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.