by Hermann B. Deutsch Doubleday & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York, 1963 Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 62-15869 Copyright © 1963 by Hermann B. Deutsch All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America First Edition In Boundless Affection, This Modest Volume Is Dedicated to THE LYING NEWSPAPERS A Generic Term Applied by Huey P. Long to The Free Press of a Free Republic . Especially is it dedicated to any and all who during almost half a century have been My Fellow W

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

“ Assassination has never changed the history of the world. ” ——DISRAELI The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a world-shaking event. President McKinley, for example, was shot down in full view of the throng that moved forward to shake his hand at the Pan-Americ

“ The iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to merit of perpetuity. ” ——SIR THOMAS BROWNE One day some of the VIP’s of the Long political hierarchy were gathered in the office of Governor Oscar Allen when a matter of legislative procedure was under discussion. It is worth noting for the record that the Governor’s chair was occupied by Senator Huey Long. Governor Allen sat at one side of his desk. The names of the others do not mat

“ I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long. ” ——UNIDENTIFIED VOICE FROM A DICTOGRAPH RECORD QUOTED BY HUEY LONG IN AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES SENATE Long’s charge that he had been selected for assassination by a cabal in whose plot President Roosevelt was involved at least by implication made headlines from coast to coast and filled page on page of the Congressional Record . But it fell quite flat, being taken in a Pickwickian rather than in a

“ Behold, my desire is that mine adversary had written a book. Surely I would take it upon my shoulder and bind it as a crown to me. ” ——JOB Congress did not adjourn its 1935 session until seventeen days after Senator Long had delivered his blast about “the plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” at the Roosevelt administration in general and at its head in particular. This was, as he clearly stated in his reference to presidential primaries, the opening move in launching his 1936 candidac

“ There is nothing more difficult to undertake, more uncertain to succeed, and more dangerous to manage, than to prescribe new laws. ” ——MACHIAVELLI Tuesday far into the night, throughout Wednesday, and again Thursday until well past noon, Long labored with attorneys, officials, secretaries, and typists, going over and over the measures to be introduced when the forthcoming special legislative session was convened. The streamlined rush with which such bills were speeded to final enactment in les

“ 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 gover

“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 e

“ 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

“ 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 whil

“ He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of fearing death. ” ——SHAKESPEARE Among the first of the Long hierarchs to reach the hospital to which Jimmie O’Connor had rushed the fallen Kingfish were Dr. Vidrine, Justice Fournet, and Acting Lieutenant Governor Noe. As a matter of fact, O’Connor had not yet left the capitol’s porte-cochere when Fournet and Noe reached it. “I heard Huey and Jimmie O’Connor talking before I saw them in the darkness there,” Justice Fournet relates.

“ 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 d

“ 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

“ Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. ” ——SAMUEL BUTLER The difficulty encountered when seeking to rationalize the assassination of Huey Long is implicit in two circumstances. The first is the total absence of fact or testimony about the motive for it, so that conclusions are necessarily based on surmise. The second is the apparently irreconcilable disparity between the known nature of Carl Weiss, the man, and the obvious nature of his act. Why would som

“ Finality is not the language of politics. ” ——DISRAELI To the Huey Long murder case the preceding chapters offer a solution which fits every determinate fact of what took place in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935, everything pertinent that led up to the climactic moment of violence, and what followed. Yet it goes without saying that many will reject this rationalization of available evidence. The arguments will go on and on. We are prone to cherish certain myths. As though in wish-fulfillment