6 ——September 8: Morning

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

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

——ISAIAH

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——HORATIO NELSON

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The results of political changes are hardly ever those which their friends hope or their foes fear.”——THOMAS HUXLEY

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

——THOMAS HUXLEY

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

10 & 11Huey Long was enshrined as a saint by some of his followers as shown by these personals from want-ad pages of theTimes-Picayune. The one at left appeared on March 26, 1936, the other on January 11, 1937.Left hand advertisement:THANKS to the late Senator Huey P. Long for favor granted. Mrs. H. Gomme.Right hand advertisement:THANKS St. Raymond, St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long favor granted. ROSE ANDERTON.

Left hand advertisement:THANKS to the late Senator Huey P. Long for favor granted. Mrs. H. Gomme.Right hand advertisement:THANKS St. Raymond, St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long favor granted. ROSE ANDERTON.

Left hand advertisement:THANKS to the late Senator Huey P. Long for favor granted. Mrs. H. Gomme.

Right hand advertisement:THANKS St. Raymond, St. Anthony, Sen. Huey P. Long favor granted. ROSE ANDERTON.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

——LORD CHESTERFIELD

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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