Hermann B. Deutsch

“Finality is not the language of politics.”

——DISRAELI

To the Huey Long murder case the preceding chapters offer a solution which fits every determinate fact of what took place in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935, everything pertinent that led up to the climactic moment of violence, and what followed. Yet it goes without saying that many will reject this rationalization of available evidence. The arguments will go on and on.

We are prone to cherish certain myths. As though in wish-fulfillment we still tell our children Parson Weems’s absurd fable of the boy Washington, the cherry tree, and “I did it with my little hatchet.” Similarly, the myth of the bodyguard’s bullet, product of a compulsive necessity for political escape from the onus of assassination, will retain adherents and win fresh believers, despite the obvious fact that wherever else the truth may lie, the bodyguard-bullet hypothesis is false.

Paradox remains a continuing footnote to Huey Long’s career. Surrounded by fanatically loyal bodyguards, he was none the less done to death by a shy, retiring young stranger in whom neither he nor his myrmidons recognized any trace of menace. His injuries were critical and might in any case have proved fatal; but it was a decision on the part of the same Arthur Vidrine whom Huey Long had elevated to high command which sealed the Kingfish’s doom. True, the alternative Dr. Vidrine chose was one many another physician, confronted by the same circumstances, might have selected inasmuch as mere delay in taking action could have proved fatal.

On the other hand, it is not to be disputed that Dr. Vidrine’s decision to operate by a frontal incision made it impossible for him or any one else thereafter to save Huey Long’s life. In consequence, he fell under the ban of the Long faction’s permanent and extreme displeasure. As soon as he took office in 1936, Governor Leche appointed Dr. George Bel to the superintendency of Charity Hospital, thus automatically displacing Vidrine from that position. Within the year, Dr. James Monroe Smith, president of the State University, speaking for its Board of Supervisors, notified him that Dr. Rigney D’Aunoy had been made acting dean of the medical school but that he—Dr. Vidrine—might retain a place on the faculty as professor of gynecology.

Rather than accept such a demotion he resigned in August of 1937. Returning to Ville Platte, he founded a private hospital there, and maintained it until his retirement in ill health from active practice in 1950. Five years later he died.

Death also thwarted Long’s design to place the Pavy gerrymander at the head of what became his last demonstration of dictatorship as the legislature’s Act Number One. It became Act Number Three, since the first two were concurrent resolutions, one expressing the grief of House and Senate over the leader’s untimely end, the other creating a committee to select a burial place on the capitol grounds for what remained of his physical presence among them.

As for the gerrymander, it never really took effect, though it automatically became law twenty days after the legislature adjourned. To be sure, it did provide for an additional judge in a newly enlarged judicial district, he to be chosen some fourteen months later at the time of the Congressional election of November 1936.

But a new legislature, meeting in May 1936, adopted another statute, superseding this law and reshuffling Louisiana’s judicial districts once more to add a new one—the twenty-seventh—consisting of St. Landry parish alone. This act, a constitutional amendment, would not become operative until ratified by popular vote at the November elections. That obviously made it impossible to elect a judge at the same time, so the new bill provided that within thirty days after its ratification, the governor should appoint a judge for the new district, his term not to end until that of the judges elected in 1936 should have run its course. In other words, the appointee would serve for six years.

Needless to say, the appointee was not Benjamin Pavy.

Another facet of the Long paradox is presented by the saint-or-sinner image which his contemporaries and their successors yet seek to preserve. Until the Kingfish’s name has lost all popular significance, debates will be waged over the issue of whether the man was an uninhibited genius, or merely a conscienceless opportunist endowed with exceptional mental agility. On this point the testimony of one of the three brothers Huey so heartily disliked might well shed some light.

Some days after the fallen leader’s funeral, and while the legislature was still in session, a number of the Long satraps were gathered in Governor Allen’s office, lamenting the confusion into which a virtually leaderless assembly (in the sense of having too many leaders) had fallen.

The leitmotiv of the parley held that things weren’t like that in the good old days when the Kingfish was around to issue orders and see to it that they were carried out. The conversation finally veered to what a remarkable thing it was for a little bit of an old town like Winnfield to have produced a superman like ol’ Huey, especially when you realized it had never given to the world anyone else of comparable stature.

Earl Long, himself one of the thus disprized other products of Winnfield, listened in morose silence for a time to these observations. Finally he got up, moved to the door, paused, and said:

“You folks are right, of course. Huey was the only smart one from Winnfield. No manner of doubt about it.” He scratched his chin meditatively and then added: “But I’m still here!”

On the other hand, those who casually dismiss Long as a conscienceless political gangster overlook the number of respects in which he was far, far ahead of his time. It is only since the mid-century’s turn, for example, that clamor has become general to provide special advanced training for school children with well-above-normal mentality. Long proposed a program of this sort for Louisiana State University in his last broadcast, delivered two nights before he was shot. One of his last rational statements, expressed only moments before he lapsed into the drugged stupor from which he never really returned to consciousness, was a lament that he would be unable to carry out this project.

He enormously increased Louisiana’s public debt with what proved to be a remarkably sound system of funding dedicated revenues into bonds, in order to give the state a highway network geared to the impending expansion of motorized traffic. In the 1960s the federal government followed the same line by laying out and constructing a vast system of interstate super-highways.

Almost without formal education himself—he never finished high school—he was like one possessed in his determination to put schooling within the reach of all by providing free textbooks, free transportation, free lunches, and the like. The medical school he founded at Louisiana State University, as though merely to spite Tulane for not conferring upon him at least one honorary degree, has won a recognized place as a great center of research and instruction; it fills what admittedly became a genuine need ... and while today’s income and inheritance levies do not set arbitrary limits like those proposed by Long in the early 1930s, the underlying principle of decentralization of wealth by heavy upper-bracket taxes is basically what he advocated.

None of this mitigates the heritage of corruption in public life that he bequeathed to Louisiana, or his ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and other reprehensible qualities. But he was very far from being merely another gangster.

The fact that the sons of both men whose lives ended so abruptly in September 1935 followed brilliantly in their fathers’ footsteps may well be part of this same pattern of paradox.

Russell Long, only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, enlisted in the Navy as a seaman during World War II, serving with distinction in the invasions of Africa, Sicily, and Italy (at Anzio), and advancing through promotion until he was a lieutenant at the time of his demobilization in 1945. In the election of January 1948 he supported the successful gubernatorial race of his uncle, Earl K. Long. In September of that same year, when Senator John H. Overton died with two years of his term yet to run, Governor Long supported his nephew for election to the vacancy.

He barely won by the slimmest sort of majority. The city of New Orleans cast a majority of twenty-five thousand votes against him. But he received much more ponderable support when he ran for the full Senate term two years later, and a more impressive vote still when he was re-elected in 1956. Finally, he was swept back into office in 1962 by a veritable landslide, receiving some 84 per cent of the votes cast.

In part this was a response to his generally independent stand on both local and national issues. In 1952, for example, he supported one of his father’s uncompromising opponents, T. Hale Boggs, for governor against the candidate backed by his uncle Earl, then nearing the end of his first term as governor. But four years later he vigorously supported Earl against Mayor deLesseps Morrison of New Orleans when the latter made the first of two unsuccessful races for the governorship.

Beyond doubt, at least part of Russell’s steadily growing strength was also due to the unmistakable fashion in which he proved himself an exceptionally able member of the Senate, being one of the first ranking figures in United States officialdom to recognize in Castro’s rise to power a sinister portent, and to advocate immediate revision by this country of the sugar quota to counter the Fidelista drive toward Communist affiliation.

Following his sweeping victory in the late summer of 1962, he issued a modest victory statement in which he said in part:

“The most striking feature of my [re-election] was the majority recorded for me in New Orleans. In some of the wards where I had been defeated by a margin of seven to one fourteen years ago I was given a majority of as much as six to one. This could never have happened without a lot of people casting their first vote for a man who bears my family name.... I shall always appreciate those tolerant and generous persons who have seen fit to endorse me as the first member of my family to enjoy their support.”

Dr. Carl Austin Weiss III, who was but three months old at the time of his father’s death, was taken to New York by his mother when she left Louisiana to make her home in the East. He was graduated from Columbia in 1958, and set out to make general surgery his field of medical practice. He was a full-time resident at St. Vincent’s hospital for two years, but in July 1961 decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, and entered the same hospital—Bellevue—where his father had been chief of clinic thirty years before.

He was married in 1961, and early in 1962 was called to active military service, being assigned as an air-force surgeon with the rank of captain to duty at Barksdale Field. This base is in Bossier parish, Louisiana, directly across the Red River from Shreveport, the city where Huey Long was married and where Russell Long was born. Thus the son of Carl Weiss was practicing medicine in Louisiana at the time the son of Huey Long won an overwhelming victory there in a campaign for the Senate seat formerly held by his father.

Long’s presidential aspirations left his friend and secretary, Earle Christenberry an embarrassing $28,000 debt to pay.

“It is my firm belief now, and was my belief then,” Christenberry asserts, “that Huey would not have been a candidate for president himself prior to 1940. He told me in 1935 that he intended to stump the country, sounding out sentiment before deciding whom he would support against Roosevelt.

“To that end he had me purchase from Graybar one sound truck which was the last word in mobile loud-speaker installations. It came in a day or two before his death, and I sweated it out for many a month, raising some $28,000 to pay for it. Graybar looked to me for payment because I had placed the order. My recollection is that the money was not forthcoming until late in the Leche campaign, for I would not let them use the truck until it was paid for.”

In retrospect, two predictions about Huey Long hold a certain interest. One, by Elmer Irey, is merely academic, since it deals with what would have happened. In closing his chapter on “The Gentleman from Louisiana” Mr. Irey notes that to him the “important thing about the Huey Long gang’s downfall” is the following:

“I hope this story will destroy for all time one of the blackest libels ever made against the American system of democracy. This libel states that had not Dr. Weiss (or somebody) assassinated Huey Long, our country might well have been taken over by the Kingfish as dictator. The inference is clear. Our country was no match for Huey’s genius and ruthlessness.

“I would suggest that the bullet that killed Huey ... merely saved Huey from going to jail.... Huey had broken the law and was to be indicted for it when he was killed.”

When evaluating this forecast, the first thought that comes to mind is a matter of record: within a month of Long’s death one of his top-echelon supporters was brought to trial on a tax-evasion indictment. Mr. Irey’s organization had selected this particular indictment because it was regarded as the government’s strongest case against any Long administration official. At the trial’s close the jury verdict was “not guilty”!

In the light of past experience the conjecture that Long would in time have gained the presidency is not one casually to be shrugged aside. Had he ever attained “My First Days in the White House,” subjection of the large cities (not the rural areas) would have been his primary objective. Just as New Orleans was the last foothold of the carpetbaggers in the 1870s, Boston, New York, Cleveland, Philadelphia, Chicago, and others might have learned what it is like to live under the rule of force from without.

The other prediction referred to above was made by Mason Spencer in the course of a bitter address on the floor of the House of Representatives in April 1935. Spencer withdrew from public office at the close of this legislative term, as did also Dr. Octave Pavy. Both died of heart attacks within weeks of one another in the summer of 1962. But whereas Spencer forsook politics almost altogether, Dr. Pavy retained a very active quasi-Warwickian interest in parochial campaigns.

He retired from forty years of the practice of medicine at an advanced age, and moved from his home at Leonville on Bayou Teche to Opelousas. But his popularity along the bayou-side, where by that time he had delivered more than fifty-eight hundred babies, was so widespread that patients demanded he continue to treat them, so that he had to establish a small office. From this GHQ he successfully brought about the defeat of an opposition sheriff, winning a scandalously large sum of money in bets on the outcome of the election. He converted most of his winnings into currency, packed them into an ordinary water-bucket, and carrying this, he marched triumphantly around and around the Opelousas courthouse square, shouting his exultation to the four winds.

He had been among the first to cheer Mason Spencer’s closing remarks in April 1935 at a special session during which the Kingfish brought about the enactment of a bill which to all intents and purposes gave him the sole right to appoint every commissioner and other polling-booth official in every voting precinct for every election throughout Louisiana.

“I am not one of those who cries ‘Hail, Caesar!’” Spencer said in slow and measured tones, “nor have I cried ‘Jail Caesar!’ But this ugly bill disfranchises the white people of Louisiana.... I can see blood on the marble floor of this capitol, for if you ride this thing through, it will travel with the white horse of death. In the pitiful story of Esau the Bible teaches us it is possible for a man to sell his own birthright. But the gravestones on a thousand battlefields teach you that you cannot sell the birthright of another white man!”

Within five months there was blood on the marble floor of the capitol.