Chapter IV: Part 4

By the time he puts down the telephone and turns, Huey Long has already dashed out into the hallway where John Fournet steps forward to greet him. The Senator stops momentarily to talk to A. P. White in the partly opened private doorway to the inner office. He has noticed, while looking over the House from the Speaker’s rostrum, that some of his legislative supporters are absent, and asks White where the hell this one, that one, and the other one are, adding: “Find them. If necessary, sober them up, and have them at that meeting because we just might need their votes tomorrow!” Then he turns, facing the direction of the House chamber.

For that one fractional moment every actor is motionless: Huey Long, with John Fournet at his left elbow and Murphy Roden just behind his right shoulder; Chick Frampton in the very act of stepping into the corridor from the double doors of the governor’s anteroom; Elliott Coleman down the hall in the direction of the House, near the door of the small private elevator reserved for the governor’s use; and among three or four individuals standing in the marble-paneled niche recessed into the wall opposite the double doors where Frampton is standing, a slim figure in a white suit.

The fractional moment passes. Let us turn once more to Murphy Roden’s graphic account of what transpired:

“... a young man in a white linen suit, who held a straw hat in his hand loosely before him, and below the waist, so that both of his hands seemed to be concealed behind it. He walked toward us from the direction of the House chamber and I did not see the gun until his right hand came out from beneath his hat and he extended the gun chest high and at arm’s length. In that same instant I realized that this was no jest, no toy gun, and leaped. I seized the hand and the gun in my right hand and bore down, and as I did so the gun went off. The cartridge ejected and the recoil of the ejector slide bruised the web of my right hand between thumb and forefinger, though I was not conscious of the hurt and did not see the injury, a very minor one, until later.

“I tried to wrest the gun away, but saw I could not do it in time, so shifted my grip on it from my right hand to my left and threw my right arm around his neck. As I did this, my hard leather heels slipped on the marble floor and my feet shot out from under me, so that we both went down, the young man and I, with him on top. That is the last pair of hard leather heels I have ever worn. While we were falling, my wrist watch was shot off, but again I was not conscious of it. I did not even miss my watch until I was being treated at the hospital, later that same night.

“It has always been my belief that it was Dr. Weiss who fired a second shot as we were falling and that it was this one which shot off my watch. There are several reasons for this conclusion on my part. Firstly, his gun was of small caliber, 7.6 millimeter, which is about the equivalent of our .32-caliber automatic, a Belgian Browning which he had brought back with him from abroad. When it was examined later, it had only five cartridges in it. Normally it holds seven. I have always had a deep conviction that Dr. Weiss fired twice, and that I saw the first shell ejected. When his gun was recovered from the floor, a shell was found caught in the ejecting mechanism which I am convinced was the second shell. The dent on my watch, which was later recovered and which I still have, was made by a small-caliber bullet.

“As we were falling--Dr. Weiss and I--I released his gun hand, and reached for my pistol, a Colt .38 special on a .45 frame, loaded with hollow-point ammunition, which I carried in a shoulder holster. By the time we hit the deck I had it out and fired one shot into his throat, under his chin, upward into his head and saw the flesh open up. I struggled to get out from beneath him, and as I partially freed myself, all hell broke loose. The others may have waited till I got partially clear before they fired, for I think I got to my knees by the time they started, and that probably saved my life. But I was being deafened and my eyes were burning with particles of powder from those shots.

“Moreover, for all I knew this might have been an attack in force, which was why I was struggling so desperately to get to my feet. But by the time I really was on my feet, I could not see any more because of the muzzle blasts from other guns. While I did not learn this until later, shots had passed so close to me that the powder burns penetrated my coat, shirt, and undershirt, and burned my skin beneath, all along my back. I felt my way blindly down the hall in the direction of the Senate chamber, with my left hand on the corridor wall and my gun still in my right hand, till I turned a corner and reached a niche where there was a marble settee. This was right near the stairway where Huey had gone down, as I learned later. I was practically blinded for the time. The settee had a padded seat, and I waited there till Ty Campbell, a state highway patrolman, saw me and took me to the hospital.

“It was there that I missed my watch and saw the furrow plowed across the back of my wrist where the scar of it is still visible; also the pinch or scratch in the web between my right thumb and index finger. I did not know for two days what had become of my watch, but it was returned to me later by King Strenzke, chief of the Baton Rouge city police. Someone had picked it up off the floor at the scene of all the shooting, and had turned it over to the police while authorities were still trying to establish the identity of Dr. Weiss.”

* * * * *

Justice Fournet’s statement differs from Roden’s at several points, as it does from the accounts of Coleman and Frampton, each of which differs in one detail or another from all the others. Just as it was given, with none of the discrepancies modified, altered, or omitted, the Fournet account of what took place continues in the narrative which follows:

“... Just then, Huey came out of the door to the office of the Governor’s secretary.” (Actually, he had come out of the main double doors of the anteroom, and was merely pausing at the other point to impress on White the importance of getting in touch with certain absentee members.) “We walked toward each other, but instead of the usual air of greeting I saw a startled, terrified expression, a sort of look of shock, and simultaneously I saw this fellow who had been standing in the recess oppose Huey with a little black gun. This was right within a foot of me, so I threw my hands at him to grab him, just as he shot, and Murphy Roden--I don’t know where he came from but I presume he had followed the Senator out into the hall from the inner office--anyway, at the same instant when I threw my hands and the shot was fired, Murphy Roden lunged and seized the gun and the man’s hand in his left hand. This must have been at almost the very instant the shot was fired, for Murphy’s hand kept the shell of the little automatic from ejecting, which is why the man whose body was later identified as that of Dr. Weiss could not fire another shot.

“It is hard to describe in sequence all the things that were happening in practically one and the same instant. As Murphy grappled with Weiss, the gesture I had made to push the man away was completed, and my hands pushed the two struggling men partly to the floor. Weiss had both hands around his gun, trying to fire again, and this time at Roden; and Roden, while holding his desperate clutch about the gun which was waving wildly this way and that, was trying to get his own gun from his shoulder holster, and I was still standing there with my hands outstretched from pushing them, when Elliott Coleman from quite a ways down the hall fired the second shot I heard that night, as well as two others.

“In that same instant of general confusion that boiled up I heard Huey give just one shout, a sort of hoot, and then he ran like a wild deer. I bent over to help Roden disarm Weiss, and twisted a muscle in my back so that for a moment I could not move in any direction. It was then I saw that one of Elliott Coleman’s bullets had shot away Murphy Roden’s wrist watch, but the next two hit Weiss. At the first one his whole body jerked convulsively--like this. At the second it jerked again in a great twitch as he sank into himself and slumped forward, face down, his head in the angle of the wall and his legs extended diagonally out into the corridor.

“It was not until after Weiss was dead that other bodyguards came up and emptied their pistols into the fallen body. Meanwhile I caught a glimpse of other armed men, state police and bodyguards, charging from the [House chamber] end of the hall toward where the body was lying, and I caught one flash of my father wrestling around with some of them because he thought I was in trouble and he wanted to stop the shooting. I saw the crowd down there and I went into the other cross hall [the one in the direction of the Senate chamber] where there were stairs to the basement, and asked the girl at the telegraph desk which way Huey had gone, and she pointed down the stairs....”

There is general agreement here that of the first two shots, by whomever fired, the first one penetrated Long’s body, the second ripped Roden’s watch from his wrist, and that the next two killed Dr. Weiss. The only discrepancy between the accounts of Murphy Roden and Justice Fournet is as to who fired these shots. According to Roden, the first two were fired by Weiss, the third by himself and the fourth by someone else, presumably Coleman. According to Justice Fournet, the first one was fired by Weiss, who never fired again; while the second shot, the one which according to both versions shot away Roden’s wrist watch, was fired by Coleman, who thereafter also fired the two shots that took Dr. Weiss’s life.

* * * * *

How does Sheriff Coleman’s account of what took place compare with these two? There is one marked point of difference. It involves a blow with the fist which no one else describes. Here, then, is that portion of Coleman’s narrative of what took place:

“... At this point a slight young fellow in a white linen suit stepped forward and stretched out his hand with a gun in it and pressed it against Huey’s right side and fired. Everything happened very fast then, because the House had just adjourned, seemingly; anyway, people were coming out. I reached the young man about the same time Roden did, and hit him with my fist, knocking him down. He was trying to shoot and Murphy was grappling with him, so that he fell on top of Murphy when I hit him. I fired one shot. By that time Huey was gone, and I learned later he had gone down the stairs and had been taken to the hospital.

“The young man in the white linen suit, whom none of us knew at the time, was dead, and the gun was lying on the floor several inches from his hand. It was then that I saw why he had not fired again. A cartridge was jammed in the ejector. After that a lot of things happened, and there was a lot of shooting.

“They called me into the governor’s office. Some fool had run in there, and Allen said to me: ‘Coleman, I understand you hit that party. Huey isn’t much hurt, he’s just shot through the arm.’ I said: ‘The hell he is! The man couldn’t have missed him. He shot him in the belly, right here.’ Allen said: ‘But they say you hit him and deflected the bullet.’ And I said: ‘I never hit him till after he shot.’ All of this stuff about a bullet from one of the bodyguards is a lot of ----! Those boys all had .44s and .45s and if one of those bullets had gone through him it would have made a great big hole. Anybody knows that. Besides, when all the bodyguard shooting was going on, Huey was gone from that place and on his way downstairs.”

* * * * *

This last is also borne out by Frampton, whose account of the actual shooting includes the following observations:

“While the conversation” (i.e., between Long and A. P. White about making sure that all Long supporters would be present at the early caucus and the morning House session) “was going on, this slight man I did not know but who had been leaning against a column in the angle of the marble wall, sort of sauntered over to him, and there was the sound of a shot, a small sound, a sort of pop. Huey grabbed his side and gave a sort of grunt, and I think he may have said ‘I’m shot!’ while running toward the stairs. He disappeared by the time Murphy Roden materialized out of somewhere--I never did see where he came from--and seized the man’s hand. There were two shots and he crumpled forward, and fell with his head on his arm against the pillar where he had been standing, and his legs projected out into the hall. Huey had already disappeared around the corner and, as I learned later, down the stairway. The small automatic had slid out of Dr. Weiss’s hand and lay about four inches from it on the floor by the time the other bodyguards came up, among them Messina and McQuiston, and emptied their guns into the prostrate figure.”

* * * * *

Meanwhile Jimmie O’Connor, with Huey’s Corona Belvedere cigars in the breast pocket of his coat, jumped up as he heard a sound, muffled by the heavy glass doors of the newly air-conditioned cafeteria, “like cannon crackers going off.”

“I started to walk out,” he recalls, “and as I opened the door I saw Huey reeling like this, with his arms extended, coming down those steps that were near the governor’s office. He was all by himself, and I ran over to him and asked: ‘What’s the matter, Kingfish?’ He spit in my face with blood as he gasped: ‘I’m shot!’ They put in the paper next day he said: ‘Jimmie, my boy, I’m shot! Help me!’ but he never said a damn word like that. All he said was ‘I’m shot,’ and he spit blood over me so that I thought he had been shot in the mouth.

“With that I grabbed him and I heard more shooting going on. They were still shooting at the fallen body of Dr. Weiss, as I found out later. But it shows how quickly it all happened. As fast as that. He had no blood on his clothes at all at that time, other than what he had spit out of his mouth.

“So I half carried and half dragged him outside to the driveway. They had a fellow out there with an old sort of a beat-up Ford automobile, and I said: ‘Take me and this man over to the hospital.’ It was an open-model car, not a sedan. Going over to the hospital Huey said not a word, just slumped and slid in my arms. When we got over there, I opened the car door and halfway got him out and got him on my shoulder, and whoever was in the car just blew. They were gone. Right by the entrance on the side they had a rolling table. I put him on that and rang the bell. One of the sisters came down and cried: ‘Oh, oh! What is this?’ and I said: ‘The Senator.’

“She said: ‘Wheel him into the elevator.’ I did that. She operated the elevator and when we got out--I don’t remember what floor it was--she and I wheeled him into the operating room, where an intern hurried over to us. Huey was wearing a cream-colored double-breasted suit, silky-looking, and I said to the intern: ‘He’s been shot in the mouth.’ The intern pulled down the Senator’s mouth, swabbed it out, and said: ‘He’s not shot there, that’s just a little cut where he hit himself against something.’ I suppose he stumbled up against the wall while reeling around the turns going down the stairs.

“Then the intern was beginning to open the Senator’s coat when Dr. Vidrine popped in, and he and the intern opened the coat. There was very little blood on the shirt, and when they opened that and pulled up the undershirt we saw a very small hole right under the right nipple.... While his shirt and coat were being cut off, he asked the Sister to pray for him. ‘Sister, pray for me,’ he said, and she told him: ‘Pray _with_ me.’”

By this time frantic telephone calls to physicians in Baton Rouge and New Orleans, to Seymour Weiss and Earle Christenberry, to the Long family, to Adjutant General Fleming, and to a host of politicians had jammed the switchboards. Both the big buildings facing one another across the width of the old University Lake--the Sanitarium and the State House--were swarming hives of confused activity. In the hospital various officials and others in the top echelon of the Long organization were crowding the hallways around the wounded Senator’s room, and later even the operating room itself, while the constant arrival of more and yet more cars clotted into an all but hopeless traffic snarl in the Sanitarium’s small parking lot.

Others made their way to the capitol building as word of the shooting spread, but here General Louis F. Guerre, commandant of the Bureau of Identification, and Colonel E. P. Roy, chief of the highway police, acted promptly to restore some semblance of order. Part of the confusion stemmed from the fact that up to that very moment no one had been able to identify the body which later proved to be that of Dr. Weiss; almost everyone who asked to see if he might perhaps recognize the slight figure in the bloodstained white suit was admitted to the corridor where the corpse remained until Coroner Thomas Bird arrived. As described by Frampton----

“A number of people came around after the shooting stopped. Among them were Helen Gilkison, the _Item_ and _Tribune_ Baton Rouge correspondent and Colonel Roy. I remember that the Colonel took hold of the fallen man’s head and lifted it so that the features were visible. He asked first me and then Helen if we knew him. We did not. I had never seen him before, as far as I knew then or know now.

“Then I suddenly remembered that George Coad in New Orleans, who was still on the phone line I had left open, must have heard the shooting and was likely going mad. So I went in and picked up the phone and told him Huey was shot, and the man who fired at him had been killed by the bodyguards, but that the body had not yet been identified, so he had better go with just that much for an extra.

“I then ran back out into the hall and found that Dr. Tom Bird, the coroner, was there. Colonel Roy and the state police were starting to clear the corridor of everyone: spectators, newspaper people, legislators, and all. But Dr. Bird deputized Helen as an assistant coroner, and she was permitted to stay. I then followed Huey’s course down the stairs by the route I was told he had taken, and learned for the first time he really had been shot, because on the marble steps I saw a few drops of blood.

“I ran out the back door and was told he had been taken to the hospital by Jimmie O’Connor, so I ran around the end of the lake all the way from the capitol to Our Lady of the Lake Hospital, climbed the front steps, went up to the top floor, where Huey was lying on one of those surgical tables in the corridor outside of a room at the east end of the hallway.

“Right away I thought of Urban Maes and Jim Rives, and asked Colonel Roy, who had come there in the meantime, to get the airport lighted, as I would try to get Maes and Rives to fly up with Harry Williams. I put in calls for both of them and left messages about what had happened, and for them to get hold of Harry Williams and fly to Baton Rouge, where the airport had been lighted.... Actually, this had not yet been done, as I learned later. Colonel Roy could not raise any airport attendant, so he drove out there, kicked in a window, and turned on the lights himself.”

By that time Dr. Maes and his associate, Dr. Rives, were already en route to Baton Rouge by automobile. They had been called at once by Seymour Weiss, who then jumped into his new Cadillac with Bob Maestri--the latter lived at the Roosevelt--and together they ruined the engine of the car by driving at top speed to Baton Rouge.

At that time no one yet had given out any reasonably authoritative word as to whether Long was the victim of a major or minor injury; whether the prognosis was hopeful or a matter of doubt; whether his condition could be described as undetermined, satisfactory, or critical.

But so widespread was public interest in the Kingfish, who had challenged Roosevelt, and who only a month before had said the New Deal was at least cognizant of a plot to murder him, that newspapers in many distant cities lost no time in dispatching special correspondents and photographers to Baton Rouge to cover the day’s top news story. The fight to save the Kingfish’s life was just beginning.

10 ---- SEPTEMBER 8-9: MIDNIGHT

“_He that cuts off twenty years of life cuts off so many years of
fearing death._”

----SHAKESPEARE

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.

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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.”

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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.

The unsigned “admitting note” on its plain sheet of paper, which follows the foregoing summary, reads: