“And this was all the harvest that I reap’d—I came like water and like wind I go.”——THE RUBÁIYÁT
“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 Yvonnesported about the water. When he returned home, he bade his wife an affectionate good-by, as he left about 7P.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 theSenator’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. Hewas 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 statethat 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 itwas, 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 asthis: “Thanks toSt. Raymond, St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long for favor granted.” The last one cited appeared in the New OrleansTimes-Picayuneof 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 YorkTimes, Allen Raymond of the New YorkHerald 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 useeither 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 whichdictatorship 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 markedon 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: “Thekey 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 ofMy First Days in the White Housewas 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 HueyLong 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 contentsof 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 4:06A.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——
“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels.”——WOODROW WILSON
“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 emergingat 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.
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 emergingat 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 bodyon 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, accompaniedhim 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 onlydemonstrably 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 againstthis 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 onephotographof 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 manhad 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 substantialagreement 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 testimonyof 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 fromFrance 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 concerningwhokilled Huey Long, one big, crucial question remains unanswered. It is this:
“Why?”