“I did not see the wound of entrance, and I was told by one of the nuns

or one of the nurses that the wound of entrance was beneath the clean

dressing on his belly; and from the location of this dressing it was

clear to me that there was a good chance the bullet might have hit a

kidney.

“I asked the nurses if there were any blood in his urine. That was the

only contribution I could make. Whoever it was, she said she did not

know. I said that if they did not know, he ought to be catheterized at

once. Later that night, some time before I left for New Orleans, I was

told he had been catheterized and that there was blood in his urine.

That was an absolute indication of injury to the kidney. It was not

necessarily a critical injury, or a hemorrhage that would not stop. But

it did mean that there was an injury, and that if hemorrhage continued,

that was the place to look for it.”

Dr. Maes said there would be no further surgery, and hence while he

would stay through the day, Monday, there would be no need for Dr. Rives

to do so. The latter thereupon drove back to New Orleans.

According to Dr. Loria’s monograph, the “postoperative course of the

case continued steadily on the downgrade. Evidence of shock and

hemorrhage appeared to become steadily worse ... the urine was found to

contain much blood. At this time [Dr. Russell] Stone’s opinion was that

another operation to arrest the kidney hemorrhage would certainly prove

fatal....”

Whether it was Dr. Rives or Dr. Stone who first suggested

catheterization is immaterial. The fact remains that until one or the

other of these physicians, neither of whom was directly connected with

the case, proposed this procedure, nothing of the sort seems to have

been done; according to the progress notes on the microfilm chart, it

was not done until 6:45 A.M., almost nine hours after the shooting, and

six hours after the emergency operation had precluded the possibility of

further surgery. Even after it was discovered that the kidney hemorrhage

was massive and continuing, medical opinion was unanimous on the point

that additional surgery would unquestionably prove fatal.

Control of such hemorrhage involved removal of the injured kidney, in

order to tie off the vessels supplying it with blood. This in turn would

mean the cutting of ribs to make room for the requisite mechanics of

kidney removal. Such an operation on a patient already in shock from a

bullet wound and from the major abdominal surgery which followed, would,

it was agreed by all, inevitably bring about the patient’s death. All

that remained was to hope for a miracle--and none manifested itself. In

the words of Dr. Cecil Lorio:

“The patient never really recovered consciousness. He was in shock, and

under sedation, until he died. As the day [Monday] wore on, and Huey’s

blood pressure continued to fall, a transfusion was ordered. It may have

been earlier that the transfusion was given. The hospital records would

show.”

Unfortunately, the hospital record shows only one transfusion, given at

8:15 Monday night, nearly twenty-four hours after the shooting. However,

it must be borne in mind that in those days, long before blood and

plasma banks had been established as standard hospital facilities,

transfusions were by no means the routine procedure they are today. In

the case of Huey Long, a chart note signed by Dr. Roy Theriot records

the fact that five hundred cubic centimeters of citrated blood were

given, that before transfusion approximately three hundred cubic

centimeters of normal saline solution were given intravenously at a

time when the pulse was very thready, and that the transfusion was

followed by a continuous intravenous drip of glucose in normal saline.

Even after this the patient’s blood pressure was only 114 over 84, while

the pulse rate was still a frightening “170-plus.”

Almost as soon as Senator Long had been brought to the hospital,

volunteer blood donors were typed, and their blood cross-matched with

that of the patient. According to the laboratory report incorporated in

the hospital chart, J. A. Vitiano, Eddie Knoblock, Colonel Rougon, J. R.

Pollett, M. E. Bird, George Castigliola, and Paul Voitier were marked

“incompatible”; C. J. Campbell, John Kirsch, “no name,” Joe Bates,

Senator Noe, Bill Melton, and a Mr. Walker were found to be compatible.

In addition, “no name,” Bates, Noe, and Melton were also marked with an

“O.K.”

Senator Noe was the first and apparently only donor, and it is my

recollection that we met in the Heidelberg Hotel elevator Monday night

when he told me he had “just given blood to Huey.” Mrs. Noe was with him

at the time, said she was sure Senator Long would recover, and expressed

the hope that future installments of the _Saturday Evening Post’s_

biographical portrait would “do him proud.”

A little after two o’clock that afternoon Dr. Maes had prescribed a

rectal instillation of laudanum, aspirin, brandy, and normal saline

solution. Once this was given, the chart notes: “Resp. less labored,

less cyanosis, P 148 Temp. 103⁴⁄₅ axilla. Quieter.” During the handling

that was incident to the instillation, Senator Long awoke and asked Dr.

Maes whether he would be able to take the stump in the approaching

campaigns. “It’s a little early to tell, yet,” the physician replied. As

before, the patient lapsed into drugged slumber the moment the handling

that had roused him came to an end.

As concerns the one transfusion recorded on the hospital chart, Dr.

Cecil Lorio reports:

“I recall clearly the fact that the young physician who was to give the

transfusion was so nervous, and his hands were shaking so, that he was

having difficulty placing the needle in the vein that was to receive the

blood; and my brother Clarence said to me, knowing that I frequently

gave transfusions to children: ‘Dr. Cecil, haven’t you your equipment

here so that you might assist in transfusing the Senator?’ I said I had,

and of course to me, accustomed to performing this with the small veins

of children, it was child’s play to place the needle in the large vein

of a man. A number of volunteers--everybody wanted to volunteer--had

already been typed, and one of those whose blood matched was State

Senator James A. Noe. He was the first donor.

“But as the day wore on it became evident that the patient was losing

blood about as fast as we were transfusing it into him, and while there

were no external evidences of bleeding, the conclusion was that he must

be hemorrhaging from the apex of the right kidney. So Dr. T. Jorda Kahle

of New Orleans [head of the urology department of Louisiana State

University’s College of Medicine] was sent for. He got to Baton Rouge

Monday night and thrust a needle just under the skin of the kidney

region and drew out a syringeful of blood. That made it evident the

Senator’s case was hopeless, barring a miracle. The only way to stop

such a hemorrhage would have been to remove the kidney, and that would

certainly have killed him.

“At the end, the dying man threshed wildly about the oxygen tent that

had been put over him. A little after four in the morning his breathing

stopped.”

* * * * *

Mrs. Long and the three children--Rose, Russell, and Palmer--did not

reach Baton Rouge until after the operation was over, in spite of the

fact that the Airline’s new bridge across the Bonnet Carre Spillway was

opened to the passage of their car, thanks to Earle Christenberry’s

directions to the highway guards at Lousteau’s. Since the Senator was

never really conscious after he left the operating room, the members of

his family had little or no communion with the man who to them was not

merely a public figure, but husband and father.

They were given rooms directly across the hall from the one in which

physicians strove unremittingly to save Huey Long’s life. He had not

been a very devoted family man. He was away from home too much in the

pursuit of objectives it seemed impossible for him to share with the

Rose McConnell he had met when he was a brash young door-to-door

salesman of Cottolene.

Those days were now so long in the past, the happy days of shared trial

when every penny had to be stretched to the uttermost. Success had come

so quickly--the big ornate home in Shreveport, the new Executive Mansion

at Baton Rouge of which Rose had been the first chatelaine, the

elaborate residence on Audubon Boulevard, the days of triumph and

rejoicing that followed the effort to impeach him....

All of it was now slipping away forever, while Huey Long’s blood seeped

slowly but relentlessly out of his body, with no possibility short of a

miracle of halting its ebb as some physician, now forever anonymous,

made on his hospital chart a final entry to the effect that even “the

oxygen tent discontinued as pt. grew very restless under it--delusions

of photographers, etc.”

Once hope for the patient had been abandoned, it was Seymour Weiss who

was the nuncio bringing to the members of Huey’s family, in the room

across the hall, tidings of great grief. Himself emotionally shaken to

the depths of his being, he told Mrs. Long and the three children as

gently as possible that the end was very near. They followed him across

the hall to the bed where the dying man, barely conscious, was drawing

in and expelling shallow, noisy breaths. He made no effort to speak; but

as each of the four laid a hand on the bed beside him, he managed weakly

to pat it in a final, caressing gesture of farewell.

They returned to their room to await the end. Seymour Weiss accompanied

them, giving voice to whatever comforting phrases he could muster, and

then returned to the sickroom. One vital point remained to be cleared

up.

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

There was a faint stir of response.

“Huey, you are seriously hurt. Everything that can be done to help you

is being done, but no one can ever say how such things will turn out.

Now is the time to tell me where you put the papers and things that you

took out of the bank vault. Where did you put them? Tell me where they

are, Huey. Please don’t wait any longer.”

Thus the final thoughts he carried with him out of his life concerned a

political campaign, his campaign for the presidency of the United

States. Hardly audible was the faint breath that whispered:

“Later--I’ll--tell--you--later....”

They were his last words. The secret of what became of the affidavits,

the other documents, and the campaign funds that were to provision his

presidential race was one he took with him to an elaborate tomb newly

constructed in the very center of the landscaped park around the capitol

he had built for Louisiana.

11 ---- THE AFTERMATH

“_And this was all the harvest that I reap’d--I came like water and

like wind I go._”

----THE RUBÁIYÁT

A few hours after Huey Long had breathed his last, Dr. Weiss was buried

with requiem services at St. Joseph’s Church, where he and Yvonne had

gone to Mass only three days before. John M. Parker and J. Y. Sanders,

Sr., two former governors prominent among leaders of the political and

personal opposition to the Kingfish regime, attended the funeral, and

were bitterly assailed by Long partisans for doing so. Dr. McKeown, the

anesthetist during the emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine, was

one of the pallbearers.

Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, a member of the House of Representatives, had

been delegated by the Weiss family to act as their spokesman in meeting

with reporters who had swarmed into Baton Rouge from near and far. It

should be noted that at this time no one had as yet voiced the slightest

doubt about Dr. Weiss having fired the shot that ended Long’s reign.

Only the question of motive was the subject for argument and dispute.

“There was absolutely nothing premeditated about what Carl did,” Dr.

Pavy told newsmen gathered at the little cottage he shared with Judge

Philip Gilbert when in Baton Rouge. “On Sunday, while his parents sat on

the beach of their camp with their baby grandchild, Carl and Yvonne

sported about the water. When he returned home, he bade his wife an

affectionate good-by, as he left about 7 P.M. for a professional call.

He even phoned the Lady of the Lake Sanitarium to make an appointment

for an operation Monday morning.

“He was an earnest lad, and lived for humanity, but he was sorely

distressed about the suppressive form of government he felt existed in

Louisiana. He never talked much about it, and he certainly never

confided to his family or anyone else any plan to kill Long. Our only

explanation for his action is that this suppressive type of rule preyed

on his mind until it unhinged, and he suddenly felt himself a martyr,

giving his life to the people of Louisiana. He must have felt that way,

else how could he have left the wife and baby that he loved above

everything?”

To a question as to whether the gerrymander that would oust his wife’s

father from the honorable office he had held for so many years could

have prompted the decision to shoot Long, Dr. Pavy replied:

“In the first place, none of us would kill anyone over such a matter as

the loss of a public office. It is my understanding that while the bill

aimed at my brother’s judgeship was discussed at the Weiss’s dinner

table Sunday, it was treated lightly rather than otherwise.”

The legislature of which Dr. Pavy was a member had remained in session.

“We’re going to pass every one of ol’ Huey’s bills the same as if he was

still here with us,” was the majority watchword. In addition to these,

the members also adopted a concurrent resolution authorizing the fallen

leader’s interment in the capitol grounds, and the construction there of

a proper tomb to receive the great bronze casket, this to be topped by a

monument later. They also adopted a concurrent resolution “recognizing

and commending and according due recognition” to the valued services and

help of the Senator’s bodyguards, mentioning by name specifically

George McQuiston, assistant superintendent of the state police, Warden

Louis Jones of the state penitentiary, and officers Murphy Roden,

Theophile Landry, Paul Voitier, and Joe Messina.

During one of the interludes when the House was in session, I took

occasion to go to Dr. Pavy’s desk and ask whether he had reached any

conclusion as to Dr. Weiss’s motive other than the one he had mentioned

on the previous Monday. I had heard vague reports that it was felt in

some quarters Huey Long was planning to revive an old racial campaign

canard against Judge Pavy. This was the allegation made in 1908 by the

then Sheriff Swords to the effect that one of the Judge’s

relatives-in-law had an ancestor of other than purely Caucasian blood.

The old slur had long since been forgotten by most persons, since it

dated back to 1907-8. In that era, though the quadroon ball had long

since lapsed from the quasi recognition once accorded it, Northern

magazines still published muckraking articles about miscegenation in the

South. On the other hand, memories of relatively recent carpetbag evils

were so vivid that the “taint of the tarbrush” was fatal to any

political aspirant. Thus the fact that in spite of Sheriff Swords’s

allegations in a milieu of that sort, Judge Pavy was not only elected,

but re-elected for five or six consecutive terms, testifies eloquently

to the universal disbelief this imputation encountered.

Naturally, I did not spell all this out to Dr. Pavy. I merely made a

casual reference to the general spread of all sorts of rumors about Dr.

Weiss’s motives, and asked whether he had any information on this score

other than what he had told us on the morning after the shooting.

“I tell you again,” he replied with profound conviction, “that this was

an act of pure patriotism on Carl’s part. He was ready to lay down his

life to save his state, and perhaps this entire nation, from the sort of

dictatorship which he felt Long had imposed on Louisiana.”

None the less, in many minds--my own, for one--the feeling that there

might be some substance to the racial motive would not down. Many

Louisianians, for example, well knew that in his weekly, _American

Progress_, Long never referred to the scion of a certain socially

prominent family as anything but “Kinky” Soandso.

Even more recent in public memory was his insistent conjunction of

Dudley LeBlanc with Negro officers in his “Coffin Club,” the outlawed

burial-insurance society. Moreover, the knowledge that a derogatory

allegation was untrue never deterred Huey Long from trumpeting it forth

at least by innuendo on every stump during a political campaign. For

example, an office seeker opposing the candidacy of a man Long had

endorsed was in the business of installing coin-activated devices for

jukeboxes and an early type of vending machine, but Long never referred

to him in his tirades as anything but Slot Machine Soandso.

Amid a fog of conflicting rumors and surmises, the first note of doubt

that Carl Weiss, Jr., had even tried to kill Senator Long was sounded by

the young physician’s father, in a statement he made at an inquest into

the circumstances of his son’s death. Such as it was, this probe was

conducted by District Attorney John Fred Odom, one of the leaders of the

Square Deal Movement. It developed little more than one possible

explanation of the contusion, abrasion, or cut visible on Long’s lower

lip when he reached the hospital.

“Was Senator Long bleeding from the mouth?” District Attorney Odom asked

Dr. William A. Cook, after the latter stated that he had assisted Dr.

Vidrine in the emergency operation on the mortally wounded patient.

“Dr. Henry McKeown, who was administering the anesthetic,” responded

Dr. Cook, “called my attention to an abrasion on Senator Long’s lower

lip. It was an abrasion or brush burn. When it was wiped with an

antiseptic, it oozed a little.”

“Did it appear to be a fresh abrasion?”

“Yes.”

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

“A man having been shot as Senator Long was, and making his way down

four winding flights of stairs, could perhaps have struck against an

angle of marble or iron?”

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

Cook’s reply.

Only one new development of any potential significance was brought out

by the inquiry. Sheriff Coleman testified that he struck twice with his

fist before firing on Weiss and that “the first time I missed him and

struck someone else, but the second time I hit him and knocked him down

when Roden was grappling with him.” Conceivably, the “someone else” of

the first blow could have been Huey Long, although none of the other

eyewitnesses mention such a blow. As for the remainder of the

investigation, only one brief moment of emotional tension marked its

course. That was when the Rev. Gerald L. K. Smith, a paid organizer of

the Share-Our-Wealth movement, took the stand. He had been dropping

hints here and there indicating his entire readiness to take over the

Huey Long movement as its new leader. The moment he reached the witness

stand he burst out dramatically to the effect that “my leader whom I

worshiped has been killed. He was my hero. I respect this court, but I

do not respect the district attorney, who was one of the co-plotters of

this assassination, and I shall refuse to answer any questions put by

him.”

Mr. Odom said he had no questions to ask, adding: “I care nothing about

him or his statements, but merely wish to state that whoever says I

plotted to kill Huey Long is a willful, malicious, and deliberate liar.”

Neither on this occasion, eight days after the event, nor for a long

time thereafter did anyone deny, or offer to deny, that Carl Weiss had

entered the capitol armed with a pistol and had fired it at Senator

Long. Even the bitter-enders among Long’s political foes came up with

nothing more in the way of exoneration for the young physician than the

suggestion that there had been two bullets, and that the second one, a

wild shot or a ricochet from the gun of one of the bodyguards during the

furious fusillade which followed the initial shot, had inflicted the

wound that proved mortal.

True, Carl Weiss’s father, testifying at the inquest, had expressed the

opinion that his son was “too superbly happy with his wife and child,

and too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a

murder.” But this was generally accepted as a natural expression of

paternal love and grief, and therefore not to be taken as refuting the

uncontradicted testimony of eyewitnesses and physicians.

The inquest conducted by Coroner Tom Bird into the death of Huey Long

occupied only a few minutes. The family had refused to authorize a

necropsy, the results of which might well have confirmed or silenced

proponents of the two-bullet theory. These still emphasize the fact that

no small-caliber bullet was ever found among the projectiles picked up

from the floor of the corridor where the shooting occurred. They argue

that if a small-caliber bullet were found to be still in Huey’s body,

the wound of exit must necessarily have been made by yet another

missile.

Huey’s corpse was viewed by a coroner’s jury at the Rabenhorst Funeral

Home, where it was being prepared to be laid out in state in the

capitol’s memorial hall for two days before the funeral. Thomas M.

Davis, now a laboratory supervisor for an oil refinery, was one member

of that five-man panel. Speaking in the living room of his modest home

in the Goodwood subdivision, he recalls that----

“I was an L.S.U. freshman at the time. My daddy had come to Baton Rouge

from Alabama to work as a brickmason at the Standard Oil plant. Dr. Tom

Bird, the coroner, was a friend of ours, and knew I wasn’t too well

fixed, so for as long as I was in college, he would appoint me to these

coroner’s juries because he knew the two-dollar fee I got helped me to

stay in school.

“The day of the inquest--it was a Tuesday and raining like

everything--we met at Rabenhorst’s and were taken out in back where

Long’s body lay under a sheet. The sheet was lifted and then Dr. Tom, he

raised up the right side of the body to show us the wound in the back.

It was so small I doubt we’d have even seen it had it not been pointed

out to us. But they wouldn’t let us get too close to the body, no more

than from here to the other side of the room [indicating a distance of

approximately twelve feet]. They never did let us feel around to see

could we get out another bullet. They did show us the little old Spanish

[_sic!_] automatic that belonged to Dr. Weiss, and then Dr. Tom filled

out the report and we all signed it, and went home through the rain that

was still pouring. That afternoon Dr. Weiss was buried.”

Long was buried two days later. Throughout the day and night, Tuesday

and Wednesday, his body lay in state as thousands upon thousands filed

slowly past the casket in an apparently endless procession to look their

last upon him. From near and far came floral offerings: elaborate

professional set pieces of broken columns, gates ajar, open schoolbooks,

and the like, with ornately gold-lettered, broad ribbons of white or

lavender silk; but there were likewise many simple wreaths of garden

blossoms, plucked by the hands of those who revered ol’ Huey as the

avatar who had been put on earth to brighten and better the lot of the

common man. Large as it was, Memorial Hall could not begin to hold the

flowers. When they were set up outdoors in the landscaped capitol park,

they occupied literally acres of the grounds.

Beginning with daybreak on Thursday, mourners began to stream into Baton

Rouge from all sections of the state; by special train from the cities,

by chartered bus, by glossy limousine and mud-spattered farm pickup.

Looking westward from the observation gallery atop the capitol’s

thirty-one-story central section, it is possible to see for nearly seven

miles along one of the state’s principal highways. No bridge had yet

been built to span the Mississippi at this point. Consequently, as far

as the eye could see from this lofty lookout platform, a solid line of

vehicles was stalled. They moved forward only a bit at a time, as the

Port Allen ferries, doing double duty, picked up deckload after deckload

for transfer to the east bank.

Mrs. Long had asked Seymour Weiss to make all funeral arrangements, and

because Huey, though nominally a Baptist, was not a church member and

thought little of ministers as a class, the problem of selecting an

ordained churchman to conduct the services was a sticky one. Religious

prejudice was no part of Long’s make-up. He had known Dick Leche as a

close friend for years. Yet on the last day, when casting about for a

gubernatorial candidate, he did not even know whether this close friend

was or was not a Catholic.

Looking back on what happened, and still chagrined by the memory of his

decision to select Gerald Smith as funeral chaplain, Seymour Weiss

relates that “I didn’t know what to do. If I picked a Catholic priest, a

Protestant minister, or a rabbi, I’d offend those that weren’t

represented; even if I picked all three for a sort of joint service,

those who felt that Huey was neither a Catholic nor a Jew might resent

their inclusion, and in addition, the funeral service would be dragged

out too long with three obituary sermons to deliver. Then I happened to

recall that Gerald Smith had severed his connection with a Shreveport

church of which he had been the pastor before being employed by the

Share-Our-Wealth movement as an exhorter.

“So I went to him and said: ‘You’re a kind of free-lance preacher

without portfolio, and that’s why I’m going to give you the biggest

honor you’ve ever had. You’re going to conduct Huey’s funeral service’

... and that was the worst mistake I ever made in all my life.”

Not that anything untoward occurred to mar the service. Under direction

of highway-department engineers, special crews had labored around the

clock to have the vault ready. From the great bronze doors of the

capitol the cortege was led by Castro Carrazo and his Louisiana State

University student band. With drums muffled and the tempo of their march

reduced to slow-step they played “Every Man a King,” so artfully

transposed to a minor key that what was and still is essentially a

doggerel became an impressive and moving dirge. The service that

followed was simple and dignified.

In Baltimore, Henry L. Mencken, ever ready to sacrifice fact for the

turn of a sparkling phrase, predicted that ere long Louisianians would

dynamite Huey’s ornate casket out of its crypt and erect an equestrian

statue of Dr. Weiss over the site. The truth is that a monument to the

fallen apostle of Share-Our-Wealth has been built above the vault, and

that elders still make worshipful pilgrimages to the spot.

Indeed, there have been those who literally canonized the memory of the

man who once proclaimed himself Kingfish. Among the personal

advertisements in the daily newspapers of South Louisiana one finds

cards of thanks to this or to that favorite saint. “Thanks to St. Rita

and St. Jude for financial aid.” “Thanks to St. Anthony for successful

journey.” “Thanks to St. Joseph for recovery of father and husband.” And

among them have appeared such cards as this: “Thanks to St. Raymond,

St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long for favor granted.” The last one cited

appeared in the New Orleans _Times-Picayune_ of June 11, 1937.

Even those who make up a younger generation to whom Huey Long’s name

already has become as impersonal as that of, let us say, Millard

Fillmore, still visit the statue, much as they would pause to look at

any other historical monument in their travels.

Within twenty-four hours of the most elaborate funeral ever held in

Louisiana, attended by approximately 150,000 participants in the solemn

rites of lamentation, Huey’s Praetorian Guard were up in arms against

one another. Ready to yield instant obedience to their Kingfish, they

were one and all determined never to render such homage to anyone of

their own subordinate rank.

The climax came about three o’clock one morning, when Gerald Smith not

only proclaimed himself the new head of the Share-Our-Wealth movement,

but announced the ticket which he and his followers had endorsed and

would back in the forthcoming January primary. None of the names Huey

had been considering appeared thereon. It was headed by the names of

State Senator Noe for governor and Public Service Commissioner Wade O.

Martin, Sr., for United States senator.

Reverend Smith issued his pronouncement from the Roosevelt Hotel, but

was incautious enough to tell such people as Ray Daniell of the New York

_Times_, Allen Raymond of the New York _Herald Tribune_, and myself that

the Huey Long organization would move forward with even greater strides

as soon as it had rid itself of the Jews in it.

The reaction was so immediate it must have shocked even him. The first

obstacle he encountered was the announcement by Earle Christenberry that

no one not specifically authorized to do so by himself as copyright

owner, could use either Share-Our-Wealth or Share-the-Wealth as party

designations, and that he proposed to turn over the only membership

rolls of that organization to Mrs. Long.

The next came when the other Long bigwigs, realizing the ominous

implications of Smith’s bid for the scepter, submerged all their

intramural antagonisms in order to prevail on Judge Leche, as the

candidate the late Kingfish himself had tapped, to head an “official”

Long organization ticket. By way of making this ticket’s status all the

more authentic, it also carried the names of Earl Long as candidate for

lieutenant governor, Oscar Allen as nominee to serve out Huey’s

unexpired term in the Senate, and Allen Ellender as candidate for the

ensuing full six-year term, for which Huey himself would have run as

curtain raiser to his bid for the presidency.

In addition, Russell Long, then only seventeen years old, was enlisted

as one of the speakers who would campaign on behalf of the official

ticket. This was to be his initial bid for political recognition; he was

put on the first team, campaigning right alongside his uncle and Judge

Leche. Gerald Smith, on the other hand, was relegated to obviously

subordinate rank. Realizing the hopelessness of a maverick’s lone foray

against such odds, to say nothing of his inability to secure funds from

the Share-Our-Wealth organization, he returned to the fold, and was

assigned to address rural meetings in small country churches and the

like.

By and large the platform of the authorized Long ticket was simple: from

the stump and in circulars, over the radio and in newspaper advertising,

the anti-Long slate was branded the “Assassination Ticket.”

Its backers were additionally handicapped by having Congressman

Cleveland Dear, an Alexandria attorney and a very inept campaigner, as

their candidate. His insistence that he headed a “Home Rule Ticket”

which proposed to return to individual communities those rights of

self-government which dictatorship had usurped, fell upon deaf ears.

Even had Dear and his fellows been skilled and adroit campaigners, their

prowess would have availed little against the hysterical determination

of the great mass of voters to express by their ballots how deeply they

disapproved of assassination--especially of the assassination of their

idolized ol’ Huey.

There was actually a pathetic overtone to Cleveland Dear’s declaration

that the hotel conference “was attended by about 300 of as fine men as

can be found, who registered openly at the hotel desk, conducted their

conversations openly in rooms and in hallways and not behind locked

doors. There was hardly a meeting at that time where the possibility of

bloodshed was not mentioned, but I heard no discussion of it at that

hotel conference.

“Yet the governor is going around this state preaching hatred, and

charging that the murder plot was hatched there. If he believes that, he

should have me arrested. I challenge him to have me arrested!”

This sort of defensive jeremiad fell very flat when in country-school

assembly halls, in churches, in fraternal-lodge rooms and other small

rural meeting places, administration speakers became emotional over

basins of red dye, lifting the fluid in cupped hands and letting it

trickle back in the lamplight while declaiming: “Here it is, like the

blood Huey Long shed for you, the blood that stained the floor as it

poured from his body. Are you going to vote for those who planned this

deed and carried it into execution?”

It soon became obvious to even the most optimistic leaders of the

self-styled Home Rule faction that something must be done to stem the

“assassination” tide. The climax was reached when Mayor Walmsley was

booed to the echo by the throng that had come to see the first bridge

ever built across the Mississippi at New Orleans formally dedicated and

opened to traffic. The official name of the structure, and so marked on

War Department maps: the Huey P. Long Bridge. The chorus of boos drowned

out every word that Mayor Walmsley uttered at the dedication, and was

maintained until he resumed his seat.

Whether or not this incident precipitated the final effort of the Home

Rulers to escape the assassination onus in that cheerless campaign no

one can say at this late date. But a charge by Dear in his next address

before a large meeting gave birth to the bodyguard-bullet story, or at

least brought about its acceptance as factual in many circles to this

day.

“Isn’t it true that one of Huey Long’s bodyguards is in a mental

institution this very minute?” he cried dramatically. “Is he not

muttering to himself over and over again: ‘I’ve killed my best friend!

I’ve killed my best friend! I’ve killed my best friend!’?”

This was not true. Dear did not name the bodyguard supposedly thus

afflicted, and the newspapers thought so little of his outburst, or were

so reluctant to risk a libel suit, that they did not even include the

quotation in their accounts of the rally. But for some reason which now

escapes the memory of those who recall the incident, it was taken for

granted that the candidate had referred to Joe Messina.

Marching steadily toward a landslide victory by a larger majority than

had ever been cast for any other Louisiana candidate for governor--even

for the Kingfish himself--Judge Leche was asked whether he knew anything

about the basis, if any, of the Dear statement; specifically, whether

Joe Messina was then or had been confined recently to a mental

institution.

“I’d say yes to that,” he replied. “At least, he is one of the

doorkeepers at the executive mansion, and whenever I think of how crazy

I am to give up a quiet, peaceful, dignified place on the appeals bench

for a chance to live in that mansion four long years, I’d definitely

class it as a madhouse.”

None the less, the charge--a countercharge, really--that the bullet

which ended Huey Long’s life came from the gun of one of his bodyguards

was repeated so often thereafter, and with so many elaborations, that it

was permanently embedded in the twentieth-century folklore of Louisiana.

The Long machine, for the moment an invincible political juggernaut,

rolled on to total victory; but without Huey’s genius for organization,

for expelling undesirables and recruiting replacements, and above all

for having his absolute authority accepted by those serving under him,

it ground to a halt and collapsed within three years.

Beyond doubt another factor in the swiftness with which a monolithic

organization of incipiently national scope crumbled into nothingness was

the realization that its treasury had disappeared. Naturally, every

effort was made to trace this hoard of dollars and documents. In

November of 1936, while the Long estate was still under probate, the

safety-deposit box which the Riggs National Bank at Washington still

held in the late Senator’s name was opened in the presence of Mrs. Long,

the deputy Register of Wills, Earle Christenberry, a bank official, and

a representative of the Internal Revenue Service. It was found empty,

stripped of the trove which Long told Seymour Weiss he had removed to

another and secret place of concealment.

With no clue to the new depository to which the contents of this vault

had been transferred, the search for it was as prolonged as it was

bootless. Every key on the ring turned over to Mrs. Long by the Lady of

the Lake Sanitarium after her husband’s demise was examined. Only one of

them proved to have any possible relation to safety-deposit boxes. On

August 11, 1936, Earle Christenberry made a tracing or rubbing of this

key, and sent it to the Yale and Towne Company at Stamford, Connecticut.

Four days later W. W. Herrgen of that firm replied: “The key which you

sent to me ... is for one of our No. 3401-C safety deposit locks, and a

search of our files shows that this key could be for use in a lock at

the Whitney National Bank of New Orleans.”

The Whitney, largest and most independent bank in New Orleans at the

time, was for that very reason the last one Huey Long would have been

likely to select. In any case, its officials reported that the key in

question was not for any of the boxes in their vault. Of the money,

aggregating what may well have been several million dollars--enough to

finance an entire presidential campaign on the lavish scale to which

Huey Long was accustomed--no trace has ever been found.

Even the sale of _My First Days in the White House_ was pitifully small

compared to what it would have been had its author lived to issue it as

a campaign document.

Up to this day no one has been able to hazard a guess as to what was

done with this accumulation of currency. Long had always levied a

political tribute of two per cent on the salaries of all state

employees. No effort was made to conceal this. Indeed, the Kingfish

boasted that his support came from the people in small, regular

individual contributions, and not in huge individual gifts from the

swollen corporations, the money barons, and something called “the

interests.”

From 1919 to 1946 Elmer L. Irey was chief of the Treasury Department’s

Intelligence and Enforcement Division. Among other and perhaps lesser

achievements, he had directed the investigation that finally landed Al

Capone behind bars for income-tax evasion. In a 1948 book by Irey, “as

told to William J. Slocum,” one chapter deals with the Roosevelt

administration’s efforts to secure a thorough investigation of the

income-tax returns filed (or not filed) by Huey Long, his top aides, and

even some of their subordinates.

“We decided that the technique that had put Al Capone and his gang in

jail would be reasonably applicable to Huey Long and his gang,” the

Irey book avers in telling of the investigation that Treasury Secretary

Morgenthau ordered within three days after he took office.

Evidence was gathered against the smaller fry first, and with former

Governor Dan Moody of Texas as counsel for the Treasury Department, one

of these lesser lights was convicted and sentenced to Atlanta in April

1935.

By autumn more evidence had been gathered against Long himself.

According to Irey’s memoir, it “convinced Moody. ‘I will go before the

grand jury when it meets next month and ask for an indictment against

Long,’ Moody told us.... That conversation was held on September 7.”

This was the very day on which, in the course of a round of golf, Huey

Long confided to Seymour Weiss not only that enough cash and other

campaign material was in hand to finance his presidential race, but that

all this accumulation had been removed from the safety-deposit box

he--Long--had rented under his own name in the Riggs National Bank in

Washington.

It must not be forgotten that Long too had a highly proficient

intelligence service, and that therefore he was beyond question well

aware that the T-men were busily seeking evidence to be used against

him. He knew who their operatives in Louisiana were, where their

headquarters office in the Masonic Temple Building was, and in general,

exactly how the Irey unit functioned. He had no illusions about their

knowledge of his Riggs Bank safety-deposit box. He knew how they had

traced such depositories in other cases, and also that, in the past,

variations of “this money does not belong to me, it is merely the

political campaign (etc., etc.) fund of our association” had proved to

be no valid defense.

Whether or not that is why he stripped the Riggs Bank box of its

contents no one can say. But it is certain that if Long had lived, and

Dan Moody had impounded the contents of this box for evidence of

unreported income, he would have made a water haul.... The T-men brought

to trial only one other of the indictments pending against Long bigwigs;

they considered it their strongest case, but the jurors found the

defendant “not guilty.” It was not until the government filed charges of

using the mails to defraud that convictions were obtained some three or

four years later.

What it all came down to is this: the apparently impregnable political

structure created by Huey Long, and the hard-and-fast line of cleavage

that separated Long from anti-Long while the Kingfish was present to

maintain his dictatorial hold on all phases of his organization, began

to disintegrate at 4:06 A.M. of September 10, 1935. As is almost

invariably the case, the dictatorship died with the dictator. After the

Leche landslide majority of 1936 the governor-designate epitomized the

result rather ruefully by observing:

“They didn’t vote for or against a live governor; only for or against a

dead senator.”

Today the Long faction, what there is of it, is just another loosely

knit political coalition. The number of those who still recall the

self-anointed Kingfish of the Lodge becomes smaller with each passing

day.... In the spring of 1962 Johnny Carson, then a television

quizmaster, asked a couple of contestants on his “Who Do You Trust?”

program this question:

“What statesman who was elected governor in 1928, was assassinated at

Baton Rouge in 1935?”

The two contestants, who had otherwise proved themselves reasonably well

informed, simply looked blank. Neither of them could give the answer.

Before many more years have gone by, Huey Pierce Long will be just

another vague figure out of a history text, and there will no longer be

any disputes about the architect of his assassination, the manner in

which it was carried out, or the motives that prompted it. But in the

meantime----

12 ---- SUMMATION

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

----WOODROW WILSON

The various versions of “what really happened” during the assassination

of Huey Long can be grouped into four general classes under some such

headings as the following:

Dr. Weiss, unarmed, entered the capitol and merely struck at Long,

being gunned down at once by the bodyguards, one of whose wild shots

inflicted a mortal wound on the man they were seeking to defend.

Dr. Weiss was armed, did fire one shot which missed its target. In the

ensuing fusillade which riddled the young physician’s body, a wild

shot inflicted on Long a wound which proved fatal.

The small-caliber bullet from Weiss’s weapon did not pass completely

through its victim’s body, and was never found, being buried with him.

The fatal bullet, a ricochet or stray shot from the gun of a

bodyguard, was the missile that emerged from Long’s body in the back,

creasing the kidney in its passage and initiating what later proved to

be a fatal hemorrhage.

Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber weapon fired the only shot which struck Huey

Long, passing through the right side of the abdomen, and injuring the

right kidney just before emerging at the back. It is possible that

surgery to remove this kidney, rather than the frontal laparotomy

which was performed, might have halted the fatal hemorrhage and thus

have saved Long’s life.

Taking these up individually and in sequence, it becomes a relatively

simple matter to dispose of the first assumption. This rests on the

undeniable fact that Senator Long’s lower lip bore an abrasion on its

outer surface, and a small cut inside of his mouth; also on the

statement of one nurse who is quoted as saying she heard the patient say

in the hospital: “He hit me.”

But there is abundant evidence to support the belief that if this bruise

was the result of a blow, it was not struck by Dr. Weiss. There is, for

one thing, the testimony of Sheriff Coleman, that he struck at Senator

Long’s assailant twice, that the first blow missed the assassin and

struck someone else, and that the second felled Weiss, who by that time

was grappling with Murphy Roden.

There is likewise the statement of the first physician to examine the

gravely wounded man at the hospital, when Judge O’Connor voiced the

belief that Long had been shot in the mouth because of the bloody

spittle that stained his clothing. After an examination the young doctor

declared “that is just where he hit himself against something.”

There is the unanimous testimony of Justice Fournet, Sheriff Coleman,

and Murphy Roden that the assailant later identified as Dr. Weiss did

have “a small black pistol” and did fire it, as well as the testimony of

Frampton, Justice Fournet, and Coleman that this pistol was lying a few

inches from Dr. Weiss’s lifeless hand immediately after the shooting.

But above all, the belief that the young physician was unarmed and

merely struck Long with his fist is proved fallacious by one

circumstance: the identity of the bullet-riddled body on the floor of

the corridor where the shooting took place was not established until

long after the weapon was found, in fact, not until the coroner arrived

and examined the contents of the dead man’s wallet.

It goes without saying that if Dr. Weiss came unarmed to the capitol,

some other person must have brought his gun there from the car where his

father testified he carried it. The argument is advanced that this was

done by a bodyguard, a highway patrolman, or an officer of the state

bureau of identification, to direct suspicion away from the “fact” that

a wild shot from one of the bodyguards was the only missile that

inflicted a mortal wound on Long.

But this presupposes that those who could not identify a riddled body on

the marble floor of a capitol corridor were none the less able to pick

out the slain man’s automobile from among the hundreds, possibly

thousands, of cars parked on the capitol grounds and along every nearby

street, search it for a weapon, and place that weapon surreptitiously

where it was picked up by the authorities moments after the shooting.

This so far transcends even the most remote possibility, that any

version based on the assumption that Weiss, unarmed, merely struck at

Long with his fist, can be discarded out of hand.

The second category includes all versions of the proposition that Carl

Weiss did fire one shot, but missed. There is even one account which

holds that, at the time, Long was wearing a bullet-proof vest which

Weiss’s small-caliber bullet could not penetrate.

Everyone who knew Huey Long well, who traveled with him on his campaign

tours, stopped at the same hotels with him, and so on, can testify to

the fact that he was never known to wear a bullet-proof vest. He

surrounded himself with armed guards wherever he went; a cadre of

militiamen in full uniform, with steel helmets and side arms,

accompanied him to the washroom in what is now the building of the

National Bank of Commerce while he was conducting one of his murder-plot

probes there. But he wore no armor.

Of my own knowledge I can testify that I have seen him in his suites at

the Roosevelt and at the Heidelberg when, after breakfast, he bathed and

dressed for the street, that I have traveled with him during his

campaigns through Louisiana and through Arkansas, that I have been with

him in his home on Audubon Boulevard, and that never, from the day I

first met him in 1919 to the day of his death in 1935, have I known him

to wear anything that remotely resembled a bullet-proof vest.

But to make assurance doubly sure, I checked this point with Earle

Christenberry and with Seymour Weiss, his two closest friends.

“I can’t imagine how that story got about,” Christenberry said, “but I

know exactly on what it must be based. About six months before Huey died

I got the bright idea that it would be a smart thing for him, when he

went out stumping the country in the approaching presidential campaign,

to wear a bullet-proof vest. So without saying a word to him about it, I

wrote to Elliott Wisbrod in Chicago, a manufacturer of such equipment,

and asked that a vest of this type be sent to me for the Senator’s

approval.

“The thing was delivered in due course, and I put it on and went to his

room and showed it to him, and suggested that on occasion it might be

wise to wear it as a protection against some unpredictable attack. He

told me to send the damn thing back, adding ‘it would be ridiculous for

me to wear it. I don’t need no goddam bullet-proof vest.’ So I sent it

back and that was the end of it.

“I have never spoken about this incident from that day to this. I didn’t

think another soul knew about it. But evidently the story must have

leaked out somewhere; from the manufacturers, I suppose. At any rate, I

was the one that wore the bullet-proof vest, one day for a few minutes.

He never did in all his life.”

Seymour Weiss, the sartorial mentor who weaned Long away from the flashy

clothes in which he first came to public notice, put it more succinctly.

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

said.

Other aspects of the available evidence cover not merely the category of

stories about Weiss’s bullet missing its target, being deflected by a

bullet-proof vest, etc., but the next category as well. This embraces

what is far and away the most widely believed and oft repeated version

of what took place. It holds that a bullet from the gun of a bodyguard

inflicted the mortal wound of whose effects Huey Long died, even though

Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber missile likewise struck him.

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

this theory.

The first is that “no small-caliber bullet was ever found.” This has

been interpreted to mean that the Weiss bullet was still in Long’s body

and, no autopsy being authorized, was buried with him. There is general

agreement on one point. The fatal injury was sustained near the wound of

exit, in the region of the right kidney. It was there that a continuing

hemorrhage was the immediate cause of death.

The argument runs that Weiss’s bullet of small caliber never having been

found, and therefore remaining in the body of the victim, the wound of

exit must have been made by some other bullet. No other bullet was fired

by anyone except the bodyguards, who discharged a wild barrage of pistol

fire which left the body of Dr. Weiss riddled with wounds, and pocked

the marble walls of the corridor with bullet scars which for years

official guides pointed out to visitors touring the capitol. The injury

near the point of exit was the only demonstrably fatal one; ergo, a

bodyguard’s bullet killed Long.

The view that the Kingfish perished from the effects of a bullet-wound

inflicted by one of his own guards also had a certain superficial

plausibility that appealed strongly to dedicated leaders of anti-Long

factionalism and their followers. It carried with it an overtone of

Matthew’s “All-they-that-take-the-sword-shall-perish-with-the-sword”

retributive justice. Finally it was labored in season and out by the

Home Rule campaign speakers who sought to rid themselves of the

Assassination Ticket stigma by proving that Long had died at the hands

of one of his own men.

It would be difficult to overestimate the fashion in which all this

tended to perpetuate what began as a campaign legend. For example, Elmer

Irey, whose career as postal inspector and finally chief of the Treasury

Department’s Intelligence Division spanned more than a generation,

assuredly must be accounted a professional in the realm of gathering,

sifting, and assaying evidence. Yet in his book he reports that----

“Weiss had a .22 calibre pistol in his hand when Long’s bodyguards mowed

him down. Long died as the result of a single bullet wound made by a .45

calibre slug. Nobody has explained that yet.”

To cite still another instance, I happened to meet both Isaac Don Levine

(author of, among other works, _The Mind of an Assassin_) and Dr. Alton

Ochsner at a medical gathering some years ago, not long after Dr.

Vidrine’s death. The talk turned on the events of the night when Huey

Long died.

“Why, I always thought it was a bodyguard, not Dr. Weiss, who killed

Long!” exclaimed Levine. When I spoke of some of the contradictions to

which this view was open, Dr. Ochsner expressed amazed disbelief that

any presumably informed person could entertain the slightest doubt that

Long’s death was due to a bodyguard’s bullet or bullets.

And yet the weight of all real evidence is wholly against this

hypothesis; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult to select a point

of approach to it. For a beginning, then, one must take into account the

“small, blue punctures” a bullet left on Huey Long’s body as the mark of

its passage. Only one photograph of Dr. Weiss’s body was ever taken. The

official photographer of the State Bureau of Identification made this

picture, which has never before been published. It shows the great

gaping wounds left on his torso by the .44- and .45-caliber bullets of

those who fired into his already lifeless body. Most of the

large-caliber cartridges also carried hollow-point bullets, which have a

mushrooming effect. (Cf. Murphy Roden’s “I saw the flesh open up,” when

he fired into Weiss’s throat as they were locked in a fierce struggle on

the corridor floor.)

Granted that a wildly ricocheting bullet from one of these guns could

have entered into the same wound made by Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber

bullet, unlikely as this may seem, it could by no stretch of the long

arm of coincidence have made its exit as a small bluish puncture. Even

if it alone caused the wound of exit, leaving a small bullet still in

the body of its victim, the point at which it plowed its way out of

Long’s back would have been a gaping orifice and not, as Thomas Davis

graphically described it, “so small I doubt we’d have seen it had it not

been pointed out to us.”

Another fact not to be overlooked is that the moment Dr. Rives saw the

clean dressing that had been placed over the wound and the operational

incision in the anterior wall of Long’s abdomen, he came to the

conclusion that any bullet entering at that point in the manner

described, most probably emerged in the area of the kidney, and was

likely to have damaged that organ. It was for this reason that he asked

whether any blood had been found in the patient’s urine, learning to his

astonishment that the critically wounded man had not even been

catheterized to determine the existence and extent of kidney damage.

The visible abdominal trauma disclosed by the Vidrine operation was

small; so small that only a small-caliber bullet could have caused it.

Two holes had been left in the large bowel at the bend where it turns

horizontally across the abdomen from right to left. These holes were so

small that there was “very little soilage.” Reports that when the

abdomen was opened by Vidrine it was “a mass of blood and fecal matter”

were simply fabrications into which a minute fragment of fact was

expanded, like some of Huey Long’s murder-plot charges.

Finally, the available evidence is conclusive in one respect: By the

time the bodyguard fusillade began, Huey Long had fled the corridor

where the shooting took place. Coleman, Frampton, and Fournet are

unanimous on that point. Roden, blinded by the searing muzzle blasts of

his comrades’ guns, could no longer see what was going on, but testifies

that the other guards waited until he had struggled to his knees from

beneath the lifeless body of Carl Weiss, before they started their

volley. O’Connor describes how the firing was still audible after Huey

had reeled down four short flights of steps and was being led out of a

ground-floor door into the porte-cochere.

In sum, every item of credible evidence--surgical, circumstantial, and

the testimony of eyewitnesses--indicates that Huey Long could not have

been struck by a bullet from the gun of one of his bodyguards. That

leaves but one other conceivable hypothesis, namely: Huey Long died of

the effects of a bullet wound inflicted by Carl Weiss and no one else.

Disregarding the physical circumstances, an intangible consideration

virtually compels the acceptance of this view. We have in the testimony

of all the eyewitnesses a substantial agreement on what took place.

Roden, Fournet, and Coleman saw the gun in Weiss’s hand and saw him fire

it. Frampton, Coleman, and Fournet saw and describe Long’s flight before

the crashing salvo by the other bodyguards began.

Their stories differ in detail. Frampton says Huey gave “a sort of a

grunt” when he was shot; Justice Fournet describes it as “a hoot.” He

also says the first shot was fired by Weiss, the next three by Coleman;

Roden says the first two shots were fired by Weiss, the third by

himself, and the fourth by someone else (obviously Coleman). Coleman

says Huey was attended by Roden, McQuiston, and himself on his final

visit to the House chamber, Fournet says he was accompanied by Messina,

and Frampton reports that Messina answered the telephone in the office

of the sergeant at arms, which opens off the Speaker’s rostrum and is

entirely separate from the House chamber.

These discrepancies are natural; only the absence of such variations

would lay the testimony of witnesses to a violent incident open to the

suspicion, nay the certainty, of collusion. Take for example the three

mutually contradictory versions of what happened when the two

principals, Roden and Weiss, locked in literally a life-and-death

grapple, fell struggling to the floor. Roden says his hard heels slipped

on the marble paving; Justice Fournet says he threw out his hands in a

gesture that overbalanced the two; Coleman says a blow of his fist

felled Weiss, who, clasped in Roden’s grip, pulled the latter down

beneath him.

But on the main point--namely, that the two fell to the floor, and that

Weiss was not killed until after they were down--all are in complete

agreement. If it is assumed that this is a concocted story, made up to

divert suspicion from one or more of the bodyguards as having fired so

wildly that one of their bullets brought about their leader’s death, the

following must likewise be accepted as true:

Somewhere and sometime before the first of these four witnesses told

what he saw, all of them would have had to agree on the specific

untruths they would tell.

But at no time was there any opportunity during those initial frantic

moments for the four to have met, either to concoct and agree on a false

story or for any other purpose. Indeed, Frampton was already telephoning

his first story of what had occurred, while the others are all accounted

for elsewhere: Coleman describing to Governor Allen what he had seen,

Justice Fournet in the hospital, Roden out of action and temporarily

blinded until taken to the hospital himself by Ty Campbell.

Furthermore, after treatment, and not having spoken to any others in the

meantime, Roden gave his statement that night to General Guerre, and

later to General Fleming. These accounts agreed in almost every detail

with one another and with the one he gave me, twenty-four years later,

in the presence of Generals Fleming and Guerre, who verified that this

statement differed in no essential respect from what he had told them at

the scene when questioned by them on the night of September 8, 1935.

Except for one detail, it also agrees with the testimony he gave on

September 16 of that same year, at the Odom inquest. It was his belief

at first that Dr. Weiss fired but once. However, mulling the violent

images of that night over in his mind, he later came to the conclusion

that the doctor fired twice; this, incidentally, is the only conclusion

that would square with the two minor injuries he sustained on his right

hand and left wrist.

In any case, the possibility of conspiratorial collusion among these

four in time to have agreed on a falsified account of what took place

before their eyes, would appear to be ruled out in its entirety. The

inevitable corollary of such a proposition is that the otherwise

uncontradicted testimony of these four witnesses is a factual account

of what took place.

None the less, one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility, however

remote, that evidence can be framed, as it has been in documented

cases--Sacco-Vanzetti, Tom Moony, Leo M. Frank; and that circumstantial

evidence, even where no single link in the chain appears weak, leads now

and then to false conclusions. But it can be said that in this instance

the overwhelming weight of available evidence indicates that Weiss’s

bullet was the cause of Huey Long’s death, and that no bullet from the

guns of one or another of his bodyguards was a contributing factor in

putting an end to his career.

The available evidence likewise appears to indicate beyond a reasonable

doubt that the emergency operation was a contributing cause of death in

the following respect:

Had a decision to perform a frontal laparotomy been deferred, and had in

its stead a removal of the damaged right kidney made possible the tying

off of the blood vessels supplying this organ to halt the hemorrhage

that was draining off the victim’s life blood, Huey Long might none the

less have died of peritonitis, from “soilage” into the abdominal cavity

by the two small punctures of the large bowel.

But once the decision to operate from the front was carried into effect,

the only door to possible--by no means “certain,” but possible--recovery

was irrevocably closed. Even Dr. Vidrine realized that a second

operation to halt the kidney hemorrhage was something his patient could

not survive.

By way of conclusion it is logical to say that on the basis of available

testimony and with due regard for the imminence of human error, the

following facts appear to be established by the overwhelming

preponderance of evidence:

Dr. Weiss was armed when he went into the capitol building on the night

of September 8, 1935, carrying with him the small-caliber Belgian

automatic he had brought back from France and which he customarily took

with him in his car on night calls.

According to the integrated testimony of four eyewitnesses who had no

opportunity for collusion prior to giving their accounts of what they

saw, he held the gun in one hand, concealing it with the straw hat he

held in the other, so that it was virtually impossible for him to have

struck a blow with his fist.

Every trustworthy piece of testimony appears to make it clear that only

four shots were fired while Huey Long was on the scene: two by Weiss,

one each by Roden and Coleman; that by the time the general bodyguard

fusillade began, the Senator was already on his way down a flight of

stairs opposite the Western Union office, which is around a corner from

the site of the shooting; and that the fusillade was still in progress

while Long was being led out of the building by Judge O’Connor.

Medical testimony is unanimous on the point that only one bullet, and

that one of small caliber, traversed Long’s abdomen, leaving small blue

punctures at the points of entry and exit; that the primarily fatal

injury was caused when, just prior to its exit, the bullet damaged the

victim’s right kidney at a point where only removal of the maimed organ

could have halted the ensuing and ultimately fatal hemorrhage.

Granted then, if only for the sake of argument, that there no longer is

either mystery or even reasonable doubt concerning _who_ killed Huey

Long, one big, crucial question remains unanswered. It is this:

“_Why?_”

13 ---- THE MOTIVE

“_Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient

premises._”

----SAMUEL BUTLER

The difficulty encountered when seeking to rationalize the assassination

of Huey Long is implicit in two circumstances. The first is the total

absence of fact or testimony about the motive for it, so that

conclusions are necessarily based on surmise.

The second is the apparently irreconcilable disparity between the known

nature of Carl Weiss, the man, and the obvious nature of his act. Why

would someone whose closest personal and professional associates

unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of

violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if

from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a

mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of

a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to

sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of

another?

In this instance the problem is not merely one of drawing sufficient

conclusions from insufficient premises. Conclusions must be drawn from

_two_ mutually contradictory sets of insufficient premises.

Barry O’Meara, the Irish ship’s surgeon aboard the vessel that brought

Napoleon to St. Helena, volunteered to remain there with him, but was

one of the first to be deported when Sir Hudson Lowe subsequently took

over the governorship of the island. He was one of the fallen emperor’s

few confidants during the desolate days of that terminal exile. In his

memoirs of their association he quoted Napoleon as saying:

“A man is known by his conduct to his wife, to his family, and to those

under him.”

The members of Carl Weiss’s family are still not convinced, or at least

are still unwilling to admit, that he took Long’s life. The nurses who

were his principal subordinates, and many of whom still survive, looked

on him not merely as a physician, but as a teacher. To this day they

agree he could not have done what all available evidence conclusively

proves that he did.

Miss Theoda Carriere, the first registered nurse called to attend

Senator Long after the shooting, now lives in a piny woods retreat near

Amite. “Dr. Weiss just wasn’t the kind of person who would do a thing

like that,” she insists. “He taught us chemistry when we were in

training, and every girl in our class looked on him as one of the

gentlest and kindest of men. None of us believe he was the one who shot

Long.”

Admittedly, Dr. Chester A. Williams, Jr., the present coroner of East

Baton Rouge parish, cannot be regarded as a Long partisan. It was he who

pronounced Earl Long insane in 1959 while the latter was still governor,

and committed him to a mental institution. Yet he set down the following

restrained obiter dictum after transcribing and studying the microfilmed

hospital chart of Huey Long’s final hours:

“Most of the doctors who lived in Baton Rouge and are still living do

not feel that Dr. Weiss shot Long.”

In a strictly technical sense, only Carl Weiss himself, his lips

irrevocably sealed within seconds after he did what “his family and

those under him,” not to mention his professional associates, still

regard him as incapable of doing, could have given a conclusive solution

to this paradox.

Since that is out of the question, the best that can now be done is to

list the various possible motives which either have been or could be

considered as impelling Dr. Weiss to sacrifice his own life in order to

put an end to that of Huey Long. From the roster thus compiled, the

obviously impossible and then the logically infirm assumptions can be

eliminated one by one, to see whether any hypothesis which might fit

such of the facts as are ascertainable will withstand searching

scrutiny.

Four motives have been or can be imputed to Dr. Weiss in connection with

the shooting of Long. They are:

The young physician was the executioner chosen by a group of plotters

in a cabal of which he was a member, to carry out the death sentence

there secretly decreed against an otherwise invincible political

oppressor.

The assassination was an act of reprisal for the gerrymander which

would bring to an abrupt end the twenty-eight-year judicial career of

Yvonne Weiss’s father through a fraudulent mockery of legislative

procedure deliberately rigged to deny the parish of St. Landry the

free exercise of home rule.

An abstract idealism inspired a quixotic young patriot to sacrifice

himself on the altar of the common weal by destroying a dictatorship

through the death of the autocrat who stood at its head.

Haunted by anxiety born of a suspicion that, in campaigning against

Judge Pavy, Long would raise the specter of an all-but-forgotten and

long since refuted racial slur against the Pavy family, Dr. Weiss paid

with his life for the assurance that libelous words resurrecting the

false stigma would never be uttered.

The first of these four propositions can be given short shrift. The

Senate speech in which Long sought to implicate the Roosevelt

administration, and in effect President Roosevelt himself, in a “plan of

robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” was the latest of several

revelations charging others with plotting his murder. It happened also

to be the last one because within a month after making this charge in

the Senate, he was assassinated.

But significant factors must not be overlooked. The first is that after

none of these spectacular accusations of murder plots was anyone ever

formally charged before any court with conspiracy to commit murder.

The second is the undeniable fact that the so-called murder conference

in the De Soto Hotel was neither more nor less than a political caucus

of the type customarily held behind closed doors in order to facilitate

full freedom of discussion about personalities, political prospects, and

the like.

The third is that when all the verbiage about patronage plums and job

distribution and endorsement of candidacies is sifted for substance, a

pitiably small modicum of grain is recovered from a mountain of chaff.

Here are the only specific references to the infliction of bodily harm

by those hotel conferees actually quoted by Long in his Senate speech:

Oscar Whilden is reported as saying: “I am out to murder, bulldoze,

steal, or anything else to win this election.” An unidentified voice

said: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would only

take one man, one gun, one bullet.” Another unidentified voice said: “I

haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who

killed Long.” And still another unidentified voice said: “The best way

would be to just hang around Washington and kill him in the Senate.”

These four remarks were sandwiched in among two days of political

discussion about an approaching state campaign, the selection of

candidates, the use of federal patronage, and matters of that sort! By

way of illustration, a remark in a recent magazine article about another

Louisiana representative, Congressman Otto Passman, would offer a much

firmer foundation for a conspiracy charge along the lines followed by

Long.

Passman has dedicated himself, in season and out, to opposing and

reducing foreign-aid appropriations, and President Kennedy is quoted as

asking at the signing ceremony of one of these bills: “What am I going

to do about Passman?”

“Mr. President,” a bystander is reported as replying, “you’re surrounded

by a lot of well-armed Secret Service Men. Why don’t you have one of

them shoot him--by accident, of course? In fact, Mr. President, if you

promise me immunity, I’ll do it myself.”

No one who read that statement took it in its literal sense; no one

regarded it as a serious proposal to authorize, commit, and condone the

murder of a legislator. Yet that is precisely the construction Huey Long

put on four similar remarks made at intervals during a two-day caucus in

a New Orleans hotel.

All this would tend to cast doubts upon the complicity of Carl Weiss in

a murder conspiracy, even had he been the sort of person to whom a deed

involving assassination would normally have been possible. However, what

removes the assumption that he was the chosen executioner of a political

camarilla from serious consideration is this:

Carl Weiss was virtually unknown outside of his immediate professional,

social, and familial circle. Not one of the leading supposed “plotters”

of the hotel conference spoke of him during that meeting, none of the

leaders who were asked about him later could recall having heard of him,

although his wife’s father and uncle were known to virtually all of

them.

In sum, the hotel meeting of which Long sought to make great capital

was not a murder conference, and no one dreamed of bringing to book on

charges of criminal conspiracy any of those who took part in it; and

even had it been such a conspiracy, the name of Carl Weiss was not even

remotely connected with it.

The second proposition would have it that Carl Weiss assassinated Long

in reprisal for what the latter was doing to Yvonne’s father by having

him gerrymandered out of office, and virtually out of public life. There

are those who go so far as to say that Yvonne goaded her young husband

into exacting satisfaction from the despot who was persecuting her

family, who had brought about the dismissal of her uncle Paul from a

school superintendency, and of her sister Marie from a position as

teacher, and who was now implacably going to any lengths to close her

father’s long and honorable career as judge.

The whole idea of such a reprisal motive runs directly counter to every

fact known about the way the Weiss families passed that last Sunday: the

young couple leaving the baby with their elders while they attended

Mass, the family dinner at which the gerrymander was indeed the topic of

conversation, but in a light, rather jocular vein; the young couple

“sporting in the water” at the elders’ camp in the afternoon, while the

latter fondled their precious grandson, the domestic routine that

preceded Carl’s departure for a professional call....

As nearly as anything human can be certain, it is sure that neither Dr.

Weiss nor any of the Pavy clan would ever have dreamed of taking upon

their consciences the killing of a fellow being, even in the heat of

passion, over such a matter as the loss of a public office, a

development they had discussed almost jocularly only a few hours before.

Only two theoretical assumptions thus remain as to the motive of Dr.

Weiss in committing a violent act contrary to all that was known of his

nature. One is the idea advanced by Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, that this

was “an act of pure patriotism.” In 1935, when Dr. Pavy served as

spokesman for the Weiss family, he felt that his niece’s husband was

deeply troubled by “the suppressive type of government” that had been

imposed on Louisiana; that he brooded over this until “his mind

unhinged,” and he determined to put an end to the dictatorship even at

the cost of his life.

Supporting this view are certain plausible factors. Carl Weiss was

indeed an idealist of the type who might voluntarily have sacrificed his

life in the furtherance of any noble cause, such as the liberation of

his community from the thralldom imposed upon it by a ruthless

authoritarian. Negating this view, however, is the fact that he took no

active part in politics, though at that time Baton Rouge, his home, was

the focal point of fiercely contested Long and anti-Long rivalry.

It is simply not conceivable, in the general sense of that word, that

anyone so deeply and earnestly concerned with “pure patriotism” should

not have been known to a single member of the press gallery at the

capitol, to a single member of the State Bureau of Identification, to so

well known a leader of the anti-Long movement in Baton Rouge as Dr. Tom

Bird--a fellow physician--and above all, to Huey Long himself, a man

whose memory for names and faces was truly phenomenal.

While Carl Weiss could well have been a crusader for any idealistic

cause, it is difficult to accept unreservedly the proposition that one

who had so very much to live for, whose happiness was so nearly

complete, the best and most rewarding years of whose life still lay in

the future, would give up all this and burden his conscience with two

mortal sins--murder and what was tantamount to self-destruction--for an

abstract concept of the general good.

It would seem almost self-evident that no man would voluntarily make

such a sacrifice except in seeking to protect from harm those whom he

held dear.

And there must have been some such motive in the haunting suspicion

that, while campaigning against Judge Pavy, Huey Long would revive that

long-buried, long-refuted tarbrush bugaboo which had been brought up

unsuccessfully as involving one of Judge Pavy’s relatives-in-law thirty

years before.

In view of Long’s past obsession with racial issues of this sort, Carl

Weiss had good grounds for apprehension on that score. In past campaigns

and polemics Long had never hesitated to use such innuendos, as when he

referred to a prominent Orleanian as “Kinky” Soandso in issue after

issue of his weekly newspaper, _The American Progress_. Nor had he

hesitated to make direct attacks on this front, as in his campaigns

against Dudley LeBlanc in the matter of the latter’s Negro fellow

officers of his burial-insurance society.

In his fancy the young physician could readily imagine Long’s insistence

that “this isn’t what I’m saying; I’m not even a-saying it’s so. All I’m

telling you is this is what Sheriff Swords said time after time....”

If Long, true to form, had made up his mind to drag this rejected canard

back into the open, there was one sure way in which Dr. Weiss could keep

him from his purpose and prevent a single syllable of that baseless and

forgotten slander from being uttered. True, he could accomplish this

only at the cost of his life. Surrounded as the Kingfish was by heavily

armed guards, anyone who attacked him, even though he cut him down with

the first shot, was sure to die himself, in the next instant, under a

rain of bullets. Carl Weiss “just wasn’t the sort of person that would

ever do a thing like that,” for any ordinary motive. But to shield the

wife he adored and the infant son he idolized from a slander, groundless

though it be, that would impute to them by innuendo a remote trace of

Negro blood, he could--and in the opinion of many he did--lay down his

life.

In that case, the real tragedy inherent in his act was not the sacrifice

of his own future, so rich with promise, nor even the extinction of Huey

Long, one of the most notable, challenging, and controversial figures in

the public life of his era. Unschooled in the labyrinthine windings and

turnings of politics in general and more particularly the ins and outs

of Louisiana’s politics during that hectic era, Dr. Weiss had no

intimation of the fact that nothing could have been farther from Huey

Long’s plans than raising any racial issue at this time.

He did not know that Long was preparing to challenge Franklin

Roosevelt’s bid for re-election by running against him for the

presidency; that he was no longer campaigning merely in the Deep South

where Negroes, disfranchised ever since the final rout of carpetbaggery

in the 1870s, were kept from the polls first by force, then by the

Grandfather Clause, and after that by the Understanding Clause, but

above all by the one-party device of settling campaigns not at a general

election but in a Democratic (i.e., white) primary.

Running for office as the nominee of what in all likelihood would have

been a new coalition party--the Share-Our-Wealthers?--Louisiana’s

Kingfish would need all the minority-group votes he could attract to his

standard. Primarily this meant the heavy Negro vote of Harlem in New

York, Chicago’s black-and-tan belt, and other such concentrations in

Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, and so on.

Looking forward, planning far ahead, he had already begun to rid himself

of the “racist” label customarily applied to every far-Southern

politician. As an initial step he abolished the poll tax in Louisiana,

issuing poll certificates free to all applicants, regardless of color,

provided they could meet the age and residential requirements.

True, this was quite meaningless insofar as enfranchising the Louisiana

Negroes went. The law provided that no one would be permitted to

register or to vote unless he could show poll-tax receipts (or later,

free poll certificates) for each of the two years directly preceding any

given election. Its intent was primarily to keep floaters from being

brought into the state from Mississippi or other adjacent areas, on

election day. But this was by no means the only prerequisite for voting.

One must also be registered, each parish registrar being the sole

arbiter as to whether the applicant had correctly interpreted a section

of the state or federal constitutions.

In theory the Democratic Party was a private organization, like the

Fifth Ward Athletic Guild, and could thus choose its members at

pleasure, excluding whom it wished not to admit. Coupled with this was

an unwritten agreement to settle political differences not between

parties, but between factions of the Democratic Party, with all hands

pledged to support the Democratic nominee in the ensuing general

election, even if that nominee “happens to be a yellow dog!”

Abolition of the poll tax did nothing to alter this situation, which

obtained until the Supreme Court invalidated it, many years after Long’s

death. None the less, Negroes queued up by the thousands and treasured

the essentially worthless but to them invaluable slips of paper

officially issued to them.

The next step was Huey’s Share-Our-Wealth promise that this movement

would recognize no racial bars of any sort, that the division of shared

wealth would include black as well as white on equal terms. “Five

thousand a year and a span of mules,” the poor and underprivileged of

both races told one another ecstatically. “With what I’m making now and

the five thousand Huey Long’s going to give us, we’ll be in high cotton

for true!”

The final step would have been some sort of a second Emancipation

Proclamation, issued as a campaign document to a mammoth 1936

Share-Our-Wealth convention to be held in Detroit, or possibly St.

Louis. The unmistakable augury of this was Huey Long’s published apology

during the summer of 1935 for having used the word _nigger_ in the

course of a national network broadcast. A “race” tabloid, referring to

the word he had used as “the epithet n----r,” sent a reporter to him in

his suite at the New Yorker Hotel, and published the ensuing interview

under a two-column headline on its front page. In his statement Long

made it plain his use of “the epithet n----r” was a slip of the tongue,

and was not meant to be derogatory in a racial sense; also that he would

exercise due care not to use the epithet again in either public or

private speech.

It is all but impossible to convey to non-Southerners how radical a

departure from the _mores_ of Winn parish in central Louisiana was this

sort of retraction. Efforts were made to use the interview as an

anti-Long campaign document. Facsimiles of the front page of the Negro

tabloid were printed by some of the rural weeklies, but it didn’t work.

The Negro Share-Our-Wealthers throughout the land rejoiced. The whites

in the organization shrugged it aside as fabricated anti-Long propaganda

inspired by “the interests” or passed it off with: “As long as I get my

five thousand a year, what difference does it make who else gets it

too?”

It should not be overlooked that in the case of Judge Pavy, Long needed

no resort to ancient libels to accomplish his longtime opponent’s

defeat. The gerrymander would make it impossible for Ben Pavy to be

re-elected. Long would take the stump against him, of course, in order

to claim the foreordained victory as another personal triumph; but once

St. Landry parish was put into the same judicial district with Acadia,

Lafayette, and Vermillion parishes, even the slightest possibility of a

Pavy election was precluded. Huey Long would no more have gone to

needless lengths to win an already certain victory at the risk of

alienating any large section of the prospective Negro presidential vote

than he would have belabored a dying horse at an S.P.C.A. picnic in an

effort to make the animal run.

Taking all the foregoing into account, it would seem clearly impossible

to accept either the hypothesis that Carl Weiss, Jr., was the chosen

instrument of a political murder cabal to whose membership he was almost

wholly unknown, or the proposition that his was a nature sufficiently

ruthless to take the life of a fellow being in reprisal for the loss of

a long-held political office by his wife’s father.

As concerns the idea that Dr. Weiss was motivated by the “pure

patriotism” ascribed to him by his wife’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, there can be

little doubt that this was possible. But it is also not to be doubted

that there is a basis beyond parental affection for the elder Dr.

Weiss’s statement at the inquest into his son’s death that “my son was

too superbly happy with his wife and child, too much in love with them

to want to end his life after such a murder.”

On the other hand, no such contradiction is an integral part of the

hypothesis that he made this sacrifice to shield his wife and his son

from exposure to groundless odium. This would appear to be the only

assumption in full accord with all the known circumstances, even though

Dr. Weiss’s belief that Huey Long would exhume a long-buried slander

reflecting on his loved ones was tragically erroneous.

On the basis of the situation as he saw and understood it, the only way

to safeguard them was to silence Long before he could utter the libel.

If the only price at which this assurance could be purchased was the

forfeit of his own life, the compulsive paternal urge to protect his

beloved baby son might well be strong enough to overcome every

inhibition that was normally part of his character and background. He

took no one into his confidence, realizing that anyone to whom he

confided would inevitably thwart his plan. Thus we may picture him

leaving to his family the happy memory of an afternoon of carefree

affection, and departing alone to weigh in solitude one factor of the

situation against another, as he understood them.

Should he thereupon have decided that “this man will never slander my

son as he has slandered others in the past if I can silence him,” we can

only surmise that it was with this thought in mind that he entered the

marble-walled corridor where he died to make certain that some words

Huey Long never intended to utter would remain unsaid.

EPILOGUE

“_Finality is not the language of politics._”

----DISRAELI

To the Huey Long murder case the preceding chapters offer a solution

which fits every determinate fact of what took place in Baton Rouge on

September 8, 1935, everything pertinent that led up to the climactic

moment of violence, and what followed. Yet it goes without saying that

many will reject this rationalization of available evidence. The

arguments will go on and on.

We are prone to cherish certain myths. As though in wish-fulfillment we

still tell our children Parson Weems’s absurd fable of the boy

Washington, the cherry tree, and “I did it with my little hatchet.”

Similarly, the myth of the bodyguard’s bullet, product of a compulsive

necessity for political escape from the onus of assassination, will

retain adherents and win fresh believers, despite the obvious fact that

wherever else the truth may lie, the bodyguard-bullet hypothesis is

false.

Paradox remains a continuing footnote to Huey Long’s career. Surrounded

by fanatically loyal bodyguards, he was none the less done to death by a

shy, retiring young stranger in whom neither he nor his myrmidons

recognized any trace of menace. His injuries were critical and might in

any case have proved fatal; but it was a decision on the part of the

same Arthur Vidrine whom Huey Long had elevated to high command which

sealed the Kingfish’s doom. True, the alternative Dr. Vidrine chose was

one many another physician, confronted by the same circumstances, might

have selected inasmuch as mere delay in taking action could have proved

fatal.

On the other hand, it is not to be disputed that Dr. Vidrine’s decision

to operate by a frontal incision made it impossible for him or any one

else thereafter to save Huey Long’s life. In consequence, he fell under

the ban of the Long faction’s permanent and extreme displeasure. As soon

as he took office in 1936, Governor Leche appointed Dr. George Bel to

the superintendency of Charity Hospital, thus automatically displacing

Vidrine from that position. Within the year, Dr. James Monroe Smith,

president of the State University, speaking for its Board of

Supervisors, notified him that Dr. Rigney D’Aunoy had been made acting

dean of the medical school but that he--Dr. Vidrine--might retain a

place on the faculty as professor of gynecology.

Rather than accept such a demotion he resigned in August of 1937.

Returning to Ville Platte, he founded a private hospital there, and

maintained it until his retirement in ill health from active practice in

1950. Five years later he died.

Death also thwarted Long’s design to place the Pavy gerrymander at the

head of what became his last demonstration of dictatorship as the

legislature’s Act Number One. It became Act Number Three, since the

first two were concurrent resolutions, one expressing the grief of House

and Senate over the leader’s untimely end, the other creating a

committee to select a burial place on the capitol grounds for what

remained of his physical presence among them.

* * * * *

As for the gerrymander, it never really took effect, though it

automatically became law twenty days after the legislature adjourned. To

be sure, it did provide for an additional judge in a newly enlarged

judicial district, he to be chosen some fourteen months later at the

time of the Congressional election of November 1936.

But a new legislature, meeting in May 1936, adopted another statute,

superseding this law and reshuffling Louisiana’s judicial districts once

more to add a new one--the twenty-seventh--consisting of St. Landry

parish alone. This act, a constitutional amendment, would not become

operative until ratified by popular vote at the November elections. That

obviously made it impossible to elect a judge at the same time, so the

new bill provided that within thirty days after its ratification, the

governor should _appoint_ a judge for the new district, his term not to

end until that of the judges _elected_ in 1936 should have run its

course. In other words, the appointee would serve for six years.

Needless to say, the appointee was not Benjamin Pavy.

* * * * *

Another facet of the Long paradox is presented by the saint-or-sinner

image which his contemporaries and their successors yet seek to

preserve. Until the Kingfish’s name has lost all popular significance,

debates will be waged over the issue of whether the man was an

uninhibited genius, or merely a conscienceless opportunist endowed with

exceptional mental agility. On this point the testimony of one of the

three brothers Huey so heartily disliked might well shed some light.

Some days after the fallen leader’s funeral, and while the legislature

was still in session, a number of the Long satraps were gathered in

Governor Allen’s office, lamenting the confusion into which a virtually

leaderless assembly (in the sense of having too many leaders) had

fallen.

The leitmotiv of the parley held that things weren’t like that in the

good old days when the Kingfish was around to issue orders and see to it

that they were carried out. The conversation finally veered to what a

remarkable thing it was for a little bit of an old town like Winnfield

to have produced a superman like ol’ Huey, especially when you realized

it had never given to the world anyone else of comparable stature.

Earl Long, himself one of the thus disprized other products of

Winnfield, listened in morose silence for a time to these observations.

Finally he got up, moved to the door, paused, and said:

“You folks are right, of course. Huey was the only smart one from

Winnfield. No manner of doubt about it.” He scratched his chin

meditatively and then added: “But I’m still here!”

* * * * *

On the other hand, those who casually dismiss Long as a conscienceless

political gangster overlook the number of respects in which he was far,

far ahead of his time. It is only since the mid-century’s turn, for

example, that clamor has become general to provide special advanced

training for school children with well-above-normal mentality. Long

proposed a program of this sort for Louisiana State University in his

last broadcast, delivered two nights before he was shot. One of his last

rational statements, expressed only moments before he lapsed into the

drugged stupor from which he never really returned to consciousness, was

a lament that he would be unable to carry out this project.

He enormously increased Louisiana’s public debt with what proved to be a

remarkably sound system of funding dedicated revenues into bonds, in

order to give the state a highway network geared to the impending

expansion of motorized traffic. In the 1960s the federal government

followed the same line by laying out and constructing a vast system of

interstate super-highways.

Almost without formal education himself--he never finished high

school--he was like one possessed in his determination to put schooling

within the reach of all by providing free textbooks, free

transportation, free lunches, and the like. The medical school he

founded at Louisiana State University, as though merely to spite Tulane

for not conferring upon him at least one honorary degree, has won a

recognized place as a great center of research and instruction; it fills

what admittedly became a genuine need ... and while today’s income and

inheritance levies do not set arbitrary limits like those proposed by

Long in the early 1930s, the underlying principle of decentralization of

wealth by heavy upper-bracket taxes is basically what he advocated.

None of this mitigates the heritage of corruption in public life that he

bequeathed to Louisiana, or his ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and other

reprehensible qualities. But he was very far from being merely another

gangster.

* * * * *

The fact that the sons of both men whose lives ended so abruptly in

September 1935 followed brilliantly in their fathers’ footsteps may well

be part of this same pattern of paradox.

Russell Long, only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, enlisted

in the Navy as a seaman during World War II, serving with distinction in

the invasions of Africa, Sicily, and Italy (at Anzio), and advancing

through promotion until he was a lieutenant at the time of his

demobilization in 1945. In the election of January 1948 he supported the

successful gubernatorial race of his uncle, Earl K. Long. In September

of that same year, when Senator John H. Overton died with two years of

his term yet to run, Governor Long supported his nephew for election to

the vacancy.

He barely won by the slimmest sort of majority. The city of New Orleans

cast a majority of twenty-five thousand votes against him. But he

received much more ponderable support when he ran for the full Senate

term two years later, and a more impressive vote still when he was

re-elected in 1956. Finally, he was swept back into office in 1962 by a

veritable landslide, receiving some 84 per cent of the votes cast.

In part this was a response to his generally independent stand on both

local and national issues. In 1952, for example, he supported one of his

father’s uncompromising opponents, T. Hale Boggs, for governor against

the candidate backed by his uncle Earl, then nearing the end of his

first term as governor. But four years later he vigorously supported

Earl against Mayor deLesseps Morrison of New Orleans when the latter

made the first of two unsuccessful races for the governorship.

Beyond doubt, at least part of Russell’s steadily growing strength was

also due to the unmistakable fashion in which he proved himself an

exceptionally able member of the Senate, being one of the first ranking

figures in United States officialdom to recognize in Castro’s rise to

power a sinister portent, and to advocate immediate revision by this

country of the sugar quota to counter the _Fidelista_ drive toward

Communist affiliation.

Following his sweeping victory in the late summer of 1962, he issued a

modest victory statement in which he said in part:

“The most striking feature of my [re-election] was the majority recorded

for me in New Orleans. In some of the wards where I had been defeated by

a margin of seven to one fourteen years ago I was given a majority of as

much as six to one. This could never have happened without a lot of

people casting their first vote for a man who bears my family name.... I

shall always appreciate those tolerant and generous persons who have

seen fit to endorse me as the first member of my family to enjoy their

support.”

Dr. Carl Austin Weiss III, who was but three months old at the time of

his father’s death, was taken to New York by his mother when she left

Louisiana to make her home in the East. He was graduated from Columbia

in 1958, and set out to make general surgery his field of medical

practice. He was a full-time resident at St. Vincent’s hospital for two

years, but in July 1961 decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, and

entered the same hospital--Bellevue--where his father had been chief of

clinic thirty years before.

He was married in 1961, and early in 1962 was called to active military

service, being assigned as an air-force surgeon with the rank of captain

to duty at Barksdale Field. This base is in Bossier parish, Louisiana,

directly across the Red River from Shreveport, the city where Huey Long

was married and where Russell Long was born. Thus the son of Carl Weiss

was practicing medicine in Louisiana at the time the son of Huey Long

won an overwhelming victory there in a campaign for the Senate seat

formerly held by his father.

* * * * *

Long’s presidential aspirations left his friend and secretary, Earle

Christenberry an embarrassing $28,000 debt to pay.

“It is my firm belief now, and was my belief then,” Christenberry

asserts, “that Huey would not have been a candidate for president

himself prior to 1940. He told me in 1935 that he intended to stump the

country, sounding out sentiment before deciding whom he would support

_against_ Roosevelt.

“To that end he had me purchase from Graybar one sound truck which was

the last word in mobile loud-speaker installations. It came in a day or

two before his death, and I sweated it out for many a month, raising

some $28,000 to pay for it. Graybar looked to me for payment because I

had placed the order. My recollection is that the money was not

forthcoming until late in the Leche campaign, for I would not let them

use the truck until it was paid for.”

* * * * *

In retrospect, two predictions about Huey Long hold a certain interest.

One, by Elmer Irey, is merely academic, since it deals with what

_would_ have happened. In closing his chapter on “The Gentleman from

Louisiana” Mr. Irey notes that to him the “important thing about the

Huey Long gang’s downfall” is the following:

“I hope this story will destroy for all time one of the blackest libels

ever made against the American system of democracy. This libel states

that had not Dr. Weiss (or somebody) assassinated Huey Long, our country

might well have been taken over by the Kingfish as dictator. The

inference is clear. Our country was no match for Huey’s genius and

ruthlessness.

“I would suggest that the bullet that killed Huey ... merely saved Huey

from going to jail.... Huey had broken the law and was to be indicted

for it when he was killed.”

When evaluating this forecast, the first thought that comes to mind is a

matter of record: within a month of Long’s death one of his top-echelon

supporters was brought to trial on a tax-evasion indictment. Mr. Irey’s

organization had selected this particular indictment because it was

regarded as the government’s strongest case against any Long

administration official. At the trial’s close the jury verdict was “not

guilty”!

In the light of past experience the conjecture that Long would in time

have gained the presidency is not one casually to be shrugged aside. Had

he ever attained “My First Days in the White House,” subjection of the

large cities (not the rural areas) would have been his primary

objective. Just as New Orleans was the last foothold of the

carpetbaggers in the 1870s, Boston, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia,

Chicago, and others might have learned what it is like to live under the

rule of force from without.

* * * * *

The other prediction referred to above was made by Mason Spencer in the

course of a bitter address on the floor of the House of Representatives

in April 1935. Spencer withdrew from public office at the close of this

legislative term, as did also Dr. Octave Pavy. Both died of heart

attacks within weeks of one another in the summer of 1962. But whereas

Spencer forsook politics almost altogether, Dr. Pavy retained a very

active quasi-Warwickian interest in parochial campaigns.

He retired from forty years of the practice of medicine at an advanced

age, and moved from his home at Leonville on Bayou Teche to Opelousas.

But his popularity along the bayou-side, where by that time he had

delivered more than fifty-eight hundred babies, was so widespread that

patients demanded he continue to treat them, so that he had to establish

a small office. From this GHQ he successfully brought about the defeat

of an opposition sheriff, winning a scandalously large sum of money in

bets on the outcome of the election. He converted most of his winnings

into currency, packed them into an ordinary water-bucket, and carrying

this, he marched triumphantly around and around the Opelousas courthouse

square, shouting his exultation to the four winds.

He had been among the first to cheer Mason Spencer’s closing remarks in

April 1935 at a special session during which the Kingfish brought about

the enactment of a bill which to all intents and purposes gave him the

sole right to appoint every commissioner and other polling-booth

official in every voting precinct for every election throughout

Louisiana.

“I am not one of those who cries ‘Hail, Caesar!’” Spencer said in slow

and measured tones, “nor have I cried ‘Jail Caesar!’ But this ugly bill

disfranchises the white people of Louisiana.... I can see blood on the

marble floor of this capitol, for if you ride this thing through, it

will travel with the white horse of death. In the pitiful story of Esau

the Bible teaches us it is possible for a man to sell his own

birthright. But the gravestones on a thousand battlefields teach you

that you cannot sell the birthright of another white man!”

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

Transcriber’s Notes

The source document uses the word capitol both for capitol and for

capital; this usage has been retained. Inconsistent spelling and

grammar have not been standardised.

Changes made

Some obvious minor typographical and punctuation errors have been

corrected silently.

The text underneath Figs. 10 and 11 has been transcribed from the

illustration, not from the actual text.

Page 70: George Washington (vessel’s name) has been changed to _George

Washington_ (cf. _American Farmer_).

End of Project Gutenberg's The Huey Long Murder Case, by Hermann B. Deutsch