed from the
  illustration, not from the actual text.

  Page 70: George Washington (vessel’s name) has been changed to _George
  Washington_ (cf. _American Farmer_).





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