Playboy's History of Assassination in America

Part III

End of the Kingfish

The spirit of violence is un-American.

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, on hearing of the shooting of Huey Long

What did he want to shoot me for? ... I don't know him.

--Huey Pierce Long, September 8, 1935

Moments before he was electrocuted on March 20, 1933, for the assassination of Chicago's mayor Anton Cermak, the anarchistic Giuseppe Zangara shouted at his executioners, "All capitalists lousy bunch of crooks!" The main capitalist-crook for Zangara was the man he'd tried to kill, the crippled aristocrat Franklin D. Roosevelt, who'd escaped him to be inaugurated President.

Yet Zangara might have been surprised to learn that his sentiments echoed those of the next prominent American politician to be assassinated--a man who ultimately posed as great a threat to Roosevelt as did the immigrant's five wild bullets.

The man was Huey Pierce Long, the "Kingfish." In March 1933, he represented the sovereign state of Louisiana as its junior (soon to be senior) Senator, a title that belied his absolute power in that state and the growing national entrancement with his neopopulist demagoguery. Long's Zangaraesque remark came about March third, a day before F.D.R.'s Inauguration. The Kingfish burst into a Washington hotel room occupied by some of the incoming President's brain-trust advisors. He had come fresh from a bitter Congressional dispute over a bank-reorganization bill (a bill too conservative for Long). He grabbed an apple from a table, took a bite and, ramming his be-appled hand against an advisor's chest, announced, "I don't like you and your goddamned banker friends." Then the Kingfish (continued on page 173)End of the Kingfish(continued from page 139) and his bodyguards strode out, leaving a shaken advisory panel, including one Senator hiding in the bathroom.

Obviously, a battle had been joined. Long's contempt for the class represented by the new President, for the traditional power structure of the United States, for the delicate balancing of a Government's obligation to provide for its citizens--especially now, in Depression times--against its constitutional mandate to protect them from itself, threw down a challenge not ended until the Kingfish was himself the victim of an assassin. Only then, in September 1935, was Long's threat to succeed Roosevelt stopped. Only then was his fearful, fascinating demonstration that unlimited power governed efficiently--and pleased the poor masses--removed from the national stage.

And only then did another irony become as clear as Zangara's death-room scream: One saw that Long's killer had reversed the order set by the killings of Garfield and McKinley and the attempt on F.D.R. One could understand the frustration of the have-nots, those deprived of their share of the dream America offered. But this assassin--Dr. Carl Austin Weiss--was a member of an upper-middle-class establishment as foreign to Long's hard-bitten beginnings as were Roosevelt's to Zangara's.

•

Huey Long was in the capitol the night of September 8, 1935, doing what he was born to do--run things. "I was born into politics," he had once told the U. S. Senate, "a wedded man with a storm for a bride." Right now, it was Louisiana, but soon he thought it might be America. Long entered the corridor, where Dr. Weiss waited, from the house of representatives' chamber, a rococo room forming the east wing of the capitol. He'd been in the house prodding his compliant legislators to support the 42 bills he was backing at this, the fourth special session of 1935. Though he was a United States Senator, who, technically, had no business on the floor of Louisiana's legislature, everyone acknowledged that Long ran things in the state's house and senate. It was, people snickered, the "Longislature," and it was through its special sessions that he administered the state. He'd order the titular governor, his old friend and crony Oscar Kelly Allen, to call a special session. Allen did as he was told (Long once reminded the aptly initialed O. K., "I made you and I kin break you") and into Baton Rouge came the legislators, only too glad during the Depression of the ten dollars per day, plus mileage, and the benevolent attention of the Kingfish. Once there, they'd be shown the bills Long's aides had prepared beforehand. Then they'd meet in solemn session to consider what Long wanted. Their deliberative method, once used only for emergencies but now the common legislative procedure, was simple and effective. The house met the first night. One member introduced all the bills, asking that the rules be suspended so that every proposed law could be referred to one committee. The speaker of the house, selected in accordance with Long's wishes, agreeably gaveled each bill to the Long-dominated Ways and Means Committee.

The night of September eighth, the speaker was Allen J. Ellender, who would be elected United States Senator in 1936, taking Huey's seat, and who, in the fallout from the Kingfish's death, would proclaim, "If dictatorship in Louisiana, such as was charged to Huey Long, will give to the people of our nation what it gave to the people of my native state, then I am for such a dictatorship."

Altogether then, the bills on the agenda summed up Long's concerns under one rubric: power. The Senator intended to keep his, to consolidate it locally and state-wide and to achieve it nationally. As a master politician, the Kingfish understood Roosevelt's plight. Long's Share Our Wealth proposals and societies, which urged redistribution of the nation's money, were more alluring to many of the Depression-weary than the more conservative New Deal programs. His irreverence, his country-preacher oratory may have been derided in the Senate cloakroom, but they stirred the poor, and there were lots of them just then. More critically, Long could point to genuine accomplishments in Louisiana, and he often did. Roosevelt would have to move leftward, toward him, he figured, in the coming 1936 election campaign, but it might not be enough. Huey just might be able to defeat Roosevelt. Already several big corporations, sick of the price-setting National Recovery Act and other New Deal measures, had secretly pledged campaign funds to Huey. But defeating F.D.R. this time was unlikely. More probably, Long could with a third party in 1936 siphon off enough liberal and disgruntled voters to throw the election to a Republican, who wouldn't know how to run things, either. Then Huey, for sure, could beat the ineffective G.O.P. in 1940, since the country would be crying for a strong, radical candidate. Thus reasoned Huey and his followers (while, in Washington, James Farley was telling F.D.R. what he already knew--that Long couldn't be disregarded nationally, that he might have the "balance of power," that Huey "might spell disaster," since a secret poll showed that he could get 3,000,000 or 4,000,000 votes at that time). Against that potential political energy, the machinations of Harold Ickes, even the income-tax investigations of Long's closest aides by Henry Morgenthau's Treasury agents, the same ones who'd put Capone away, might well be powerless (Long himself, that morning of September eighth, had wrestled with his overdue tax return--he was sure it would be audited). It seemed on that warm Sunday evening as if nothing could impede the Kingfish, at least in Louisiana. Nothing except the slight figure of Weiss in the corridor.

Huey stalked out of the house in his curious heel-pounding gait, as if he were hopping rails. His phalanx of bodyguards got in one another's way, too, since Huey rushed here and there, cajoling, ordering, securing votes, altogether the successful salesman of salvation out on his rounds, while his protectors, sometimes as many as 25 during special sessions, lurched to and fro in his wake. These guards--two, particularly, Murphy Roden and Elliott Coleman--had reason to be vigilant. In their heads, doubtless in Long's, too, were the premonitions that had surrounded the Kingfish ever since he'd come to power in 1928, a fear of assassination ever more persistent as rumors and actualities of plots reached the Senator (who was, his brother Earl said, a terrible coward). Just the day before--Huey's men were later to claim--a telephoned warning had come. Thus, the clearing of the house galleries, the extra state police on guard, the additional members of the State Bureau of Criminal Identification and Investigation (which was, everyone knew, Huey's secret police--"Cossacks," as his intimidated enemies called them, or "Huey's skull crackers," as his brother Julius named them). No public official in America, not even "Prince Franklin," was better protected. "Sure I carry a gun," Huey said once, joking. "Sometimes I carry four. Can't tell when somebody's going to shoot the king."

Again, Long was right. Coming west down the corridor from the house, passing some of the 30 kinds of marble he'd specified for the capitol, he headed for his appointment with the doctor. He'd left Ellender, the other legislators and favor seekers in the house, and now he was windmilling his way to the governor's office, 80 feet away down the corridor connecting house and senate. His bodyguards were beside and behind him as he rushed past the private elevator that ran to his 24th-floor suite, to barge through the double doors of the governor's office. His main corps of bodyguards--Roden, Coleman, Joe Messina, Paul Voitier, Louis Heard--halted to wait outside, along with a Longite state-supreme-court justice who wanted the Kingfish's counsel on political matters. The group stood in the center of the corridor, on a circular design facing the governor's doors, where the corridor widened slightly for aesthetic effect and where recessed marble pillars broke the wall's straight line and flanked a bust of Robert de la Salle, the explorer who had named the state in honor of his patron, King Louis XIV. In a few seconds, Huey bustled out of the governor's anteroom, calling over his shoulder to "get the boys out early in the morning" for the vote, his eyes "popping like saucers." He moved toward his guards and friends and from beside one of the pillars Weiss came forward, a small figure in white, his eyes limned by dark-rimmed glasses and in his hand (almost everyone agreed later) a small black automatic.

The doctor glides through the guards up to Long, he may say something, his hand raises, Huey blinks, the bodyguards swivel white-eyed to Weiss, the supreme-court justice moves his hand, which holds a panama hat, in a fending gesture, and there is a shot, then (some say) another, then a bloody spot on the Senator's shirt six inches above and to the right of his belt buckle, and Long's eyes roll, he emits a scalding groan and runs, "like a wild deer," away from the doctor and the sound of a scuffle, away west toward the Senate. Hardly anyone sees him go, so much is happening.

Roden is down, the doctor on top of him, as Roden strains for Weiss's gun. Coleman, a few yards away, aims and shoots; the bullet grazes Roden, who's scrambling to his feet. Another shot from Coleman. Weiss, now crouched, shudders, begins his slow-motion fall; the little automatic skitters across the circular design. Now guns are in every guard's hand. Roden and others fire blindly and repeatedly emptying their pistols into Weiss. The body jerks, palpitates, as bullets ricochet in the corridor, which is filled now with screams, with people ducking, flattening against walls, with state patrolmen galloping to the scene with submachine guns, with newspaper reporters hurrying to find out what's happening. Is it the firecrackers that often mark Louisiana legislative sessions? Or what? After maybe 30 seconds, the shooting ceases. Weiss's body at last is left alone to pump blood onto the marble floor.

In April of that year, one of the few surviving anti-Long legislators, Mason Spencer, had addressed the legislature on a special-session bill that gave the state sole control of all local elections. Spencer had said, "When this ugly thing is boiled down in its own juices, it disfranchises the white people of Louisiana. I am not gifted with second sight, nor did I see a spot of blood on the moon last night, but I can see blood on the polished marble of this capitol; for if you ride this thing through, you will travel with the white horse of death." It had seemed another bootless threat then, or perhaps a rodomontade in the Southern tradition, but now the marble floor was bloody and we were again forced to ask, What is it this time? What moves one of us to assassination? Is this a representative act attributable to an intolerable political situation, or what? To ask, too, just who is Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, and what were his motives, and have we been told the truth about the assassination of Huey Long? Was Weiss crazy and acting alone or the cool agent of a plot? If a plot, whose and why? Many asked whether Weiss, in fact, did mortally wound Long, or whether the Kingfish died because in the panic a stray shot from a bodyguard gaffed him. Who was Huey Long, for that matter, that he should be so endangered? Savior or home-grown Hitler?

The questions ricochet farther than the shots in the corridor, where, for now, the frame is frozen in the climactic scene of All the King's Men(the adulatory book written afterward by Robert Penn Warren, a young English instructor at nearby Louisiana State University, or "my university," as Long called it). Weiss lies dead as bystanders mutter, bodyguards curse and identification is made. Long, in flight down a stairway, is found and taken to the hospital for treatment. Oddly, he has a cut lip, which will raise many more questions. There will be an operation under less than ideal circumstances and a deathwatch reminiscent of those for McKinley and Cermak, and then Long will die, saying, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do," and be buried in front of his capitol ("Huey's silo," brother Earl called it) with unprecedented pomp. Political legacies will be won, lost, saved and squandered in interesting ways that take us to today, as Long's son Russell serves in the U. S. Senate. People, various as politics itself, will use Long's death and Weiss's to their own ends. Hundreds of thousands of campaign dollars will disappear. The political factionalism that may, finally, have caused Long's death will worsen in Louisiana. Nationally, with a populist threat removed, Roosevelt will win three more terms, an ambition that Long's posthumous book, My First Days in the White House, implies was an honor in store for the Kingfish. And the questions will have partial answers, at least. They begin now, with the figures tableaued in the corridor, in the lives of Long and Weiss, where lie the first clues to the meaning of their deaths.

•

Huey Long was older than Carl Weiss by 12 years. He was born August 30, 1893, in the hard-shell Baptist, red-clay, red-necked parish of Winn in northcentral Louisiana--as far emotionally as geographically from the lusty, luxuriant Creole culture of New Orleans. One commentator said of Winn parish, "Its harvests were scrawny. What cattle it had were scrawnier; its people were scrawniest." Far, indeed, from New Orleans, and muddy with envy the whole way. Winn imbued Huey with its flavor. The parish hadn't entirely embraced the Southern cause in the Civil War. Many of its subsistence-level farmers, the fabled yeoman agrarians, figured they were slaves, too, and so wouldn't fight to keep slavery as an institution. The attitude persisted. Huey Long, Sr., once asked his son Huey, the seventh of his nine surviving children, "Didn't Abe Lincoln free the niggers and not give the planters a dime? Why shouldn't the white slaves be freed?" During Huey's childhood, one of his homeland's political heroes was the populist William Jennings Bryan ("The Great Commoner," who ran against the soon-to-be-assassinated President McKinley and who in one of his campaign speeches created the phrase Long adopted for his populism--"Every man a king, but no man wears a crown"). Not surprisingly, Winn parish went socialist in 1908 after Eugene Debs spoke there.

Though he liked, as much as any politician, to boast that he was born in a log cabin, Huey's birthplace was actually a comfortable six-room farmhouse, albeit built of logs. In fact, the Longs after 1900 were relatively prosperous people for a time, despite the populist leanings of Huey Long, Sr. The father of the future Kingfish farmed 320 acres, sold some other land to the railroad, some more to home builders serving the growing town of Winnfield, and by 1907 had one of the most impressive homes around Winnfield, the parish seat where Huey was raised. Old Hu also valued education and eventually all of his children got some college. The household demanded twice-a-week church attendance, complete with evangelical preaching, and the Longs encouraged reading. Huey learned the Bible nearly by heart (a passage in Leviticus became his favorite--it stressed sharing wealth) and read Hugo and Shakespeare--a bonus of working for a book salesman as a teenager (later he'd be fond of Plutarch's Forty-Six Immortals and other histories of great men who shaped events). Unfortunately for Huey's ambitions for college, the extra money for that ran out before it got to him, and he went to work early. He retained an admiration for the trappings of higher education, though. When he had the power, he quadrupled the size of LSU, built athletic facilities, financed trips for students to see the LSU football games (and helped organize the Sugar Bowl), composed fight songs (and sometimes high-stepped at the head of the marching band with the indulgence of his hand-picked bandmaster, Castro Carazo, who'd been plucked from leading the orchestra at New Orleans' Roosevelt Hotel, where Long loved to dance). Long also endowed scholarships with the help of LSU's president--J. M. "Jingle Money" Smith--whom Huey had selected and who later went to prison for using university money to speculate in wheat. The Kingfish's last public address, three days before Weiss met him, announced 1000 "practically free" college educations for Louisianians. He didn't need to add that the recipients might look to their political allegiances--most folks knew Long used everything politically, carrot-and-sticking his way onward and upward.

At first, however, it didn't seem as if Long were going far, unless it was far from home, from which he ran away when he was ten. He may have been fleeing the tedious farmwork. But he returned to live up to his ginger-colored hair and bumptious manner with a rowdy boyhood that included auctioneering (he hated farm sales, he claimed later, because they usually meant a man had lost everything), working as a printer's devil, book peddling and an occasional fistfight (Earl Long recalled he'd once pitched in to help Huey, only to have Huey run off, leaving Earl to carry on alone). He was known by neighbors such as O. K. Allen as quick-witted, slick (abiding only by those rules he liked) and fast-talking. Really, he was mostly interested in talking with people, selling them an idea or a program. While in high school, he once, on a bet, sold an elderly Negro a nonexistent secondhand coffin, so the old man would be prepared for death. Naturally, he was a debater in school (he autographed his textbooks "Hon. Huey P. Long," plainly marking his goal) and he also ran the mile, a combination ideal for a Sammy Glick of politics. His last year, he won a debating scholarship to LSU, but there just wasn't enough money. He did the next best thing: became a traveling salesman. That was in 1910.

Carl Austin Weiss was five that year. He lived in New Orleans, though he'd been born in Baton Rouge on December 18, 1905. Carl's father was a physician, doing some postdoctoral work at Tulane and practicing as an eye, ear, nose and throat man. While Long was on the road as a drummer, the elder Weiss (Dr. Carl Adam Weiss) moved back to Baton Rouge and began a large, prestigious practice (Long once stormed in with a speck in his eye that Weiss removed--it was the only time Huey and the accused assassin's father met). Little Carl was the opposite of Long. He was small-framed, dark, long-nosed and wore glasses. He was raised as a devout Catholic, the religion of southern Louisiana (a state that, in its religious and ethical divisions, resembled the two Irelands). Carl was introverted as a child, a lover of books and music and a fine student--as obedient and kind as a boy scout should be. He possessed a biting temper, but unleashed it only occasionally. For the rest, as a teacher phrased it, "It was as if he had discovered a secret zone of calm in which he moved serenely." Or, as others had it, Carl was a serious, self-controlled boy, high-strung and under tension of his own making. Perhaps that's why he turned to mechanics in his youth. Figuring out how things worked separated him from people and lent him tranquil objectivity. He built a radio. He learned about electricity. He was fascinated by guns, was first in his neighborhood to get a .22 rifle and later had pistols. He didn't hunt much, not like his father. He preferred disassembling the guns, putting them back together or shooting at targets. Weiss graduated at 15 as valedictorian from a Catholic high school and entered LSU in 1921.

That was a good year for Long. He was 28, a lawyer, an elected state official on the Railroad Commission (the future Public Service Commission), a cantankerous foe of large corporations who was reaping political benefits from that liberal stance. Not bad, really, looking back, and the best was yet to come. He'd thrown himself into salesmanship, and he saw that it paid. He'd peddled Cottolene, for example, a cooking oil. Stomping through the red-dirt country, raising its dust on the unpaved roads (he'd see to that when he was governor), he sold Cottolene with precept and persuasion. "Stop usin' that hog lard," he'd command the country women and quote a Biblical injunction against Israelites' eating swine. 'Course, they weren't Jewish, but Huey learned early it wasn't always how logical you said it, it was how well. And they'd buy. If they were a little sticky, he would bustle into the kitchen and mess up supper for them. He stayed with farmers overnight, always paid them a dollar, later wrote them about crops, weather, politics (he admired the style of Theodore Bilbo, the rising Mississippi demagog). They remembered him. Cottolene really greased Huey's way. He met his future wife through it, at a cake-baking contest in Shreveport (where he also tried to finish high school). And he got fired from it for breaking expense-account rules. No matter. Long could sell anything. He sold produce for a spell in Oklahoma, attended its university's law school for two semesters. Then in Texas, Arkansas, Tennessee, he peddled starch (and got fired), then patent medicine. He got married in 1913 to Rose McConnell, the cake-contest winner. By 1914, however, Long was finished with the drummer's trade. At his brother Julius' urging, he'd be a lawyer. At his own, a politician. Huey and his bride went to New Orleans. In eight frantic months, his prodigious memory stored enough law to pass a special exam of the state examining committee and he was admitted to the bar of Louisiana. He was a shrewd lawyer, as his later career showed (Chief Justice William Howard Taft called him one of the most able men ever to argue a case before the U. S. Supreme Court). And he could use the law to his advantage, as he did during World War One, claiming that as a notary public, he was a state official and, hence, exempt from service. Besides, he said, "I ain't mad at anybody over there."

Long went to Winnfield to practice. He had all the business he could handle. He eventually prospered, got good fees, bought land and securities. Oil was big then, flowing out of the poor countryside to redeem the "flop hats' " blasted lives. Huey and O. K. Allen and partners established oil companies, sold thousands of dollars of stock, only to have the Standard Oil Company break them by refusing to buy their low-grade oil, instead offering only to pipe it at low rates. Huey wouldn't forget that. He and Rockefeller's gigantic subsidiary would remain blood enemies. Six months before he was assassinated, he would charge that the company had hired men to try to kill him. For now, he knew the only way to defeat the huge companies and the New Orleans oligarchs was electorally. Searching the state statutes, he found that the Railroad Commission had no age requirement for office. He ran hard. He toured every hamlet and county seat. Like Bilbo, he dressed in white-linen suits, adopting the dress but not the manner of those he attacked. He recited the Bible, told stories, swapped gossip, woke folks up at night to give them his spiel. They liked this spindly red-haired fellow with the cleft chin and pouchy cheeks, liked the rubbery good nature of his face that vanished when he was riled against the robber barons. Then he'd skin 'em proper, arms windmilling, the country oratory spilling out.

Long was elected in 1918 by 635 votes. Not overwhelming, but enough. He moved to Shreveport, devoted more time to politics. As a public-service commissioner, he declared a tax war on big corporations. He blocked railroad mergers, opposed telephone rate increases and got refunds for the companies' customers, lowered fares on intrastate railroads. He convinced the commission to levy a three percent severance tax on Standard Oil. In 1920, Long backed John Parker, a "gentleman liberal," for governor, but when the dignified gentleman wouldn't go all out after Standard, Huey slandered him, saying, among other things, that a polecat couldn't stay in the same room with him. Convicted of slander and fined one dollar, Huey refused to pay, so the friendly judge passed the hat in the courtroom.

In 1921, when Weiss entered LSU, Long became chairman of the Public Service Commission. One of his first acts was to have Standard Oil's pipes declared a public carrier, like a bus line, and hence subject to regulation. Now anybody's oil could be carried through them. For the next few years, Long built his political constituency (and a big house) and gathered money for a try at the governorship--some said "extorted" from "interests" like those he attacked; to wit, the Southwestern Gas and Electric Company. But then, such was politics.

In 1924, Long stumped the state in the Democratic primary against a Southern French Catholic, who was the lieutenant governor, and a Baton Rouge Protestant, who managed the state penitentiary. Long campaigned for free textbooks for all school children, free bridges and good roads to let people move about. He called for a renewed tax war on Standard Oil, the "octopus" that epitomized Louisiana's victimization by the New Orleans "ring" faction, the big corporations, the fat cats and the plantation barons. To them, Long seemed no threat, since he was always out there somewhere in the scrub country, a long way from Antoine's. The Old Regulars' ring dictated Louisiana politics, and against it, Huey's appeals looked impotent. Furthermore, Long appeared to waffle on the issue of the Ku Klux Klan, then busily murdering blacks. The Catholic candidate opposed the hooded bigots, as did the penal officer, at least nominally. But Long, a native of the northern Klan country and beneficiary of funds from known Kluxers, was suspected of being a closet Klansman (much as Harry Truman later was accused), especially since he denounced the law banning masks at all but Mardi gras events. He retorted that the law extended the government's power too much.

In any event, Huey missed the runoff by 10,000 votes because he had no support in the southern parishes. Yet his day would come. "Someday our people will call the roll again," he prophesied.

Weiss graduated from Tulane Medical College in 1927, the year before Long's people elected him governor. He had switched in 1925 from engineering to medicine. That pleased his father, as did his emergence from introversion. Young Carl made friends, played in a band (he shared a love of music with Long) and was well liked. The year Long was elected governor, Weiss was learning his specialty--ear, nose and throat--during a residency in New Orleans. Late that year, in 1928, the young doctor was on his way to Vienna and Paris for postdoctoral work. He liked Vienna, despite the fascist rallies, the more because he spoke German--learned from his grandfather. When his studies there were over, Weiss traveled in Germany and Italy. He heard about Hitler's threat, saw Mussolini's transformation of the cradle of the Renaissance into the armory of the Mediterranean. Of Mussolini, Weiss said: "This little Caesar will get his due someday."

In April 1929, Carl was to be in Paris, taking up a prestigious appointment at the American Hospital. Just then, his new governor was escaping an impeachment conviction by the Louisiana senate--barely escaping, at that, via a canny blend of intimidation and polite bribery. But Carl didn't get to Paris until June, and by then Long was winging free, transforming the political and physical landscape of Louisiana--the first by distributing spoils, the second by building the roads, bridges and schools he'd promised.

Sometime that year, Weiss visited Belgium's Fabrique Nationale d'Armes de Guerre. He bought an automatic pistol, a .32 caliber built on Browning patents, and added it to his collection. In 1930, he returned home for a visit. The family brought him up to date on things in Louisiana. His brother recalled that he didn't express any strong political philosophy, "just right and wrong. And that was it." That summer, Carl was in New York, to begin yet another residency, this one at the famed Bellevue Hospital. In New Orleans, a colorful governor, soon to be Senator, was telling some rambunctious advisors, "Shut up, you sons of bitches, shut up! This is the Kingfish talking!" Even the sober Weiss might have laughed at that. After all, almost everybody listened to Amos 'n' Andy, and while Carl was known as a perfectionist, insisting that everything be done right, he wasn't humorless. He'd opine on Long, too, but he wasn't fanatical about the Kingfish of the lodge. Rather, medicine obsessed him. When he returned to Baton Rouge in 1932, his colleagues thought him destined for greatness. And, in truth, everything inclined favorably. His practice started well. In November 1932, he met Louise Yvonne Pavy, daughter of a judge in St. Landry parish, then studying for a master's degree in French at LSU. Carl was surprised to learn she'd been in Paris when he had, on a fellowship at the Sorbonne. She'd dated interns from the same hospital. They had so much in common--education, religion, politics--and she was beautiful. They were married December 27, 1933, in Opelousas, her home town, at the local Catholic church. Their son, Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., was born June 7, 1935, three months before the death of Long.

Long had achieved quite a bit, too. From his election as governor in 1928, Huey's put-on bumpkinisms, his courtship of what H. L. Mencken called the booboisie, won him the right to speak for the "forgotten man." Huey made good his promises, too, in the most conspicuous ways possible. By 1935, his administration and his-via-Allen's had increased the miles of concrete road tenfold, of asphalt fivefold, of gravel twofold, and built 40 major bridges. Long's suppliers were paid two dollars a ton for gravel when the going rate was 67 cents, but, as Huey said, "We got the roads in Louisiana, haven't we? In some states they only have the graft." It was also true that roads stopped at the borders of parishes unfriendly to him. The Long administration gave free textbooks to all the state's school children (winning a Supreme Court verdict that this did not violate the separation of church and state) and in time it eliminated the poll tax, gave tax exemptions to poor households, passed in the depths of the Depression a debt-moratorium act and levied taxes on large incomes, on corporations, on utilities, on the previously sacred totems of the establishment (though Huey faithfully supported the Democratic Party and delivered Louisiana to Al Smith in 1928).

Before that, however--in 1929--his policies had led Long to impeachment proceedings when an alliance of political enemies mounted its most effective challenge to his transformation of Louisiana into his personal fiefdom, via patronage, specially negotiated contracts, state boards and commissions of this and that that by 1935 controlled nearly every state job, from local public-safety officials to all municipal jobs to schoolteachers (like Weiss's sister-in-law, who was fired in 1935) to printers. Frightened by what they saw as a fascist power lust, the Old Regulars and others brought impeachment charges, including attempted murder (supposedly asking a former bodyguard to kill a political foe), bribery, misappropriation of funds, intimidation of officials and the press, cavorting with the Sodom and Gomorrah ilk of New Orleans (specifically, a topless dancer) and general conduct unbecoming a governor. The charges, along with a malfunctioning electric vote register that adjourned the session, ignited a riot in the Louisiana house, complete with ripped clothes, brass knuckles and knocked heads and legislators rushing the podium to say hell, yes, let's stay and impeach the bastard. They did, on 19 counts (an index of the bitterness engendered: Earl Long bit an opponent on the ear in a related slander of his brother). But Long forestalled conviction by persuading 15 senators to sign the infamous round robin--a document that said they thought the charges voted by the house were illegal and they would not vote to convict. The charges were abandoned. The robineers soon were highly rewarded. Huey dealt in lawmakers "like you'd buy a sack of potatoes." He maintained he had been a victim of the old politics, that he had to "fight fire with fire.... I may not live long enough to do everything I want to do." Affirming this in a eulogy delivered in the Senate after Huey's death, Louisiana's surviving Senator, John Overton, a Long creation, opined that Long's politics were from the start necessitated by the unscrupulous nature of his opponents. That may have been true, as suggested by a meeting of anti-Long men called to order with "This meeting is called for the purpose of discussing ways and means of killing Huey Long." What is certain is that Long, once free of impeachment, never let the opposition up again (in later years, he carried a "son-of-a-bitch" book, like Nixon's "enemies list").

In 1930, while Weiss traveled in Europe, Long decided he wanted to be a U. S. Senator. Maybe more, in time, since that February he told the visiting Calvin Coolidge that he'd had to tear down the old mansion on becoming governor, it was such a wreck, and he sure hoped he wouldn't have to do that to the White House. Senator, though, would do for a start. With his oratory and invective ("Old Feather Duster" Ransdell, he calléd the incumbent) and swelling support for his soak-the-rich policies, that was easy. Long then decided he wouldn't take his Senator's oath until he could leave Louisiana in good, safe hands; namely, O. K. Allen's. So, for two years, he didn't venture out of the state. When the lieutenant governor, a former Long ally now defected, tried to take over, claiming Huey was no longer governor, the Kingfish sent militia to the capitol and prevented the accession. He appointed the president pro tem of the Louisiana senate as his lieutenant governor and waited until 1932 to be sworn in and serve in Washington, after Allen's election was assured by the Long organization. No trouble, that, since the machine was well financed. Huey had about ten percent of all his state employees' salaries deducted for his war chest (and put in the fabled "deduct" safe-deposit box, later to be a mysterious element after his murder). They also subscribed to his newspaper, the Louisiana Progress (later, in line with Long's ambitions, the American Progress), formed in 1930 to combat the increasingly critical urban press. Huey's business friends advertised so loyally that its pages carried more ads than The Saturday Evening Post. Huey didn't disguise his contempt for the Louisiana and national publications that, looking to Europe, wondered if the Bayou State might not be growing its own fascist hybrid. He once tried to impose a "two cents a lie" tax on their advertising revenues, but the bill was declared unconstitutional. The Kingfish snorted, "When I lie from the stump, I lie big, because no matter what the newspapers say, 90 percent of the people will believe me."

True, and in 1932, Long's wishes elected Overton Louisiana's other Senator (Senator making was the old salesman's line--his speeches elected Arkansas' Hattie Caraway). The Long opposition cried foul, saying Overton's election was fraudulent. For instance, anti-Long members of the Louisiana congressional delegation pointed out, in St. Bernard parish, where there were only 2500 white people over 20 years old (Negroes were still disenfranchised, not yet freed by Long's removal of the poll tax), some 3189 votes were cast and Overton got 3176. The Senate in February 1933 ordered a subcommittee investigation in New Orleans. The Senate's agents broadened the probe to include Long. Huey and his organization's treasurer, Seymour Weiss (no kin to Carl), retaliated by treating the investigation as a circus so as to defeat the obvious F.D.R.-inspired attack on Long. The hilarity broke down when the committee's investigators declared that Weiss and the Kingfish had gotten illegal money from Wall Street interests for stock purchases, and when brothers Earl and Julius testified that Huey had gotten campaign-box cash from "the interests" in "rolls so big they made his pockets bulge out and spoiled the fit" (of his pajamas, that is--Huey loved conducting business in his bedroom and once insulted a junketing German consul by receiving him in green pajamas, red-and-blue robe and blue slippers, looking "like an explosion in a paint factory").

The family rift seemed not to bother Huey, who was curiously distant from human affairs such as his marriage and children. Too much the politician, one supposes, although he did say in sorrow of Earl, "I cannot attack my own blood." The breach was not entirely walled until Huey lay on his deathbed, although Earl later served two full terms as governor at the behest of Longites, and though Senator Russell Long, the Kingfish's largest fry, remembers his father fondly. In the end, Huey's rhetoric of outraged innocence--"only stupid politicians take bribes"--(and one of his famous circulars calling the hearings a kangaroo court) prevailed. The crooked-election charges were shelved and Overton sat beside Long in the Senate. But the feud with F.D.R., whom Long had supported vociferously in the 1932 election by campaigning in several states, was full-blown now--despite Huey's periodic visits with Roosevelt and subsequent declarations that "Frank is all wool and a yard wide." The President, unflattered, wrote to a friend that these Depression times were not normal, the people were "jumpy and ready to run after strange gods."

In August 1933, the strange god named Long suffered an incident that tilted his halo, and on his birthday eve, too. At the Sands Point Bath club on Long Island, the Kingfish, after considerable imbibing and ingesting, emerged from the men's room with a blackened, cut eye. Asked what had happened, Huey said a bunch of "J. P. Morgan's gang" had mugged him, presumably because he offended Wall Street interests. Immediately, other stories bloomed. One had it that Long had stood behind a man at the trough and tried to urinate between his legs, and had got slugged for it. That seemed unlikely, even for Huey. A lady companion said she thought he'd just let it swing too much and splattered the shoes of a fellow diner. Hence, the black eye. Whatever, the press had fun. One national magazine collected funds to award a medal to the man, whoever he was, who'd assaulted Long. But Huey didn't mind such publicity. Folks believed him and two months later, his autobiography, as dictated to the editor of the Progress, came out, wrapped in a gold cover featuring a picture of the new $5,000,000 capitol and the Kingfish himself, published by the National Book Company--a Long enterprise formed for the purpose. Friends and foes alike knew the book tokened an advance of his political front. The next events hastened it and strengthened the hatred, the grudging respect, the love of Huey Long.

Early in 1934, Long unveiled on a national radio broadcast his Share Our Wealth program, a neopopulist proposal that couldn't help but appeal to the depressed masses and embarrass F.D.R. to boot. Essentially, it was an expansion of a bill he'd sponsored two years earlier in the Senate but that called only for limiting per-family fortunes to $5,000,000. The bill had been defeated, but the Kingfish hadn't quit. He'd cherished the idea of sharing wealth since his young days in Winnfield, when a state senator had told him 72 percent of the nation's wealth was held by two percent of its people. Huey used that fact in figuring in 1935 that there ought to be enough for everyone to have a guaranteed $5000 homestead (i.e., "enough for a home, an automobile, a radio and the ordinary conveniences"), plus a guaranteed annual income of $2000--$3000, an adequate old-age pension, college educations for qualified children and generous bonuses for veterans. The money would come from levies limiting any one family's earnings to $1,000,000 per year and from capital taxes on fortunes larger than $5,000,000.

Understandably, the mass response was favorable. Especially so since part of Long's plan was the formation of local Share Our Wealth societies, which amounted to pro-Long political clubs. Their organizer (who, by Huey's death, claimed 7,000,000 members) was the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, a revivalist preacher whose oratory surpassed even Long's in impressing boobs (at least so wrote Mencken) and who loved Long, money and power, in interchangeable order. Smith, bereft of his leader after 1935, became vehemently anti-Semitic and pro-Fascist before World War Two cooled that ardor--in peacetime, he founded the Christ of the Ozarks tourist area in Eureka Springs, Arkansas, where today he presides over a 65-foot statue of Christ, with follow-you eyes, along with other inspirational relics.

The clubs, the proposal itself, worried Farley and other New Dealers. Critics assailed the economics of the Kingfish's proposal. One calculated that, what with the decline in riches caused by the Depression, Huey would have to confiscate all property, assets liquid and otherwise over $50,000 in order to provide the $5000 homestead to the number of families with less than that. Such carping prevailed little, though. While the New Orleans faction worried over Long's pressure on it, and while liberals wondered how to get rid of Huey, the Kingfish's appeal grew. His enemies muttered that they had to make a move soon.

The year before his death brought Long myriad threats, aggravating his "deadly fear of assassination," as one man said. He surrounded himself with personal bodyguards, state police, agents of his Bureau of Criminal Investigation and Identification, even the militia on occasions when violence seemed particularly likely. There were more of those. Long's opponents managed to win two elections for Congress. In one, rebellious officials armed themselves and manned the parish bridges to prevent militiamen from going in with ballots marked only with the name of Long's candidate. Hodding Carter, later to win a Pulitzer Prize as the racially moderate editor of the Greenville, Mississippi, Delta Democrat Times, then was editing the Hammond, Louisiana, paper. Carter wrote, "If ever there was a need for shotgun government, that time is now." Such was the mood as Long's opponents, themselves often intimidated and harassed, huddled to discuss the Kingfish.

Another armed confrontation took place in New Orleans. Longites had at last subdued the city's anti-Huey mayor, "Turkeyhead" Walmsley, and now had New Orleans by its purse strings. Special legislative sessions put the city's employees under state "civil service" control. Other bills impounded the Federal funds--F.D.R.'s patronage--intended for Long's political opposition and to keep the city afloat. Those opponents had in April, heartened by the Congressional victories, challenged Huey in the state legislature. These bills routed them and now Long's men, with militia in reserve, were in New Orleans to enforce the state's new laws. Walmsley's "special deputies" confronted them and a shooting war seemed inevitable. But Huey urged negotiations, reminding the New Orleans Old Regulars they were sure losers. The opposition capitulated and all of Louisiana was Long's at the end of that year.

Late in December 1934, while Weiss was performing tonsillectomies, Long's legislature operated on Standard Oil. At Long and Allen's request, a bill was passed taxing Standard five cents per barrel on refined oil. It was whispered that might be negotiated if Standard refined more Louisiana oil, say 80 percent--a compromise potentially profitable to Longites both politically and economically. While Standard pondered that, events took over. The oil firm fired 900 men (before the effective date of another new law that stipulated mandatory pensions) and distressed Huey. Next, a group of Standard employees and other anti-Long gentlemen met in Baton Rouge to protest the new tax. They formed the Square Deal Association, a frankly paramilitary group dedicated to overthrowing Long. As president they chose Ernest Bourgeois, whose name was appropriate--he was a young electrical engineer and strikebreaker for Standard Oil. Assisting Bourgeois was James Mehaffey, an itinerant rabble rouser, who shouted, "You ought to hang every legislator, commencing with your governor." True to that sentiment, the Square Dealers armed themselves and demanded that Governor Allen call a special session to repeal the "demagog-dictator" laws. Anti-Long forces throughout the state quickly formed Square Deal groups (eventually 70,000 strong), but Huey said, "they're too lazy to march." The Senator-governor protected himself, though. New Long appointees authorized by the legislature seized control of the hostile Baton Rouge constabulary and arrested a Square Dealer named Sidney Songy. The story went out that Songy would be forced to reveal who was behind the association.

Panicked, the Square Dealers mobilized 300 men and seized the courthouse. That turned out to be what Long wanted. He had Allen declare martial law, then announced he'd release Songy. The blue-shirt-association guerrillas parleyed, then decamped. Then the Kingfish loosed a surprise. Songy was a spy for him. The next day, a hearing was convened and Songy testified he'd heard the Square Dealers plot Huey's assassination. They'd stop his car on the highway to New Orleans on the night of January 24 and--as Huey told the press--"force me in the ditch and then 14 or 16 were going to come along in another car and kill me." When this news went out, the Baton Rouge Square Dealers, as Long had expected, decided on defiance. They assembled at the airport for a showdown. It ended ignominiously. Faced by lines of National Guardsmen, the Square Dealers surrendered their arms. Bourgeois scrambled over a fence in flight, dropping his shotgun and inflicting on one of his troops the only wound of The Battle of the Airport.

Now Baton Rouge, long critical of the Kingfish, was Huey's. Governor Allen stationed machine guns, mortars and troops on the capitol lawn while another hearing, based on Songy's information, was held. The Kingfish acted as ringmaster. A former East Baton Rouge deputy sheriff named "Red" Davis confessed that Fred Parker, another deputy ousted by Long's men, had offered him $10,000 to kill the Kingfish, at the time of the New Orleans trouble. Davis said he'd stalked Huey but because of Huey's guard, finally quit. Parker had replaced him with Songy, of all people. For his part, Parker refused to testify, as did a Square Dealer named O'Rourke, who was rumored to be the contract man and in the employ of Standard Oil (coincidentally, both Parker and O'Rourke afterward got jobs with one of the Federal programs in Louisiana). Long crowed over the disclosures, knowing Standard would soon bow to the governor's right to tax it. He pressed no further and the hearings were ended.

Doubtless, the Kingfish by then was fatalistic. He told a fellow Senator: "If there were just a few people plotting it, I think I might live through it, but those people are determined to kill me and I'm not going to live through it." This pessimism, whether genuine or theatrical, didn't stem Long's assaults on F.D.R. Huey had his strategy: Secure Louisiana through his legislature, make it the utopian example of what he could do, then press on to the Presidency. That early part of 1935, Long was Roosevelt's scourge. He'd pre-empted him with Share Our Wealth. The Kingfish helped defeat the Administration's attempt to ratify American adherence to the World Court. He knew most patriots didn't like that. In February, the backwoods lawyer engineered the defeat of Roosevelt's work-relief bill because it contained no minimum-wage provision. In Roosevelt's office, the President was saying they'd have to steal Huey's thunder, and "Don't put anybody in and don't help anybody that is working for Huey Long or his crowd; that is a hundred percent." Huey just went on, though, riding high. In March and April, he said he'd leave the party if Roosevelt were nominated and, yes, he might be a candidate unless the other parties came round to his thinking. Roosevelt counterattacked on June 19, with a tax proposal less stringent than Share Our Wealth but probably more acceptable in its higher individual and corporate tax rates. Huey said F.D.R. was a "scuttler."

But that was nothing compared with August 9, 1935, when the Senate of the United States heard Long accuse the President of passive complicity in a plot to murder the Senator from Louisiana. That day, the Kingfish waved what he said was the Dictograph transcript of "an anti-Long conference held by the anti-Long representatives from Louisiana in Congress…. Here is what happened among the Congressmen representing Roosevelt." Long then read the quotes. A Square Dealer: "I am out to murder, bulldoze, steal or anything to win this election." An unidentified voice: "There'll be income-tax indictments and there will be some more convictions.... O. K. Allen will be the next." Another unidentified voice: "I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would take only one man, one gun and one bullet." Another unidentified voice: "I haven't the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long." And so on, through what Huey called the "murder conference," attended, he pointed out, by the nefarious O'Rourke, among other thugs. He concluded by saying, "Louisiana will not have a government imposed on it that represents murder, blackmail, oppression or destitution," that wild tales of New Deal's inner council's plotting to have him murdered were now "fully verified."

Huey stalked out, and into his dust the facts vanished. Surely, that had been an anti-Long meeting in New Orleans' DeSoto Hotel for two days in late July. It was also true that Herbert Christenberry, the brother of Huey's trusted secretary, Earle Christenberry (then the world's fastest typist--a man who'd worshiped the Kingfish for years and kept track of the deduct box for him), had arranged a comic eavesdropping device: a microphone stuck on the end of a pole and poked up to the window of a conference room. Herbert inscribed in shorthand what he heard, transcribed it for Seymour Weiss, who sent it to Huey in Washington, where it was waved at Senators like that day's Gospel. Never mind the illegality of the means, it's probably true that intemperate statements such as those Huey quoted were made. Violent talk was common enough in Louisiana just then. But there is no proof that such talk had a corollary in action (one adversary said Huey had just "got hold of some bad whiskey" to imagine the danger), and the quotes were out of context, excerpted from meetings held in that room over two days. To be sure, in the vindictive hysteria following Huey's death, Earle said he'd heard the Dictograph and told Huey it mentioned a man named Wise. Couldn't that just possibly be the good doctor, the "one man and one bullet"? Unfortunately for the theory, Weiss was in Opelousas and Baton Rouge during the DeSoto conference. Yet Huey's charges in the Senate raised questions never completely put down.

Was all this part of the Kingfish's desire for publicity? Of his animosity for F.D.R.? Of his fear? Or were these genuine plots? Was the formation on August 1, 1935, of another paramilitary organization called, truly, the Minute Men an authentic threat? They did circulate a "Declaration of Independence" for a Louisiana freed of Long's tyranny and boasted they'd take Baton Rouge--if necessary, killing Long. Were they for real? Neither the state nor Long found out, since Weiss moved, it seems, before the Square Dealers or the DeSotoers or the Minute Men. Moved within a month and for reasons not then known, only felt in the marrow of political creatures who sensed the unexpected infection and feared it.

Congress adjourned on August 26 in 1935. Long left Washington for a few days' birthday roistering in New York. He took with him his Presidential ambitions, incarnate in the deduct box, now stuffed with alms for his 1936 campaigns and with affidavits detailing the New Deal's attempts to stifle him. In New York, he approved My First Days in the White House, which would, he thought, with Share Our Wealth, seize more ragged sleeves of the dispossessed and tug them into his camp. My First Days describes in first-person breathlessness the Long Administration's infancy, itself a parody of F.D.R.'s "first hundred days." Seemingly, few could take the book as a serious declaration except the Kingfish, who in planning it said if he were elected President, he'd get rid of the two-term tradition and defy "any son of a bitch to get me out."

In Oklahoma City on Labor Day, Long's speech exhumed an old joke from his Winnfield youth meant to bury Roosevelt and Hoover. They had proved themselves, he shouted, like the peddler of two patent medicines called High Popalorum and Low Popahiram, made from the bark of the same tree. "But for one the peddler peeled the bark off from the top down and for the other he peeled it off from the bottom up.... Roosevelt and his crowd are skinning us from the ear down and Hoover and the Republicans are doing the job from the ankle up." The call to a third party echoed over the red clay and the squeak of the oil pumps. In a few days, the Kingfish was in Baton Rouge for the climactic special session, safe there in his marble tower.

Weiss spent the last days of his short life in romantic-novel happiness. He ordered furniture for his home, inquired about a new furnace, planned for his future. He practiced medical arts and went home to play with his infant son, to marvel at him and at his wife. The Sunday of the special session he went to church, and he and Yvonne and the baby dined with his parents. Then they all went to their summer cottage on the Amite River, to swim and loll away the hot September afternoon. Carl had often practiced shooting there, but this day they only swam and jollied the child and talked of this and that until about dark, when they drove back to Baton Rouge. In the cooling evening, Carl and Yvonne ate sandwiches and prepared the baby for bed, and about eight o'clock, Weiss called his anesthetist to make sure he knew an operation scheduled for the next morning had been switched from Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium, across the pond from the capitol, to Baton Rouge General. Then he showered, dressed in his white-linen suit and kissed Yvonne goodbye. He said he had a call to make, "arrangements for an operation tomorrow." He kissed her and left forever, backing his Buick out of their drive and into a different world. The car was found in the Capitol's parking lot. Weiss carried a gun, as many Louisianians did, in its glove compartment, wrapped in a flannel sock. The sock and his medical bag, disarranged, were found in the car later that night. Sometime around nine o'clock, Weiss climbed the capitol's steps, found his corridor and waited for the sound of a Kingfish approaching.

The story of Huey Long's end abounds with ironies and mysteries. Start with the events in the hospital, with the first irony that Long may not have been doomed to die there in Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. Shot but once, it seems he could have survived, but the state's best surgeons summoned from New Orleans were delayed by a highway accident. The surgeon who did operate, Dr. Arthur Vidrine, was Huey's appointee, head of the huge Charity Hospital in New Orleans and dean of a project dear to Long--the LSU medical school built to rival Tulane's. A competent surgeon, Dr. Vidrine went in from the front, cleaned up the soilage where the bullet had torn through the intestines to exit at Long's back and sewed the Senator up. But in the excitement someone forgot to check the victim's urine for blood (a mistake the careful Weiss would not have made), and within 30 hours Long was dead of internal bleeding from the kidney vessels nicked by the bullet.

Consider how in the hospital the swarming after Huey's power began. His estranged brothers rallied to him (Earl was to be designated the state's next lieutenant governor). And Seymour Weiss, the indicted income-tax evader, asked the dying Long where the deduct box was, knowing Huey had taken it from Washington when Congress adjourned. "Later, Seymour, later," was the reply, but there was no more time. The box never reappeared; its hundreds of thousands of dollars and affidavits were gone as finally, as completely, as the charisma of the Kingfish. True, the Longs' familial power reasserted itself, in Governor Earl and Senator Russell, in 1948, and naturally, Longites won Louisiana in 1936 riding the revulsion for the disloyal opposition, the "Assassination Party," accused during the campaign by Earle Christenberry of sending Weiss to kill Huey. (Even so, "reform" candidates won in 1940 and 1944, and no Louisianian as potent as the Kingfish has surfaced since his death.) Yet now the succession of power and the money were forgotten in the thrashing, gasping dying of Long.

Much was forgotten for the moment. Like Huey's odd cut on his lip--which an intern had noticed, which a nurse swore Long had referred to in saying "That's where he hit me"--that was forgotten. Later it would be offered by the Weiss family and others as evidence that "he" was Carl, that Carl--his temper loosed by the gerrymander against Judge Pavy, by the rumor that Huey would accuse the Pavys of having Negro blood, by his detestation for fascism--had gone to the capitol to confront Huey, had stepped out and spoken to him, had hit the Kingfish, and then the guns of the bodyguards were out, those hand cannons cutting down Carl and, by accident, shooting Long, while Carl's little self-protection pistol fell from his pocket. So the cut was forgotten, not to be remembered until eight days later, when Long's bodyguards testified with remarkable unanimity about the scuffle with Weiss. Roden had wrestled him, Coleman had struck at the doctor. Huey could have been cut accidentally then, they said, or he could have bumped into something in his flight; and as for any of them shooting Huey, the doctors and the coroner's jury said the Senator's wound was small, hardly noticeable. A .32 would do that, not a .45. And what was Weiss doing with his pistol in his pocket if he were there only to have this conversation nobody remembers with Long? How, Longites asked, could Weiss's brother in future years fantasize that a guilty bodyguard went afterward to fetch the pistol from the doctor's car, messing up the doctor's bag in the process (how even would that guard know Weiss's car--Huey didn't know Weiss when told who had shot him--unless the guard was in on it? Unlikely, since those men had been with Huey for years), and then plant it by Weiss's body, that little "toy automatic," as someone remembered it, which held seven rounds and had one jammed in the ejector and five in the magazine (so maybe there were two shots, one that nicked Roden's wrist watch, just as he said; so what?) and was similar to the pistol Weiss had that week showed a Mr. Fitzgerald and said didn't work right. After all, how plausible was this business stemming from the little cut and Weiss's pistol?

Further into the Kingfish's deathwatch, his assassin was forgotten. Even as Carl's father, his widow, her father the Judge, assured the press and the world that this action of Carl's was inexplicable, certainly not a plot--he was not a joiner and certainly he was not a martyr--even as they spoke, the wires of congratulations (like those our assassins always get) came in and the newspaper editorials called Carl not crazy but a savior. Thus flowed, in the reciprocal of Long hatred, the praise for the young doctor's act, and it continued to come as his perforated body was prepared for burial. Forever after that interment in hallowed ground, his family said Carl had not gone to the capitol to kill Long; that, though they'd tsk-tsked over it at Sunday's supper, he had not been upset over Judge Pavy's fate--in fact, the family welcomed the judge's coming leisure. They certainly weren't afraid of Huey's tarbrushing, not one of the most distinguished and oldest families in Louisiana. No, it could only have been the impulse of idealism, a hatred and fear of oppression, of Long's fascism. Carl had that. Perhaps only that would have taken him to sure death, away from the wife, the child, the profession, the joy of existence.

So that, too, was forgotten, as Long's family and closest friends leaned forward to hear him near the end hallucinate about the poor, the Gallused backwoods folk he'd help, the things he'd do, his campaign, his LSU, until finally, they swore, he said, "God, don't let me die. I have so much to do," and soon there-after died.

Long, the commoner from Winnfield, lay in state in his capitol for one full day, dressed in a tuxedo and surrounded by $25,000 worth of flowers. When Long was interred in a bronze, double-walled, $5000 coffin in front of the capitol, the roads around Baton Rouge were clogged with cars, wagons, buses, 100,000 people in all. Reverend Smith delivered the eulogy. Carazo's band played Every Man a King in a minor key, and to the throb of his own dirge, Huey's body was lowered into a massive concrete vault (Mencken unkindly predicted that Louisianians would dynamite Huey's crypt and erect an equestrian statue of Dr. Weiss over the site--they didn't, preferring one of the Kingfish). The music died and it was over.

The surviving echoing throbs we've come to expect--the alarums of plots.

Seymour Weiss said he, too, was sure he'd read the name Wise off the DeSoto Hotel Dictograph record to Huey over the telephone; so Huey's killer was there (Weiss refused to let anyone see the record).

An erstwhile leader of the Minute Men said that was wrong, that there had been another meeting at the DeSoto, a secret meeting attended by five men, who drew straws to see who would kill Long. "We would all have killed him," this bravo supposedly said. "Weiss drew the short straw. He wanted it. He hated Huey because of the nigger business [hypothetically, the racial slur on the Pavys]." This man has never offered proof of his story nor its extension--that if Weiss failed, the rest would kill Long in northern Louisiana with machine guns.

Another tale, sworn to by one man, had it that bitter hangers-on of the Baton Rouge Square Dealers were to meet the week of September eighth to cast lots and decide who was to kill the Kingfish. This man was at the home of a friend when he heard a radio announcement of the shooting in the capitol. "That wasn't planned," he told Long's biographer. "The meeting was to have been tomorrow."

Soon, too, arrived the predictable rumors that Roosevelt had had it done. The accusations by Earle Christenberry that rival Democrats had orchestrated the short-straw drawing (a tale madly embroidered by Songy, who claimed two men--other plotters--had taken a shot at him the day after Huey was shot). And, last, some Louisiana newspapers reported that Weiss was, indeed, violent on the subject of Long and could with equanimity leave his happy hearthside, drive to the capitol and shoot Long, knowing he was committing suicide in so doing. "I'm going to kill Huey Long," these sources quote Weiss as having said, and it seems he did--and that someone would have eventually, had he not.

But these facts and fictions cushion the basic question, Why? There is no indisputable answer. Only that meeting in the corridor is unquestionable. The doctor in white, the Senator in silk, and each driven--perhaps urged by Cajun voodoo, by bayou vapors--to this clash of ideas or politics or prejudices or visions, so opposed that their confluence could only end in death.

The bequests were many. Ellender and the Longs, the collapse of Share Our Wealth, the "Louisiana scandals" of 1939, when the Longite tax defenses finally crumbled, populism and fascism in the steady third-party thumpings of Strom Thurmond in 1948 and of George Wallace in 1968--even this, which assays Long and his assassin, is itself a bequest wrapped in enigmas, in ironies lined up for a final bow:

• Such as Huey Long, he who, though he skimmed and deducted, took legal fees from a state he governed and made thousands from state oil leases through a corporation nicely named Win or Lose; who, though he vandalized civil liberties and raped constitutional processes and burglarized common decency, left Louisiana better in ways than he found it. The backwoods Galluses, rednecks, flop-hats had their day--some vow Huey is still alive somewhere and they run prayers of gratitude to him in newspaper "Personals"--and although we may ask if they'd like another Kingfish, in Long's time their answer was clear. They agreed with Huey, who once said, "Just say I'm sui generis," and we may ponder the portent of their love for such as Long.

• Such as the mystery of Carl Weiss; was he plotter or patriot, or both? Or merely a killer-gardener hewing down something outsized that had grown to shade his inherited garden?

• Such as the relief of Franklin D. Roosevelt (who once called Long one of the two most dangerous men in America--the other was Douglas MacArthur) shimmering beneath his perfunctory wire, never amplified, to the Longs: "I deeply regret the attempt made upon the life of Senator Long...." Of course, it came to pass that it was F.D.R. who won four terms and was called dictator, not the country Kingfish, and F.D.R. who, with bigger fish to fry, presided over the five years in which the mass murder of World War Two supplanted individual assassination, in which the Cain in man turned upon Abel by the millions in the name of fascism and freedom. Dizzyingly appropriate then was Long's comment on Hitler: "Don't liken me to that son of a bitch. Anybody that lets his public policies be mixed up with religious prejudice is a goddamned fool.... There has never been a country that put its heel down on the Jews that ever lived afterward." For all its gaudy improbability, nothing Huey ever said was truer for our time.

• Finally, such as that the man who succeeded F.D.R. was not Huey but Harry, and that it was Truman next in the gunsight-mind of assassins. Certainly, not this time the mind of any smallish, landed-gentry physician but of two Puerto Ricans who wanted freedom for their land--and whose desire burns still in the bombings of restaurants, of banks and of Government buildings.

Mercifully, the parallels stop there.

Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola did not understand in November 1950, when they charged Truman's residence at Blair House with their hopeless pistols--indeed, could not understand as well as Weiss and Long would have--how fitting for a Kingfish's epitaph were the words of Senator Harry Truman in 1935 when he heard of Huey's shooting. Harry said, "The proper way for Louisiana to get rid of Huey Long is to vote him out."

In that sentiment, too often abrogated by politics' true fourth estate, violence, lies the vexing problem of American assassinations. It would be seen next in the futile attempt on Truman in 1950 and, too soon after, in the murder in Dallas that altered the mind of America forever about itself.

This is the third in a series of articles on political assassination in America.