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. “Jimmie asked: ‘Where did he hit you?’ and Huey said: ‘Hell, man, take me to the hospital.’ I reached them just as they got into the car of a man—his name was Starns, I think—and I tried to get into the car with them, but it was just a two-door affair, and I could not get in. By that time Jimmie Noe had come down, so he and I managed to get to the hospital in another of the cars around there. They had Huey sort of strapped to a wheeled table, an operating table, I suppose, by the time we got there and found out what floor he was on.

“Dr. Vidrine was there, and starting to take off some of the Senator’s clothes; but I took out my pocket knife and said: ‘Here, cut it off.’ He slashed through the clothes and laid them back. I saw a very small bluish puncture on the right side of Huey’s abdomen, and it was not bloody. And I saw Dr. Vidrine lift up the right side of Huey’s back, but he did not lift it very far. Dr. Vidrine put us in a room with a nurse, then, and gave instructions to let no one else come in.

“Meanwhile other doctors were taking his blood pressure and pulse rate. Huey asked one of them what it was, and he told him. Naturally, I don’t remember the figures, but I do remember Huey saying: ‘That’s bad, isn’t it?’ and Vidrine or one of the others”—[it was Dr. Cecil Lorio]—“answered him, saying: ‘Well, not too bad, yet.’ Vidrine asked him what doctors he wanted called, and he said Sanderson from Shreveport, and Maes and Rives from New Orleans. While they were waiting for their arrival, Joe Bates came in. He was allowed to come there so he could tell Huey who had shot him. He said it was a young doctor named Weiss.

“‘What for?’ Huey asked. ‘I don’t even know him.’

“‘He’s a fanatic about you,’ Bates replied. ‘But he is friendly with a lot of others in the administration.’”

Pending the arrival of surgeons from New Orleans, some semblance of order was being restored about the hospital. Highway motorcycle officers unsnarled the traffic jam in the Sanitarium’s small parking lot, set up guarded barriers, and thereafter admitted to the grounds no one who did not have a special permit.

It was during this interlude, too, that Ty Campbell finally brought Murphy Roden from the capitol to the hospital for treatment.

“One of the interns washed my eyes out first,” Roden remembers. “They were smarting and there must have been some powder residue in them. There were powder burns on the skin of my back, burns that had gone through my coat, my shirt, and my undershirt. These were cleaned and swabbed with antiseptic. But it was not until several weeks later, after a place on my back kept festering, that I went to my family doctor in Baton Rouge, and he finally removed a small fragment of the copper jacketing of a bullet, from where it had lodged just under the skin.

“After the interns finished with me, Ty went to the Istrouma Hotel and brought me back some clothes, and I changed in the hospital. After that we went back to the capitol with General Guerre, who took me to the office of the governor’s executive counsel where General Ray Fleming, head of the National Guard, had set up his headquarters, and we talked nearly an hour or so, with me telling all I could recall. From there I went to my quarters and to bed.”

When he returned to the capitol with Roden, General Guerre had the State House hallways cleared.

“Once I satisfied myself that the Senator had been taken to the hospital and was in the hands of physicians,” he explains, “I gave orders to my men to clear the capitol’s lower floor as quickly as possible, and allow no one else to come in without special authorization from me. I put officers in charge to see that the body of the assassin was not touched until the coroner got there. Even Dr. Bird did not know who the man was till they removed his wallet and saw his identification there.”

Unaware of what had taken place in Baton Rouge, Earle Christenberry reached his New Orleans home shortly after 9:30, having driven in from the capitol without special haste. His neighbors, seeing the car turn into the Christenberry driveway, flung open a window and told him someone in Baton Rouge was trying to get in touch with him. His phone had not answered, whereupon the caller secured from the telephone company the number of the adjoining house, asking that when Earle arrived he be requested to call back immediately.

Then, adding a bit of news they had heard a short time earlier over the radio, they told him Huey Long had been shot.

Christenberry did not pause to call Baton Rouge. Without leaving his car, he backed out of the driveway and headed for the capitol. He made but one stop en route. That was at Lousteau’s combination sandwich counter and automobile agency, where the Airline Highway cut across the government’s newly completed Bonnet Carre Spillway over a bridge a mile and an eighth long, spanning the dry channel through which the Mississippi River’s flood waters could be diverted into Lake Pontchartrain. Final inspection of the structure had not yet been made; hence it was not open to general traffic. Wooden highway barriers blocked entry to it.

However, Christenberry directed the highway patrolman on duty there to open the barriers for him, since this would save at least six miles on the road to Baton Rouge. After ascertaining that Mrs. Long and the three children had not yet passed this point, he instructed the motorcycle man to remain on watch for their car, and open the barrier to let it pass over the bridge too.

Approximately seventy minutes after leaving his home, he parked at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.

Earlier that afternoon, in New Orleans, General Ray Fleming, Adjutant General of Louisiana, had taken part at Jackson Barracks in a polo game between teams representing the 108th Cavalry and the famed Washington Artillery. During one of the late chuckers a hard-hit ball had banged against the General’s left foot, inflicting an injury not in itself serious, but so painful that before retiring for the night he borrowed a pair of crutches from the post infirmary and secured a left shoe he could cut to accommodate the swelling which had followed the mishap.

“Hardly had I retired,” he relates, “than I received a phone call from Governor Allen, who in a very excited voice said to me: ‘Huey has been shot!’ Realizing that I must have certain information to deal with such a situation, I demanded that the Governor stay on the telephone at least long enough to answer one question before I took action.

“The question was: ‘Is this an action involving many persons or is it the act of just one individual?’ This I had to know in order to determine what troops, if any, were needed to handle the situation.

“Governor Allen immediately informed me that it was the spontaneous action of just one individual. With this information in hand, I started almost at once for Baton Rouge. In a remarkably short time I reached the capitol, where I immediately set up headquarters in the office of the executive counsel. From then until about 2 A.M. I talked to a great many persons regarding events leading up to, during, and after the assassination.

“One of the reasons for this inquiry was that I had to make a decision as to whether or not we were faced with the necessity of dealing with an armed insurrection on the part of a considerable number of individuals.”

Early that Sunday night Judge Leche, still inclined to make light of his conversation with Senator Long some hours before, was leaving Baptist Hospital, where his physician, Dr. Wilkes Knolle, had just changed the dressing of the airplane splint in which his left arm was immobilized.

“Our chauffeur was driving Tonnie [Mrs. Leche] and me home from the hospital,” his account of the day’s events continues, “and as we drew up in front of my house in Metairie I could hear the phone ring. I tossed my keys to the chauffeur and said: ‘Hurry up and answer it, and tell whoever it is I’ll be there as soon as I can work my way out of the car.’ He did so, and I got out awkwardly, my left arm being held rigidly horizontal at shoulder height with the elbow bent, and when I got to the phone it was Abe Shushan telling me Huey had just been shot. I called out to the chauffeur not to leave, we were going to Baton Rouge right away, and I told Tonnie I would send the car back for her and she could come up the next day, if that seemed indicated.

“I went directly to the governor’s office, and Oscar Allen was there, very nervous and visibly shaken. He was talking on the telephone and picked up a sheet of paper while holding the other hand over the mouthpiece, and said: ‘This is what I am going to release to the press.’ At the time I thought he said he had already released it. In brief, the statement said for everyone to remain calm, this had been merely the irresponsible act of one individual, and that it did not mean more than just one individual’s crazed action.

“I tore the paper up and handed the pieces back to him, saying: ‘Huey has been charging in Louisiana and in Washington that there was a plot on foot to kill him, and that he surrounded himself with bodyguards for that reason. He conducted a formal investigation into a murder plot with witnesses who said they had won their way into the confidence of the plotters, and named them, and carried on an investigation in New Orleans for days.... How in the world can you take it on yourself to proclaim officially that this was all twaddle, and that only one individual was responsible for what happened?’

“He said very excitedly: ‘You’re right, you’re right, you’re right!’ I left, and was driven over to the hospital, but by that time the operation was either over or in progress, so I did not see Huey. I stayed in the hotel, and Tonnie joined me there the next day.”

The operation was begun at 11:22 P.M., but Drs. Maes and Rives were not present. What happened is told by Dr. Rives in the following account:

“Dr. Maes had been called, I have forgotten by whom, and he was asked to fly to Baton Rouge as Huey Long had been shot; a chartered plane would be waiting for him at the New Orleans airport, and a highway car at the one in Baton Rouge. He asked me to go with him to assist him if he had surgery to do, and I told him there was no sense in flying to Baton Rouge, because I could drive him there in the time it would take to drive out to the New Orleans airport, and then, after the flight, from the Baton Rouge airfield to the hospital. This proved to be not right.

“We were in my car and I was driving. The road then ran beside the old O-K Interurban Line tracks, and just outside of Metairie an S-curve crossed the tracks, a black-top road with graveled shoulders. Just before we entered this S-curve another car, coming from the opposite direction, swept through it and put its bright lights right into my eyes. I was going about forty-five or fifty. I was not racing, in other words, but I got my right wheel into the loose gravel of the shoulder, and ended up skidding completely around and facing back in the direction of New Orleans on the old gravel road beyond the S-curve.

“My differential housing was caught on the high center of this old gravel road, with only one rear wheel on the ground. We did no damage to the car, but with only one wheel on the ground, a car is helpless. We finally flagged someone driving back toward New Orleans and asked him to send a wrecker to pull us back on the road. Actually they sent only a truck, but it took us off the high center and then we went on. I should say we lost not more than half an hour, but I think we would not have reached Baton Rouge until after the operation even if we had not met with this accident.

“We did not have permission to use the completed but not yet opened Airline Highway beyond Kenner, so I took the old River Road. As we finally drove into Baton Rouge, there wasn’t a soul in sight, aside from a policeman or two. No one was abroad on the streets; lights in the houses, yes, but no people or cars on the streets. To outward appearances, it was the most deserted community I ever saw, and going to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium we had to drive right through the center of town.

“At the hospital we were met by highway police, identified ourselves, which was required, and then we were conducted to the entrance where someone else took us up to the ward where Huey had been placed....”

Word of the shooting of Huey Long had spread through the capitol’s corridors and offices with almost explosive speed. The minute she heard the report, Lucille May Grace (Mrs. Fred Dent in private life), Register of the State Land Office, tried to telephone Dr. Clarence Lorio, who, though not Senator Long’s physician, was one of his closest friends in the Baton Rouge area. Mrs. Dent (since deceased) was devoted to Huey Long, for he had supported her father for re-election to the office of Land Register, a post which he held for more than thirty years. Upon her father’s death Long appointed her to serve in Mr. Grace’s stead for the unexpired balance of his term, since she had been his principal assistant almost from the very day she was graduated from Louisiana State University.

Since she had retained, and even added to, her father’s tremendous personal following among the voters, Huey decided at the end of her term of office in 1932 to put her name on the Allen slate, which would carry his imprimatur as the “Complete-the-Work” ticket. Hoping to induce Long to rescind this decision, one or another of the rival aspirants spread a completely baseless rumor to the effect that Mrs. Dent’s ancestry was tainted with a touch of Negro blood.

Huey Long’s almost obsessive response to this sort of aspersion was a matter of common knowledge; it is only because what ensued may have some bearing on the motive behind the assassination that this particular incident is worth giving in some detail.

Though he had already consented to put the name of Lucille May Grace on the slate that would carry his endorsement, he lost no time in retracting this agreement, and made it crystal clear forthwith that unless she could show to his complete satisfaction that the rumor which had gained considerable circulation was without even the semblance of a foundation, he would place another’s name on the ticket for the position she, and before her her father, had held.

Miss Grace, the niece of an Iberville parish priest, enlisted the latter’s aid and that of the late John X. Wegmann, a universally respected New Orleans insurance man and perhaps the foremost Catholic layman in Louisiana at the time. Thus birth and baptismal records going back for generations along the Grace family tree were produced, and they conclusively demonstrated the utter falsity of the canard. Satisfied, Long restored her name at once to his personally approved “Complete-the-Work” ticket of candidates, headed by the name of Oscar K. Allen for governor.

Miss Grace (she did not become Mrs. Dent until a year later) had attended Louisiana State University with both Clarence and Cecil Lorio, and knew how close the former’s friendship with Senator Long was. She began at once to call him, but he was not at his farm in nearby Pointe Coupee parish, and the telephone at his Baton Rouge residence was apparently out of order. So she called his brother, Dr. Cecil Lorio.

“Suppose you let me tell the whole story, exactly as I recall it,” the latter began, when asked about his recollections of what took place in the operating room of Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium when Huey Long was admitted there as a patient that September night. Dr. Cecil Lorio and Dr. Walter Cook were, at the time of this inquiry, the only surviving physicians who were present throughout all the ensuing surgical procedure.

“When she failed to reach my brother Clarence,” Dr. Lorio continued, “Lucille May Grace called me at my home, and I left at once for Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. Huey’s clothing had been removed by the time I got there, and he was in bed in his room at the east end of the third-floor corridor. He was fully conscious and we talked quietly from time to time during the next hour. He was particularly distressed by the thought that he might now be unable to carry out his plan to screen students for L.S.U., so as to make it possible for all exceptionally bright high-school graduates, however needy their families, to receive the advantages of college education.

“I took his blood pressure and pulse every fifteen minutes; he had evidently learned something about the significance of this, for when he asked me what the readings were, and I told him his pulse rate was getting faster and his blood pressure was dropping a bit, he said: ‘That’s not good, is it?’ and I answered him by saying: ‘No, but it isn’t too bad yet, either.’ ‘It means there’s an internal hemorrhage?’ he then asked. I said he was probably hemorrhaging some, but that the relation between blood pressure and pulse rate was one that could also be attributed to shock. He was very curious about who had shot him, saying it was someone he had never seen before.

“He had visibly a small blue puncture on the right side of his abdomen, and another on the right side of his back where the bullet emerged. Both were very small. But it was obvious some emergency surgery would have to be performed sooner or later. I was told that Dr. Sanderson had been summoned from Shreveport, and that Drs. Urban Maes and James Rives were already en route from New Orleans. Dr. Maes had been appointed to the chair of surgery at L.S.U.’s new medical college, of which Dr. Vidrine, also present in Baton Rouge at the time, was dean, along with his position as superintendent of Charity Hospital. He was in general charge of the patient’s case. At some point in the proceedings word was brought to us that a motoring accident had forced Dr. Rives’s car off the road, and that they would be delayed some time by the difficulty of securing service at that time of night to have their car dragged back to the highway. When informed of this, Dr. Vidrine decided not to wait any longer.”

Huey’s very close friends, Seymour Weiss and Conservation Commissioner Robert Maestri, had reached Baton Rouge some time prior to this. It is Mr. Weiss’s clear recollection that the decision to wait no longer before performing an emergency operation was reached “by all of us” before word was received of the mischance encountered by Drs. Maes and Rives.

“As I recall the circumstances,” Seymour Weiss says, “Huey’s condition was getting worse by the minute. Dr. Vidrine insisted that any further delay was progressively lessening the Senator’s chances. The other physicians present agreed that the outlook was not hopeful. Vidrine was the physician in charge and the rest of us were laymen. The time came when we either had to agree to let the operation be performed at once, or take upon ourselves the risk of endangering the man’s life. Mrs. Long and the children had not yet reached Baton Rouge, but in view of the medical opinions, the rest of us—all being individuals who were close to Huey—were just about unanimous in agreeing that the doctors should proceed.”

Amid the almost inconceivable confusion in and out of the hospital, one person seems to have kept her head, and that was Miss Mary Ann Woods, now Mrs. Arthur Champagne, the supervisor of nurses. Assigning floor nurses and trainees to duties so as to make the best possible disposition of available personnel, she set out to provide four special attendants for the critically injured Senator, two to serve at night and two by day.

The first one she called from the register was Theoda Carriere, who responded at once, even though she had just come off a twelve-hour tour of duty. The other three were Loretta Meade, Helen Selassie, and Mrs. Hamilton Baudin. Miss Carriere was one of the first to reach the hospital, as she lived nearby; and since by that time Senator Long had been taken from his third-floor sickroom to the operating theater on the floor above, she scrubbed up at once and reported for duty there.

According to her recollection, Dr. Cook was working on the patient, who was anesthetized by the time she arrived. Being short of stature, she had difficulty in seeing the operating table, and therefore placed a stool so that, by standing on it, she could look over the shoulders of those surrounding the patient.

Dr. Cook said to her: “This is a gunshot wound; get me some antitetanus serum.” Miss Carriere left the room for the pharmacy section downstairs where such supplies were stored, and when she returned with the desired serum, and gave it to Dr. Cook, Dr. Vidrine was just entering the operating room.

“Dr. Cook looked up,” she relates, “and said: ‘Well, my relief has arrived,’ and left the operating room. Dr. Ben Chamberlain assisted Dr. Vidrine during the balance of the operation.”

In this respect Miss Carriere’s recollections are in direct conflict with those of every physician who was present, and with the operation report attached to the hospital chart, as well as with the statement of Dr. Cook himself, when he testified later that he assisted at the operation.

As operating procedure was begun in the Sanitarium, neighbors of Dr. Clarence Lorio, seeing his car parked in front of his home, and realizing that under normal circumstances he of all men would have been at the hospital with his gravely wounded friend, managed to rouse him.

“I had been working for thirteen hours straight,” he explained subsequently, “and I was bone tired. When I got home I not only went to bed, but took the telephone off the hook so as not to be disturbed. I had come to the point where I simply had to rest. Naturally, when some of my neighbors woke me and told me what had happened, I lost no time in dressing and rushing off to the Sanitarium, but the operation was already under way when I got there.

“Let me say this about Arthur Vidrine: that man faced one of the toughest decisions that night anybody ever confronted. If he sat idly by, waiting for someone else to take over the case, while Huey bled to death, his associates and Huey’s friends would never forgive him, and he would never forgive himself, either. On the other hand, if he performed an emergency operation, and it was discovered later that the critically wounded patient would have had a better chance for recovery if some other procedure had been followed, he would still be blamed for a great man’s death. No one could confront a more harrowing choice.”

On the other hand, it can be taken for granted that Arthur Vidrine must at least momentarily have entertained the thought of the rewards and renown that would be his portion if by timely, courageous, and skillful surgery he, rather than others, saved the life of the Kingfish of Louisiana. Be that as it may, the decision to operate at once was made; when it was submitted to Senator Long, he concurred in it; in fact, according to a monograph by Dr. Frank L. Loria of New Orleans, Huey himself said: “Come on, let’s go be operated upon.”

Dr. Cecil Lorio described the incident more prosaically in the following terms:

“Someone told him that it had been decided to operate and that Dr. Vidrine would perform the operation if Huey had no objection. He indicated that he was willing for this to be done. Dr. Vidrine selected Dr. William Cook to assist him, and Dr. Henry McKeown as the anesthetist. It was this latter choice that brought me back into the operating room and kept me there, for I am a pediatrician, not a surgeon.

“Baton Rouge—in fact, all Louisiana—was bitterly divided into Long and anti-Long factions at this time. One of the most violently partisan anti-Long individuals in all Baton Rouge was Henry McKeown. He really hated Huey, though he had many friends among the people who were close to the Senator.

“Only two or three nights earlier, he and I were both sitting in at a poker game in the Elks’ Club, when someone said something or other about Long—probably something in connection with the special session of the legislature that might be called any day. Dr. McKeown said in jest, the way any person might in the course of a sociable card game: ‘If ever he has to have an operation, they better not let me give the anesthetic, for I’ll guarantee he’d never get off that table.’ Let me say again, and with emphasis, that this was not a threat, but a jest, something to underscore the man’s uncompromising anti-Long partisanship.

“Naturally, when within a matter of days he actually was summoned to serve as anesthetist for an operation to be performed on Huey Long, he demurred. He pointed out that Huey was a bad operative risk in any case, and for all anyone knew to the contrary, might already be dying from a wound which was in itself mortal. ‘If the man dies during the operation,’ Dr. McKeown pointed out, ‘many of those who have heard me pop off about him might actually think I killed him.’ No one who knew Henry McKeown, of course, would think any such thing. Finally he agreed to serve, provided I watched and checked every move he made.

“I told him I would do so, but while I looked now and then across the operating table to its head, where he was standing, and saw what he was doing, I really paid no attention to it, nor did he stop to see whether or not I was checking on him.

“Later, while the operation was in progress, Dr. Clarence Lorio, my brother, came in and stood beside Dr. McKeown to the end of the operation. On the side of the table at Huey’s left stood Dr. Vidrine. Opposite him was his assistant, Dr. Cook. Beside Dr. Vidrine at his left, I stood, handing him instruments and materials as he called for them. As I said, I am not a surgeon, but a pediatrician.

“The operating room was a strange sight. All sorts of people, mostly politicians, I assume, had crowded into the small room. It was not an amphitheater, and they ranged themselves all along the walls, not even being suited up. As Mother Henrietta, the head of the hospital, said later, after she had vainly tried to keep all who were not physicians or properly gowned out of the operating chamber, it was anything but normal surgical procedure.”

It is indeed a pity the original chart, such as it was, could not have been preserved. But as in the case of most hospitals, the time came when the absolute limit of storage capacity was exhausted, and the charts on file were microfilmed. In making these microfilms it was customary in many hospitals not to include the nurses’ bedside notes in the filmed record. Hence these do not appear in the film of the chart of Huey Long at Lady of the Lake.

But even what does remain is fragmentary, and in many cases unsigned. As Dr. Rives observed many years later: “The situation that night, even after I arrived, which was after the operation was completed and Huey was back in his room, could only be described as chaotic. Several physicians seemed to be on hand, and in the case of a critically injured patient, when no one of the attending doctors is actually in command and giving the orders to the crew of which he is the captain ... well, all I can say is that even during the four hours or so when I was there between about 1 A.M. and the time I started back for New Orleans which I reached at daybreak, the situation was nothing short of chaotic.”

A transcript of the microfilm was made by Dr. Chester A. Williams, the present coroner of East Baton Rouge parish. According to this document, the admitting note, set down on a plain sheet of paper, is not even signed; obviously the last two lines were added by someone else after the operation was concluded. It is preceded on the record by a standard summary form which reads:

Hospital No. 24179. Sen. Huey P. Long, 42 yr.w.m.

Admitted Sept. 8, 1935, to Dr. Vidrine.

Diagnosis: Shot wound abdomen, perforation of colon, Room 325.

Died Sept. 10, 1935.