Hermann B. Deutsch

“One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels.”

——WOODROW WILSON

The various versions of “what really happened” during the assassination of Huey Long can be grouped into four general classes under some such headings as the following:

Taking these up individually and in sequence, it becomes a relatively simple matter to dispose of the first assumption. This rests on the undeniable fact that Senator Long’s lower lip bore an abrasion on its outer surface, and a small cut inside of his mouth; also on the statement of one nurse who is quoted as saying she heard the patient say in the hospital: “He hit me.”

But there is abundant evidence to support the belief that if this bruise was the result of a blow, it was not struck by Dr. Weiss. There is, for one thing, the testimony of Sheriff Coleman, that he struck at Senator Long’s assailant twice, that the first blow missed the assassin and struck someone else, and that the second felled Weiss, who by that time was grappling with Murphy Roden.

There is likewise the statement of the first physician to examine the gravely wounded man at the hospital, when Judge O’Connor voiced the belief that Long had been shot in the mouth because of the bloody spittle that stained his clothing. After an examination the young doctor declared “that is just where he hit himself against something.”

There is the unanimous testimony of Justice Fournet, Sheriff Coleman, and Murphy Roden that the assailant later identified as Dr. Weiss did have “a small black pistol” and did fire it, as well as the testimony of Frampton, Justice Fournet, and Coleman that this pistol was lying a few inches from Dr. Weiss’s lifeless hand immediately after the shooting.

But above all, the belief that the young physician was unarmed and merely struck Long with his fist is proved fallacious by one circumstance: the identity of the bullet-riddled body on the floor of the corridor where the shooting took place was not established until long after the weapon was found, in fact, not until the coroner arrived and examined the contents of the dead man’s wallet.

It goes without saying that if Dr. Weiss came unarmed to the capitol, some other person must have brought his gun there from the car where his father testified he carried it. The argument is advanced that this was done by a bodyguard, a highway patrolman, or an officer of the state bureau of identification, to direct suspicion away from the “fact” that a wild shot from one of the bodyguards was the only missile that inflicted a mortal wound on Long.

But this presupposes that those who could not identify a riddled body on the marble floor of a capitol corridor were none the less able to pick out the slain man’s automobile from among the hundreds, possibly thousands, of cars parked on the capitol grounds and along every nearby street, search it for a weapon, and place that weapon surreptitiously where it was picked up by the authorities moments after the shooting. This so far transcends even the most remote possibility, that any version based on the assumption that Weiss, unarmed, merely struck at Long with his fist, can be discarded out of hand.

The second category includes all versions of the proposition that Carl Weiss did fire one shot, but missed. There is even one account which holds that, at the time, Long was wearing a bullet-proof vest which Weiss’s small-caliber bullet could not penetrate.

Everyone who knew Huey Long well, who traveled with him on his campaign tours, stopped at the same hotels with him, and so on, can testify to the fact that he was never known to wear a bullet-proof vest. He surrounded himself with armed guards wherever he went; a cadre of militiamen in full uniform, with steel helmets and side arms, accompanied him to the washroom in what is now the building of the National Bank of Commerce while he was conducting one of his murder-plot probes there. But he wore no armor.

Of my own knowledge I can testify that I have seen him in his suites at the Roosevelt and at the Heidelberg when, after breakfast, he bathed and dressed for the street, that I have traveled with him during his campaigns through Louisiana and through Arkansas, that I have been with him in his home on Audubon Boulevard, and that never, from the day I first met him in 1919 to the day of his death in 1935, have I known him to wear anything that remotely resembled a bullet-proof vest.

But to make assurance doubly sure, I checked this point with Earle Christenberry and with Seymour Weiss, his two closest friends.

“I can’t imagine how that story got about,” Christenberry said, “but I know exactly on what it must be based. About six months before Huey died I got the bright idea that it would be a smart thing for him, when he went out stumping the country in the approaching presidential campaign, to wear a bullet-proof vest. So without saying a word to him about it, I wrote to Elliott Wisbrod in Chicago, a manufacturer of such equipment, and asked that a vest of this type be sent to me for the Senator’s approval.

“The thing was delivered in due course, and I put it on and went to his room and showed it to him, and suggested that on occasion it might be wise to wear it as a protection against some unpredictable attack. He told me to send the damn thing back, adding ‘it would be ridiculous for me to wear it. I don’t need no goddam bullet-proof vest.’ So I sent it back and that was the end of it.

“I have never spoken about this incident from that day to this. I didn’t think another soul knew about it. But evidently the story must have leaked out somewhere; from the manufacturers, I suppose. At any rate, I was the one that wore the bullet-proof vest, one day for a few minutes. He never did in all his life.”

Seymour Weiss, the sartorial mentor who weaned Long away from the flashy clothes in which he first came to public notice, put it more succinctly.

“Huey wouldn’t have known what a bullet-proof vest looked like,” he said.

Other aspects of the available evidence cover not merely the category of stories about Weiss’s bullet missing its target, being deflected by a bullet-proof vest, etc., but the next category as well. This embraces what is far and away the most widely believed and oft repeated version of what took place. It holds that a bullet from the gun of a bodyguard inflicted the mortal wound of whose effects Huey Long died, even though Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber missile likewise struck him.

Three points are the ones most frequently stressed by those who cling to this theory.

The first is that “no small-caliber bullet was ever found.” This has been interpreted to mean that the Weiss bullet was still in Long’s body and, no autopsy being authorized, was buried with him. There is general agreement on one point. The fatal injury was sustained near the wound of exit, in the region of the right kidney. It was there that a continuing hemorrhage was the immediate cause of death.

The argument runs that Weiss’s bullet of small caliber never having been found, and therefore remaining in the body of the victim, the wound of exit must have been made by some other bullet. No other bullet was fired by anyone except the bodyguards, who discharged a wild barrage of pistol fire which left the body of Dr. Weiss riddled with wounds, and pocked the marble walls of the corridor with bullet scars which for years official guides pointed out to visitors touring the capitol. The injury near the point of exit was the only demonstrably fatal one; ergo, a bodyguard’s bullet killed Long.

The view that the Kingfish perished from the effects of a bullet-wound inflicted by one of his own guards also had a certain superficial plausibility that appealed strongly to dedicated leaders of anti-Long factionalism and their followers. It carried with it an overtone of Matthew’s “All-they-that-take-the-sword-shall-perish-with-the-sword” retributive justice. Finally it was labored in season and out by the Home Rule campaign speakers who sought to rid themselves of the Assassination Ticket stigma by proving that Long had died at the hands of one of his own men.

It would be difficult to overestimate the fashion in which all this tended to perpetuate what began as a campaign legend. For example, Elmer Irey, whose career as postal inspector and finally chief of the Treasury Department’s Intelligence Division spanned more than a generation, assuredly must be accounted a professional in the realm of gathering, sifting, and assaying evidence. Yet in his book he reports that——

“Weiss had a .22 calibre pistol in his hand when Long’s bodyguards mowed him down. Long died as the result of a single bullet wound made by a .45 calibre slug. Nobody has explained that yet.”

To cite still another instance, I happened to meet both Isaac Don Levine (author of, among other works, The Mind of an Assassin) and Dr. Alton Ochsner at a medical gathering some years ago, not long after Dr. Vidrine’s death. The talk turned on the events of the night when Huey Long died.

“Why, I always thought it was a bodyguard, not Dr. Weiss, who killed Long!” exclaimed Levine. When I spoke of some of the contradictions to which this view was open, Dr. Ochsner expressed amazed disbelief that any presumably informed person could entertain the slightest doubt that Long’s death was due to a bodyguard’s bullet or bullets.

And yet the weight of all real evidence is wholly against this hypothesis; so much so, in fact, that it is difficult to select a point of approach to it. For a beginning, then, one must take into account the “small, blue punctures” a bullet left on Huey Long’s body as the mark of its passage. Only one photograph of Dr. Weiss’s body was ever taken. The official photographer of the State Bureau of Identification made this picture, which has never before been published. It shows the great gaping wounds left on his torso by the .44- and .45-caliber bullets of those who fired into his already lifeless body. Most of the large-caliber cartridges also carried hollow-point bullets, which have a mushrooming effect. (Cf. Murphy Roden’s “I saw the flesh open up,” when he fired into Weiss’s throat as they were locked in a fierce struggle on the corridor floor.)

Granted that a wildly ricocheting bullet from one of these guns could have entered into the same wound made by Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber bullet, unlikely as this may seem, it could by no stretch of the long arm of coincidence have made its exit as a small bluish puncture. Even if it alone caused the wound of exit, leaving a small bullet still in the body of its victim, the point at which it plowed its way out of Long’s back would have been a gaping orifice and not, as Thomas Davis graphically described it, “so small I doubt we’d have seen it had it not been pointed out to us.”

Another fact not to be overlooked is that the moment Dr. Rives saw the clean dressing that had been placed over the wound and the operational incision in the anterior wall of Long’s abdomen, he came to the conclusion that any bullet entering at that point in the manner described, most probably emerged in the area of the kidney, and was likely to have damaged that organ. It was for this reason that he asked whether any blood had been found in the patient’s urine, learning to his astonishment that the critically wounded man had not even been catheterized to determine the existence and extent of kidney damage.

The visible abdominal trauma disclosed by the Vidrine operation was small; so small that only a small-caliber bullet could have caused it. Two holes had been left in the large bowel at the bend where it turns horizontally across the abdomen from right to left. These holes were so small that there was “very little soilage.” Reports that when the abdomen was opened by Vidrine it was “a mass of blood and fecal matter” were simply fabrications into which a minute fragment of fact was expanded, like some of Huey Long’s murder-plot charges.

Finally, the available evidence is conclusive in one respect: By the time the bodyguard fusillade began, Huey Long had fled the corridor where the shooting took place. Coleman, Frampton, and Fournet are unanimous on that point. Roden, blinded by the searing muzzle blasts of his comrades’ guns, could no longer see what was going on, but testifies that the other guards waited until he had struggled to his knees from beneath the lifeless body of Carl Weiss, before they started their volley. O’Connor describes how the firing was still audible after Huey had reeled down four short flights of steps and was being led out of a ground-floor door into the porte-cochere.

In sum, every item of credible evidence—surgical, circumstantial, and the testimony of eyewitnesses—indicates that Huey Long could not have been struck by a bullet from the gun of one of his bodyguards. That leaves but one other conceivable hypothesis, namely: Huey Long died of the effects of a bullet wound inflicted by Carl Weiss and no one else.

Disregarding the physical circumstances, an intangible consideration virtually compels the acceptance of this view. We have in the testimony of all the eyewitnesses a substantial agreement on what took place. Roden, Fournet, and Coleman saw the gun in Weiss’s hand and saw him fire it. Frampton, Coleman, and Fournet saw and describe Long’s flight before the crashing salvo by the other bodyguards began.

Their stories differ in detail. Frampton says Huey gave “a sort of a grunt” when he was shot; Justice Fournet describes it as “a hoot.” He also says the first shot was fired by Weiss, the next three by Coleman; Roden says the first two shots were fired by Weiss, the third by himself, and the fourth by someone else (obviously Coleman). Coleman says Huey was attended by Roden, McQuiston, and himself on his final visit to the House chamber, Fournet says he was accompanied by Messina, and Frampton reports that Messina answered the telephone in the office of the sergeant at arms, which opens off the Speaker’s rostrum and is entirely separate from the House chamber.

These discrepancies are natural; only the absence of such variations would lay the testimony of witnesses to a violent incident open to the suspicion, nay the certainty, of collusion. Take for example the three mutually contradictory versions of what happened when the two principals, Roden and Weiss, locked in literally a life-and-death grapple, fell struggling to the floor. Roden says his hard heels slipped on the marble paving; Justice Fournet says he threw out his hands in a gesture that overbalanced the two; Coleman says a blow of his fist felled Weiss, who, clasped in Roden’s grip, pulled the latter down beneath him.

But on the main point—namely, that the two fell to the floor, and that Weiss was not killed until after they were down—all are in complete agreement. If it is assumed that this is a concocted story, made up to divert suspicion from one or more of the bodyguards as having fired so wildly that one of their bullets brought about their leader’s death, the following must likewise be accepted as true:

Somewhere and sometime before the first of these four witnesses told what he saw, all of them would have had to agree on the specific untruths they would tell.

But at no time was there any opportunity during those initial frantic moments for the four to have met, either to concoct and agree on a false story or for any other purpose. Indeed, Frampton was already telephoning his first story of what had occurred, while the others are all accounted for elsewhere: Coleman describing to Governor Allen what he had seen, Justice Fournet in the hospital, Roden out of action and temporarily blinded until taken to the hospital himself by Ty Campbell.

Furthermore, after treatment, and not having spoken to any others in the meantime, Roden gave his statement that night to General Guerre, and later to General Fleming. These accounts agreed in almost every detail with one another and with the one he gave me, twenty-four years later, in the presence of Generals Fleming and Guerre, who verified that this statement differed in no essential respect from what he had told them at the scene when questioned by them on the night of September 8, 1935.

Except for one detail, it also agrees with the testimony he gave on September 16 of that same year, at the Odom inquest. It was his belief at first that Dr. Weiss fired but once. However, mulling the violent images of that night over in his mind, he later came to the conclusion that the doctor fired twice; this, incidentally, is the only conclusion that would square with the two minor injuries he sustained on his right hand and left wrist.

In any case, the possibility of conspiratorial collusion among these four in time to have agreed on a falsified account of what took place before their eyes, would appear to be ruled out in its entirety. The inevitable corollary of such a proposition is that the otherwise uncontradicted testimony of these four witnesses is a factual account of what took place.

None the less, one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility, however remote, that evidence can be framed, as it has been in documented cases—Sacco-Vanzetti, Tom Moony, Leo M. Frank; and that circumstantial evidence, even where no single link in the chain appears weak, leads now and then to false conclusions. But it can be said that in this instance the overwhelming weight of available evidence indicates that Weiss’s bullet was the cause of Huey Long’s death, and that no bullet from the guns of one or another of his bodyguards was a contributing factor in putting an end to his career.

The available evidence likewise appears to indicate beyond a reasonable doubt that the emergency operation was a contributing cause of death in the following respect:

Had a decision to perform a frontal laparotomy been deferred, and had in its stead a removal of the damaged right kidney made possible the tying off of the blood vessels supplying this organ to halt the hemorrhage that was draining off the victim’s life blood, Huey Long might none the less have died of peritonitis, from “soilage” into the abdominal cavity by the two small punctures of the large bowel.

But once the decision to operate from the front was carried into effect, the only door to possible—by no means “certain,” but possible—recovery was irrevocably closed. Even Dr. Vidrine realized that a second operation to halt the kidney hemorrhage was something his patient could not survive.

By way of conclusion it is logical to say that on the basis of available testimony and with due regard for the imminence of human error, the following facts appear to be established by the overwhelming preponderance of evidence:

Dr. Weiss was armed when he went into the capitol building on the night of September 8, 1935, carrying with him the small-caliber Belgian automatic he had brought back from France and which he customarily took with him in his car on night calls.

According to the integrated testimony of four eyewitnesses who had no opportunity for collusion prior to giving their accounts of what they saw, he held the gun in one hand, concealing it with the straw hat he held in the other, so that it was virtually impossible for him to have struck a blow with his fist.

Every trustworthy piece of testimony appears to make it clear that only four shots were fired while Huey Long was on the scene: two by Weiss, one each by Roden and Coleman; that by the time the general bodyguard fusillade began, the Senator was already on his way down a flight of stairs opposite the Western Union office, which is around a corner from the site of the shooting; and that the fusillade was still in progress while Long was being led out of the building by Judge O’Connor.

Medical testimony is unanimous on the point that only one bullet, and that one of small caliber, traversed Long’s abdomen, leaving small blue punctures at the points of entry and exit; that the primarily fatal injury was caused when, just prior to its exit, the bullet damaged the victim’s right kidney at a point where only removal of the maimed organ could have halted the ensuing and ultimately fatal hemorrhage.

Granted then, if only for the sake of argument, that there no longer is either mystery or even reasonable doubt concerning who killed Huey Long, one big, crucial question remains unanswered. It is this:

“Why?”