The difficulty encountered when seeking to rationalize the assassination of Huey Long is implicit in two circumstances. The first is the total absence of fact or testimony about the motive for it, so that conclusions are necessarily based on surmise.

The second is the apparently irreconcilable disparity between the known nature of Carl Weiss, the man, and the obvious nature of his act. Why would someone whose closest personal and professional associates unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of another?

In this instance the problem is not merely one of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. Conclusions must be drawn from two mutually contradictory sets of insufficient premises.

Barry O’Meara, the Irish ship’s surgeon aboard the vessel that brought Napoleon to St. Helena, volunteered to remain there with him, but was one of the first to be deported when Sir Hudson Lowe subsequently took over the governorship of the island. He was one of the fallen emperor’s few confidants during the desolate days of that terminal exile. In his memoirs of their association he quoted Napoleon as saying:

“A man is known by his conduct to his wife, to his family, and to those under him.”

The members of Carl Weiss’s family are still not convinced, or at least are still unwilling to admit, that he took Long’s life. The nurses who were his principal subordinates, and many of whom still survive, looked on him not merely as a physician, but as a teacher. To this day they agree he could not have done what all available evidence conclusively proves that he did.

Miss Theoda Carriere, the first registered nurse called to attend Senator Long after the shooting, now lives in a piny woods retreat near Amite. “Dr. Weiss just wasn’t the kind of person who would do a thing like that,” she insists. “He taught us chemistry when we were in training, and every girl in our class looked on him as one of the gentlest and kindest of men. None of us believe he was the one who shot Long.”

Admittedly, Dr. Chester A. Williams, Jr., the present coroner of East Baton Rouge parish, cannot be regarded as a Long partisan. It was he who pronounced Earl Long insane in 1959 while the latter was still governor, and committed him to a mental institution. Yet he set down the following restrained obiter dictum after transcribing and studying the microfilmed hospital chart of Huey Long’s final hours:

“Most of the doctors who lived in Baton Rouge and are still living do not feel that Dr. Weiss shot Long.”

In a strictly technical sense, only Carl Weiss himself, his lips irrevocably sealed within seconds after he did what “his family and those under him,” not to mention his professional associates, still regard him as incapable of doing, could have given a conclusive solution to this paradox.

Since that is out of the question, the best that can now be done is to list the various possible motives which either have been or could be considered as impelling Dr. Weiss to sacrifice his own life in order to put an end to that of Huey Long. From the roster thus compiled, the obviously impossible and then the logically infirm assumptions can be eliminated one by one, to see whether any hypothesis which might fit such of the facts as are ascertainable will withstand searching scrutiny.

Four motives have been or can be imputed to Dr. Weiss in connection with the shooting of Long. They are:

The first of these four propositions can be given short shrift. The Senate speech in which Long sought to implicate the Roosevelt administration, and in effect President Roosevelt himself, in a “plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” was the latest of several revelations charging others with plotting his murder. It happened also to be the last one because within a month after making this charge in the Senate, he was assassinated.

But significant factors must not be overlooked. The first is that after none of these spectacular accusations of murder plots was anyone ever formally charged before any court with conspiracy to commit murder.

The second is the undeniable fact that the so-called murder conference in the De Soto Hotel was neither more nor less than a political caucus of the type customarily held behind closed doors in order to facilitate full freedom of discussion about personalities, political prospects, and the like.

The third is that when all the verbiage about patronage plums and job distribution and endorsement of candidacies is sifted for substance, a pitiably small modicum of grain is recovered from a mountain of chaff. Here are the only specific references to the infliction of bodily harm by those hotel conferees actually quoted by Long in his Senate speech:

Oscar Whilden is reported as saying: “I am out to murder, bulldoze, steal, or anything else to win this election.” An unidentified voice said: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would only take one man, one gun, one bullet.” Another unidentified voice said: “I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long.” And still another unidentified voice said: “The best way would be to just hang around Washington and kill him in the Senate.”

These four remarks were sandwiched in among two days of political discussion about an approaching state campaign, the selection of candidates, the use of federal patronage, and matters of that sort! By way of illustration, a remark in a recent magazine article about another Louisiana representative, Congressman Otto Passman, would offer a much firmer foundation for a conspiracy charge along the lines followed by Long.

Passman has dedicated himself, in season and out, to opposing and reducing foreign-aid appropriations, and President Kennedy is quoted as asking at the signing ceremony of one of these bills: “What am I going to do about Passman?”

“Mr. President,” a bystander is reported as replying, “you’re surrounded by a lot of well-armed Secret Service Men. Why don’t you have one of them shoot him—by accident, of course? In fact, Mr. President, if you promise me immunity, I’ll do it myself.”

No one who read that statement took it in its literal sense; no one regarded it as a serious proposal to authorize, commit, and condone the murder of a legislator. Yet that is precisely the construction Huey Long put on four similar remarks made at intervals during a two-day caucus in a New Orleans hotel.

All this would tend to cast doubts upon the complicity of Carl Weiss in a murder conspiracy, even had he been the sort of person to whom a deed involving assassination would normally have been possible. However, what removes the assumption that he was the chosen executioner of a political camarilla from serious consideration is this:

Carl Weiss was virtually unknown outside of his immediate professional, social, and familial circle. Not one of the leading supposed “plotters” of the hotel conference spoke of him during that meeting, none of the leaders who were asked about him later could recall having heard of him, although his wife’s father and uncle were known to virtually all of them.

In sum, the hotel meeting of which Long sought to make great capital was not a murder conference, and no one dreamed of bringing to book on charges of criminal conspiracy any of those who took part in it; and even had it been such a conspiracy, the name of Carl Weiss was not even remotely connected with it.

The second proposition would have it that Carl Weiss assassinated Long in reprisal for what the latter was doing to Yvonne’s father by having him gerrymandered out of office, and virtually out of public life. There are those who go so far as to say that Yvonne goaded her young husband into exacting satisfaction from the despot who was persecuting her family, who had brought about the dismissal of her uncle Paul from a school superintendency, and of her sister Marie from a position as teacher, and who was now implacably going to any lengths to close her father’s long and honorable career as judge.

The whole idea of such a reprisal motive runs directly counter to every fact known about the way the Weiss families passed that last Sunday: the young couple leaving the baby with their elders while they attended Mass, the family dinner at which the gerrymander was indeed the topic of conversation, but in a light, rather jocular vein; the young couple “sporting in the water” at the elders’ camp in the afternoon, while the latter fondled their precious grandson, the domestic routine that preceded Carl’s departure for a professional call....

As nearly as anything human can be certain, it is sure that neither Dr. Weiss nor any of the Pavy clan would ever have dreamed of taking upon their consciences the killing of a fellow being, even in the heat of passion, over such a matter as the loss of a public office, a development they had discussed almost jocularly only a few hours before.

Only two theoretical assumptions thus remain as to the motive of Dr. Weiss in committing a violent act contrary to all that was known of his nature. One is the idea advanced by Yvonne’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, that this was “an act of pure patriotism.” In 1935, when Dr. Pavy served as spokesman for the Weiss family, he felt that his niece’s husband was deeply troubled by “the suppressive type of government” that had been imposed on Louisiana; that he brooded over this until “his mind unhinged,” and he determined to put an end to the dictatorship even at the cost of his life.

Supporting this view are certain plausible factors. Carl Weiss was indeed an idealist of the type who might voluntarily have sacrificed his life in the furtherance of any noble cause, such as the liberation of his community from the thralldom imposed upon it by a ruthless authoritarian. Negating this view, however, is the fact that he took no active part in politics, though at that time Baton Rouge, his home, was the focal point of fiercely contested Long and anti-Long rivalry.

It is simply not conceivable, in the general sense of that word, that anyone so deeply and earnestly concerned with “pure patriotism” should not have been known to a single member of the press gallery at the capitol, to a single member of the State Bureau of Identification, to so well known a leader of the anti-Long movement in Baton Rouge as Dr. Tom Bird—a fellow physician—and above all, to Huey Long himself, a man whose memory for names and faces was truly phenomenal.

While Carl Weiss could well have been a crusader for any idealistic cause, it is difficult to accept unreservedly the proposition that one who had so very much to live for, whose happiness was so nearly complete, the best and most rewarding years of whose life still lay in the future, would give up all this and burden his conscience with two mortal sins—murder and what was tantamount to self-destruction—for an abstract concept of the general good.

It would seem almost self-evident that no man would voluntarily make such a sacrifice except in seeking to protect from harm those whom he held dear.

And there must have been some such motive in the haunting suspicion that, while campaigning against Judge Pavy, Huey Long would revive that long-buried, long-refuted tarbrush bugaboo which had been brought up unsuccessfully as involving one of Judge Pavy’s relatives-in-law thirty years before.

In view of Long’s past obsession with racial issues of this sort, Carl Weiss had good grounds for apprehension on that score. In past campaigns and polemics Long had never hesitated to use such innuendos, as when he referred to a prominent Orleanian as “Kinky” Soandso in issue after issue of his weekly newspaper, The American Progress. Nor had he hesitated to make direct attacks on this front, as in his campaigns against Dudley LeBlanc in the matter of the latter’s Negro fellow officers of his burial-insurance society.

In his fancy the young physician could readily imagine Long’s insistence that “this isn’t what I’m saying; I’m not even a-saying it’s so. All I’m telling you is this is what Sheriff Swords said time after time....”

If Long, true to form, had made up his mind to drag this rejected canard back into the open, there was one sure way in which Dr. Weiss could keep him from his purpose and prevent a single syllable of that baseless and forgotten slander from being uttered. True, he could accomplish this only at the cost of his life. Surrounded as the Kingfish was by heavily armed guards, anyone who attacked him, even though he cut him down with the first shot, was sure to die himself, in the next instant, under a rain of bullets. Carl Weiss “just wasn’t the sort of person that would ever do a thing like that,” for any ordinary motive. But to shield the wife he adored and the infant son he idolized from a slander, groundless though it be, that would impute to them by innuendo a remote trace of Negro blood, he could—and in the opinion of many he did—lay down his life.

In that case, the real tragedy inherent in his act was not the sacrifice of his own future, so rich with promise, nor even the extinction of Huey Long, one of the most notable, challenging, and controversial figures in the public life of his era. Unschooled in the labyrinthine windings and turnings of politics in general and more particularly the ins and outs of Louisiana’s politics during that hectic era, Dr. Weiss had no intimation of the fact that nothing could have been farther from Huey Long’s plans than raising any racial issue at this time.

He did not know that Long was preparing to challenge Franklin Roosevelt’s bid for re-election by running against him for the presidency; that he was no longer campaigning merely in the Deep South where Negroes, disfranchised ever since the final rout of carpetbaggery in the 1870s, were kept from the polls first by force, then by the Grandfather Clause, and after that by the Understanding Clause, but above all by the one-party device of settling campaigns not at a general election but in a Democratic (i.e., white) primary.

Running for office as the nominee of what in all likelihood would have been a new coalition party—the Share-Our-Wealthers?—Louisiana’s Kingfish would need all the minority-group votes he could attract to his standard. Primarily this meant the heavy Negro vote of Harlem in New York, Chicago’s black-and-tan belt, and other such concentrations in Boston, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, Cincinnati, and so on.

Looking forward, planning far ahead, he had already begun to rid himself of the “racist” label customarily applied to every far-Southern politician. As an initial step he abolished the poll tax in Louisiana, issuing poll certificates free to all applicants, regardless of color, provided they could meet the age and residential requirements.

True, this was quite meaningless insofar as enfranchising the Louisiana Negroes went. The law provided that no one would be permitted to register or to vote unless he could show poll-tax receipts (or later, free poll certificates) for each of the two years directly preceding any given election. Its intent was primarily to keep floaters from being brought into the state from Mississippi or other adjacent areas, on election day. But this was by no means the only prerequisite for voting. One must also be registered, each parish registrar being the sole arbiter as to whether the applicant had correctly interpreted a section of the state or federal constitutions.

In theory the Democratic Party was a private organization, like the Fifth Ward Athletic Guild, and could thus choose its members at pleasure, excluding whom it wished not to admit. Coupled with this was an unwritten agreement to settle political differences not between parties, but between factions of the Democratic Party, with all hands pledged to support the Democratic nominee in the ensuing general election, even if that nominee “happens to be a yellow dog!”

Abolition of the poll tax did nothing to alter this situation, which obtained until the Supreme Court invalidated it, many years after Long’s death. None the less, Negroes queued up by the thousands and treasured the essentially worthless but to them invaluable slips of paper officially issued to them.

The next step was Huey’s Share-Our-Wealth promise that this movement would recognize no racial bars of any sort, that the division of shared wealth would include black as well as white on equal terms. “Five thousand a year and a span of mules,” the poor and underprivileged of both races told one another ecstatically. “With what I’m making now and the five thousand Huey Long’s going to give us, we’ll be in high cotton for true!”

The final step would have been some sort of a second Emancipation Proclamation, issued as a campaign document to a mammoth 1936 Share-Our-Wealth convention to be held in Detroit, or possibly St. Louis. The unmistakable augury of this was Huey Long’s published apology during the summer of 1935 for having used the word nigger in the course of a national network broadcast. A “race” tabloid, referring to the word he had used as “the epithet n——r,” sent a reporter to him in his suite at the New Yorker Hotel, and published the ensuing interview under a two-column headline on its front page. In his statement Long made it plain his use of “the epithet n——r” was a slip of the tongue, and was not meant to be derogatory in a racial sense; also that he would exercise due care not to use the epithet again in either public or private speech.

It is all but impossible to convey to non-Southerners how radical a departure from the mores of Winn parish in central Louisiana was this sort of retraction. Efforts were made to use the interview as an anti-Long campaign document. Facsimiles of the front page of the Negro tabloid were printed by some of the rural weeklies, but it didn’t work. The Negro Share-Our-Wealthers throughout the land rejoiced. The whites in the organization shrugged it aside as fabricated anti-Long propaganda inspired by “the interests” or passed it off with: “As long as I get my five thousand a year, what difference does it make who else gets it too?”

It should not be overlooked that in the case of Judge Pavy, Long needed no resort to ancient libels to accomplish his longtime opponent’s defeat. The gerrymander would make it impossible for Ben Pavy to be re-elected. Long would take the stump against him, of course, in order to claim the foreordained victory as another personal triumph; but once St. Landry parish was put into the same judicial district with Acadia, Lafayette, and Vermillion parishes, even the slightest possibility of a Pavy election was precluded. Huey Long would no more have gone to needless lengths to win an already certain victory at the risk of alienating any large section of the prospective Negro presidential vote than he would have belabored a dying horse at an S.P.C.A. picnic in an effort to make the animal run.

Taking all the foregoing into account, it would seem clearly impossible to accept either the hypothesis that Carl Weiss, Jr., was the chosen instrument of a political murder cabal to whose membership he was almost wholly unknown, or the proposition that his was a nature sufficiently ruthless to take the life of a fellow being in reprisal for the loss of a long-held political office by his wife’s father.

As concerns the idea that Dr. Weiss was motivated by the “pure patriotism” ascribed to him by his wife’s uncle, Dr. Pavy, there can be little doubt that this was possible. But it is also not to be doubted that there is a basis beyond parental affection for the elder Dr. Weiss’s statement at the inquest into his son’s death that “my son was too superbly happy with his wife and child, too much in love with them to want to end his life after such a murder.”

On the other hand, no such contradiction is an integral part of the hypothesis that he made this sacrifice to shield his wife and his son from exposure to groundless odium. This would appear to be the only assumption in full accord with all the known circumstances, even though Dr. Weiss’s belief that Huey Long would exhume a long-buried slander reflecting on his loved ones was tragically erroneous.

On the basis of the situation as he saw and understood it, the only way to safeguard them was to silence Long before he could utter the libel. If the only price at which this assurance could be purchased was the forfeit of his own life, the compulsive paternal urge to protect his beloved baby son might well be strong enough to overcome every inhibition that was normally part of his character and background. He took no one into his confidence, realizing that anyone to whom he confided would inevitably thwart his plan. Thus we may picture him leaving to his family the happy memory of an afternoon of carefree affection, and departing alone to weigh in solitude one factor of the situation against another, as he understood them.

Should he thereupon have decided that “this man will never slander my son as he has slandered others in the past if I can silence him,” we can only surmise that it was with this thought in mind that he entered the marble-walled corridor where he died to make certain that some words Huey Long never intended to utter would remain unsaid.