The motives which prompt a killer to do away with a public figure are frequently anything but clear. On the other hand, the identity of such an assassin rarely is in doubt. The assassin himself sees to that, in obvious eagerness to attain recognition as the central figure of a world-shaking event.

President McKinley, for example, was shot down in full view of the throng that moved forward to shake his hand at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Czolgosz, his anarchist assassin, boasted of his deed, making no effort to escape. John Wilkes Booth, one cog in a large plot, did not withdraw in the dimness of the stage box from which he fired on Lincoln, but leaped into the footlights’ full blaze to posture and declaim: “Sic semper tyrannis!”

In recent times the perpetrator of an unsuccessful attempt at mass assassination actually clamored for recognition. When the late Cardinal Mundelein became archbishop of Chicago in 1919, community leaders tendered him a banquet of welcome. At the very opening of the repast, during the soup course, the diners became violently ill. By great good fortune—probably because so much poison had been introduced into the soup that even the first few spoonfuls caused illness before a fatal dose could be taken into the system—none of the diners lost his life as a result of the decision of an assistant cook, Jean Crones, to do away with the leaders of Catholicism in Chicago.

The cook made good his escape. He has never been apprehended. But for days he sent a letter each morning to the newspapers and to the police telling just how he had kneaded arsenic into the dumplings he had been assigned to prepare for the soup, how he had later bleached his hair with lime whose fumes almost overcame him, in just which suburbs he had hidden out on which days, and so on. Short of surrendering to the police, he did all that lay in his power to identify himself as one who had attempted a mass murder of unprecedented proportions.

One could go down a long list of political assassinations throughout the world during the past century, and find that almost without exception the identity of the extroverted killer was not a matter of the slightest doubt. No one questions the fact that a Nazi named Planetta murdered Engelbert Dollfuss in his chancellery, that Gavrilo Prinzip shot the Archduke Francis Ferdinand in Sarajevo, or that President Castillo Armas of Guatemala was killed by a Communist among his bodyguards, Romero Vasquez, who underscored his part of the plot by committing suicide.

In modern history, however, one political assassination is still being hotly debated, not merely as to the motives which prompted the deed, but as to the identity of the one whose bullet inflicted the fatal wound. This was the killing of Huey P. Long, self-proclaimed “Kingfish” of Louisiana, who was on the very threshold of a bold attempt to extend his dominion to the limits of the United States via the White House when Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., fired on him, and was almost instantly mowed down by a fusillade from the weapons of the bodyguards with whom Senator Long surrounded himself wherever he went.

To this day, nearly thirty years after the event, there are those who believe that the assassination was part of a plot of which President Franklin Roosevelt had cognizance and in which representatives of his political organization participated. Only a month prior to his death Huey Long had charged publicly on the Senate floor that, at a secret conference in a New Orleans hotel, representatives of “Roosevelt the Little” had assured the other conferees the President would undoubtedly “pardon the man who killed Long.”

There are those who accept the coroner’s verdict that the homicidal bullet was fired by young Dr. Weiss from the eight-dollar Belgian automatic pistol he had purchased years earlier in France where he was doing postgraduate work in medicine. According to his father, testifying at the inquest which followed the deaths of the two principals, Dr. Weiss carried this pistol in his car at night, ever since intruders had been found loitering about the Weiss garage.

A great many others—quite possibly a majority of those who express an opinion on the matter—insist that the bullet of whose effects Long died was not the one fired by Dr. Weiss, but a ricochet from one of the bodyguards’ guns in the furious volley that followed.

Still others, and among these are many of the physicians and nurses who knew Dr. Weiss well, feel certain to this day that he did not fire a shot at all, that he was not the sort of person who could have brought himself to take the life of another human being. It is their contention that Dr. Weiss merely threatened to strike the Kingfish with his fist—may indeed have done so, since Long did reach the hospital with an abrasion of the lip after he was rushed from the capitol to Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. After the blow or threat of one the young physician was immediately gunned down, according to this version of the incident, a chance shot thus inflicting the wound of which, some thirty hours later, Senator Long died.

The foregoing contradictory views are still further complicated by the fact that there are many with whom it is an article of faith that regardless of who fired the ultimately fatal shot, the leader they idolized would have been saved but for an emergency operation performed on him that same night by Dr. Arthur Vidrine.

Finally, there is no agreement to this day on what could have prompted Dr. Weiss to commit an act which almost everyone who knew him still regards as utterly foreign to his nature. No valid motive for this deed has ever been definitively established. One assumption has it that the doctor was the chosen instrument of the “murder conference” whose discussions Long made the text of the last speech he delivered on the Senate floor.

Others feel that inasmuch as Long was on the point of gerrymandering Mrs. Weiss’s father, Judge Ben Pavy, out of the place on the bench he had held for seven successive terms, Dr. Weiss’s act was one of reprisal. At least one connection of the Weiss and Pavy families has held that Dr. Weiss was actuated purely by a patriotic conviction that only through the death of Long could his authoritarian regime be demolished and liberty be restored to Louisiana.

In view of the foregoing, one question poses itself rather relentlessly: At this late date is an effort to compose such far-ranging differences of conviction and surmise worth while? Can any purpose beyond a remotely academic recording of facts be served thereby? Is there anything that distinguishes in historical significance the assassination of Huey Long from the public shooting which in time brought about the death of, let us say, Mayor William Gaynor of New York?

It is because those questions seemed to answer themselves, and unanimously, in the affirmative that the data chronicled in the following narrative were gathered. They represent among other items the statements of every surviving eyewitness to the actual shooting, and of surviving physicians who were present during, or assisted in, the emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine. They include the never previously revealed hospital chart of the thirty hours Senator Long was a patient at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium.

This was no easy search for truth. There are still those who refuse to discuss the assassination of Huey Long with anyone who does not share to the fullest their individual views of what took place. None the less, the significance of two figures—Franklin Roosevelt and Huey Long—so curiously alike and yet so dissimilar, indicated a genuine need to weigh every scrap of obtainable evidence and assess any rational conclusions to be drawn from them.

During the early 1930s no two names were better known in the United States than those of Roosevelt and Long. The former was the product of a patrician heritage plus the gloss of Groton and Harvard. The latter had received no formal education beyond that afforded by the Winnfield high school. An intermittent career as a book auctioneer, Cottolene salesman, and door-to-door canvasser in the rural South did nothing to soften the rough edges of his early environment. No two modes of address could have differed more radically than the polished modulation of F.D.R.’s fireside chats and the bucolic idiom of one of Huey Long’s campaign rodomontades: “Glory be, we brought ’em up to the lick-log that time”—“He thinks he’s running for the Senate but watch us clean his plow for him come November”—“Every time I think of how I was suckered in on that proposition I feel like I’d ought to be bored for the hollow horn.”

It was once stated that before Seymour Weiss, the New Orleans hotel man who was perhaps his closest friend, took him in hand, he dressed like a misprint in a tailored-by-mail catalogue. The description was apt. Early photographs prove it, if proof be needed. Even when he was oil-rich from his expanding law practice in Shreveport, he wore a ring in which a huge diamond gleamed, and a tie-pin in which another, equally large, was set.

“Stop talkin’ po’-mouth to me, son,” an elderly legislator at Baton Rouge once advised him. “You got di’monds all over you. Bet you even got di’mond buttons on yo’ draw’s.”

None the less he was superbly endowed with what, for want of a better term, might be called personal magnetism, a quality that drew crowds as sheep are drawn to a salt trough. Nowhere was this manifested more strikingly than in Washington, where throngs packed the Senate galleries the moment it was known that he was about to deliver a speech.

He was a superb actor, too. Telling the same anecdote seven or eight times a day, day after day in campaign after campaign, he would none the less deliver it with the same chuckling verve at the thousandth repetition with which he had told it initially. Little bubbles of laughter escaped him as though involuntarily when he built up to the nub of a jest. The effect of such tricks of stagecraft was heightened by the unhurried but uninterrupted flow of words, the affectation of homely idiom, the Southerner’s easy slurring of consonants.

In Arkansas, at the time of the unparalleled Caraway campaign of 1932, every gathering set a new attendance record for the time and place. The address Long delivered from the band shell at Little Rock drew the largest crowd ever assembled in the history of the state. And when the motorized campaign party whipped from one city to the next to meet the demands of a tightly co-ordinated speaking schedule, crowds lined even the back roads through which the cars passed; crowds of those who, unable for one reason or another to leave their small farmsteads in that depression-harried autumn, waited patiently by the dusty roadsides for a fleeting glimpse of the limousine in which Huey Long whizzed by them.

He was at his best in the rough and tumble of partisan politics, both on the hustings and on the Senate floor. When Harold Ickes said Huey had “halitosis of the intellect,” Long retorted by dubbing him “the chinch bug of Chicago.” To be sure, this was after he had broken with the Roosevelt administration, when, scoffing at the Civilian Conservation Corps, he offered to “eat every pine seedling they’ll ever grow in Louisiana.” At the same time, when arguing fiscal policy with the Senate’s veteran on such matters, Carter Glass, he said bluntly in the course of debate that “I happen to know more about branch banking than the gentleman from Virginia does.”

In these respects, as in matters of politesse, Roosevelt was the very antithesis of the gentleman from Louisiana. Yet neither would brook opposition from within his partisans’ ranks. The breach between Roosevelt and as selfless a supporter as James A. Farley was to all intents and purposes identical with the disagreements that broke the ententes between Long and every campaign manager and newspaper publisher who had ever supported his candidacy. Escaping conviction on impeachment charges, he announced: “I’ll have to grow me a new crop of legislators in Louisiana.” When some of Roosevelt’s early New Deal legislation was nullified by the Supreme Court, the President promptly sponsored a bill to increase the number of Supreme Court justices, with himself to name at one swoop six additional members; and he did his best to force what was widely referred to as his “court packing” measure through Congress.

Long campaigned vigorously through the Dakotas, Minnesota, Nebraska, and other northern Midwest states for Roosevelt in 1932. Some of these states went Democratic for the first time in more than a generation. Admittedly this was not all due to Long’s stump speeches. But no one knew better than Franklin Roosevelt that much of his success in the Long-toured regions was due to the gentleman from Winnfield. He was one of the few political leaders who did not underestimate the Long potential, who correctly evaluated the Long influence in overturning the politics of Arkansas to make Hattie Caraway the first woman ever elected to a full term in the United States Senate. He had few illusions, if any, on the score of the national organization of personal followers Long was building through his Share-Our-Wealth clubs.

Under the circumstances it was inevitable that these two, neither of whom would ever admit a potential palace rival into the inner circle of his aides, should become implacable opponents. Long was on the point of announcing his candidacy for president against Roosevelt for the 1936 campaign when a bullet cut short his career. The challenge he proposed to fling at the man who subsequently carried all but two of the Union’s states was neither a forlorn token like that of Governor Landon, nor a visionary crusade like the campaign of Henry Wallace and Glen Taylor. No one appraised this more realistically than Roosevelt himself. He never underestimated the sort of monolithic organization Long could create around the hard core of existing Share-Our-Wealth clubs, the amount of whose mail, as delivered to the Senate office building, dwarfed that delivered to any other member of the Congress.

In pursuance of his objective, Earle Christenberry, with Raymond Daniell of the New York Times, had completed, by midsummer of 1935, the manuscript of a short book to be signed by Huey Long, under the title of My First Days in the White House. He had written no part of this rather naÏve treatise himself, though he had discussed it in general terms with those who did draft it. An earlier book “by Huey P. Long”—Every Man a King—was actually a collaboration in which the prophet of Share-Our-Wealth had dictated sections to the late John Klorer, then editor of Long’s weekly American Progress (nÉe Louisiana Progress), who later became a successful scenarist in Hollywood. But the helter-skelter discussions in which Long outlined his ideas for My First Days in the White House were turned into reasonably coherent prose by Daniell and Christenberry; much of the manuscript Long never even saw until it was in final form.

It was an artless bit of oversimplified future history, written in the past tense to describe the inauguration of President Huey Long, his appointment of a cabinet (Herbert Hoover, Franklin Roosevelt, and Alfred E. Smith were among its members), and the adoption of national Share-Our-Wealth legislation under the supervision of a committee headed by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Andrew W. Mellon! But it was gauged for an audience which already believed that it was possible to redistribute all large fortunes among the nation’s have-nots. It was never meant to convert economists, financiers, and magnates. On the contrary, its principal purpose was to notify all and sundry, especially “all,” that Huey Long was a candidate for president and was confident of victory.

During that early autumn of 1935 the United States stood at a windy corner of world history. In Europe totalitarians had taken over Italy’s tottering liberal monarchy in 1922, and in 1933 the “republic” of Germany. In Louisiana a home-grown fascist with complete dominance over his own state was challenging the national leadership. Long had already put into operation at the local level an authoritarian principle of governmental sovereignty. Legislative and judicial functions were almost wholly concentrated in the hands of an executive who was in reality a “ruler.” The architect of that change was setting himself to expand it to national dimensions.

The seriousness of this situation was recognized by observers of the national scene. Raymond Gram Swing listed five public figures in a volume entitled Forerunners of American Fascism and named Huey Long as the one of potentially greatest national danger. The others were Fr. Coughlin, William Randolph Hearst, Sr., Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, and Dr. Townsend. George Horace Lorimer, long-time editor of the Saturday Evening Post, ordered a three-part serial profile of the senator from Louisiana. Most of this was published posthumously, as was all of what was to have been Long’s Mein Kampf: My First Days in the White House.

Kingfish was thus tapped for a vaulting effort to become America’s Duce or FÜhrer when violence put an abrupt end to the design and to the life of its protagonist. Official records in the coroner’s office at Baton Rouge give no details beyond those embodied on a printed form, whose blank spaces were filled in to note the name, age, bodily measurements, color, and sex of the decedent, together with a curt notation ascribing death to a “gunshot wound (homicidal).”

Nearly thirty years have passed since those notations were entered on an official form to be filed in the archives of East Baton Rouge parish. Death has by now claimed many of the witnesses whose testimony might have been of value in determining what actually took place in the marble-walled corridor where the Kingfish, hurrying along with characteristically flapping stride, received his mortal wound. But many other presential witnesses yet survive.

No inquest worthy of the name has ever been conducted to decide and record officially what the circumstances of Huey Long’s assassination were. The family refused to authorize a necropsy. The death of Dr. Vidrine in 1955 was a portent of the rapid and inevitable approach of the day when the last eyewitness would have passed on. No one would then be able to relate at first hand any detail of the violent moment which averted a conflict pitting the two best-known public figures in the United States against one another for virtual sovereignty over this nation.

That violent moment would thus pass into history as a confused welter of mutually contradictory versions, of rumors, half truths, and whole untruths. Amid these the Huey Long murder case would remain an unsolved and probably insoluble mystery. It was for this reason that I undertook several years ago to gather and collate whatever eyewitness testimony might still be available. I had known Senator Long and his family for many years. Of the newsmen who heard Huey Long make his first state-wide political address at Hot Well on July 4, 1919, I am the only one still actively reporting the course of events and the doings of public figures. I had accompanied him not only on any number of his state campaigns, but also on the remarkable Caraway campaign of 1932.

I knew nearly all of his intimates, and was on first-name terms with most of them then in the easy camaraderie of journalism. Without exception every surviving witness I approached has given me his version of what took place in the capitol corridor at the time of the shooting. With but one exception every witness who was present in the operating room and in the sickroom where Huey later died, has told me all that he saw, heard, or did on that occasion.

These several accounts do not agree at every point. Indeed, here and there they are rather widely at variance. For that very reason they merit belief. Such differences validate the integrity of testimony so given. Had these accounts tallied in every minute particular after the passage of more than a quarter of a century, or even after the passage of twenty-five minutes, they would have been suspect, and properly so. It is axiomatic that eyewitness accounts of the same event invariably differ, even when given at once. The classic illustration of this is the prize fight at whose conclusion one judge awards the victory to Boxer A, the referee calls the combat a draw, and the other judge selects Boxer B as the winner.

The fact that there is no variance whatever between accounts given by several witnesses, especially when their testimony concerns an occurrence involving violence, is as certain an indication of collusive fraud as is the fact that two signatures, ostensibly penned by the same individual, show not the slightest difference in form, shading, or pen pressure at any point. Unless one or both such signatures are forgeries, absolute identity is a practical impossibility.

The question of whether or not the Kingfish could have wrested political control of the United States from Franklin Roosevelt became academic when a bullet found its mark in his body. But a glance at the highlights of his career offers some of the clues to what happened to him on September 8, 1935.