Long Was Poised to Challenge Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 Democratic Party Primary Before He Was Killed
“Times have told us that dirty tricks did not end with Brutus.” – Tom Weiss, brother of alleged assassin, Carl A. Weiss.[1]
Jessica Lauren Fields was a beauty shop worker living in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 1935 who spent 46 years in a hospital for the criminally insane because she tried to do the right thing and reported to the authorities a criminal plot she had overheard.
The plot involved the assassination of Huey P. Long, a U.S. senator from Louisiana and former governor intent on challenging President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the 1936 Democratic Party primary from the left.[2]
Fields died in 1988 after she was transferred from prison to a nursing home when her health began to fail. Her story was told by her nephew, Duel Stone, in a 1997 historical novel whose purpose was to rehabilitate Fields’ historical reputation and establish her as a truth teller and victim of a government coverup.[3]
A gifted orator known as “Kingfish” who grew up in modest circumstances in northern Louisiana, Huey P. Long was a leftist visionary who had wanted to redistribute wealth in American society and empower working people.
In the throes of the Great Depression, Long developed a “Share Our Wealth” campaign that proposed limiting any one person’s earnings to one million dollars and any family’s to three million dollars. Under his plan, every tax-paying citizen would be guaranteed an income of $5,000 and have the opportunity to own a home, car and radio.
An isolationist in foreign policy, Long said that the Spanish-American War and America’s involvement in World War I had been “murderous frauds perpetrated in the interests of Wall Street.”
He also proposed that Congress give a $30 pension for all needy persons over sixty, limit work hours to thirty a week, and give a free college education to deserving students.[4]
Long’s mentor who helped him to develop his Share the Wealth Plan, onetime Louisiana State Senator, S. J. Harper, had been a close personal friend of American Socialist Party leader, Eugene V. Debs, and other luminaries of the socialist movement of the early 20th century such as Congressman Victor Berger and Kate Richards O’Hare.[5]
During his tenure as governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, Long raised taxes on oil and railroad companies and imposed the state’s first income tax to finance social programs and public improvements.
Long’s administration built 2,300 miles of paved roads when there had been only 100 before, built up Louisiana State University (LSU), provided free textbooks to public schools, and built up the state’s charity hospital system.[6]
Among the beneficiaries were Louisiana’s long-oppressed Black population.[7]
Demonized frequently in the corporate-owned media, Long’s attempts to redistribute wealth made him enemies among the rich and powerful. His FBI file filled two thousand pages.[8]
A Louisiana journalist in 1959 described Long as a “veritable Hercules cleaning out the state’s Augean stables of vice, corruption and evils of entrenched wealth; a youthful crusader out of the Pine Hills with chips on both shoulders—and plenty on the table—respected by his foes and worshipped as a demigod by his followers. He had charm, wit and such courage and abilities as no man had ever demonstrated before in the ‘Banana Republic’ which was the state of Louisiana.”[9]
Critics accused Long of siphoning off state funds for his own personal use, collaboration with organized crime, being a megalomaniac, an alcoholic and having dictatorial tendencies.[10]
Some of the latter accusations were true, but a friend wrote a spoof after his death that read: “The Kingfish was a crook, but he had no money; a corrupt politician, but the cost of government in Louisiana was the third lowest in the country; a demagogue but he kept his campaign promises; a hillbilly but he had no racial prejudice; an ignoramus but he ran a ‘business administration’; a dictator but he broadened the suffrage; an opportunist yet he had ideals.”[11]
Journalist Carleton Beals described the goal of Long’s opponents as being “to maintain the old plantation-corporation status quo which had already made the state [of Louisiana] the most backward in the Union, and to grab the spoils.”[12] Long’s enemies included executives with the Rockefeller-owned Standard Oil Company, which Long had begun prosecuting when he was chairman of the Louisiana Public Service Commission in 1922.
To achieve his ambitious reform agenda, Long concentrated power in the hands of his political machine. When serving in the U.S. Senate, Long controlled the Louisiana legislature through proxies he had placed in key positions and could pass all the bills that he wanted.
According to Huey’s son Russell, a U.S. Senator from 1948 to 1987, Huey was assassinated in a conspiratorial plot because of his efforts to remove a $1 poll tax, which had prevented many poor whites from voting (Blacks in the South were not allowed to vote under Jim Crow laws).[13]
With the poll tax removed, Long would have increased his power and been able to enact even more sweeping legislation on behalf of working people. He in turn was poised to challenge FDR for the presidency in 1936 and was about to announce his candidacy before a bullet cut short his life.[14]
The Plot Fields Tried to Expose
Jessica Lauren Fields grew up on a farm in Mississippi and began working in beauty shops after her first husband died. She became an admirer of Long after attending one of his speeches in Tallulah, Louisiana, when Long was governor.
As Duel Stone described it, Long dressed like a king in a navy blue and gray striped double-breasted suit that day and won over the crowd as he shifted from using proper English to country slang and expressions in a southern dialect.
Railing against greedy politicians in Washington, Long spoke of his support for education and health care and advanced his vision of a more socially just political-economic order, stating that he was going to go to Washington to ask Roosevelt to step aside and allow him to enact his program nationally.
According to Stone, listeners to Long’s speech “laughed, screamed, whistled and yelled as loud as they could. They liked his honesty. They were bumping each other and nodding their heads in approval…No one in politics had ever said or promised the things they were hearing. These were certainly the things they wanted to hear at that impoverished time.”[15]
After Jessica’s husband Dan got a job doing construction on the Panama Canal, Jessica moved to Washington, D.C., where she found a job managing an upscale manicure salon. There she met Long who came in for a manicure.
On the train back to Baton Rouge, Jessica claimed to have overheard a conversation between two men who wanted to kill Long.
One said “the scalawag’s [southern turncoat’s] trying to bankrupt the wealthy and give it to the poor. The rich people worked hard for their money and they aren’t going to let a country bumpkin with no manners come in and decide how it’s divided up and how it’s going to be used. That’s for sure.”[16]
After she took a job at a beauty shop in Baton Rouge, Jessica would go to the Sackem & Rackem grocery store nearby where prominent men in town would gather at an adjacent pool hall to play pool.
One day, Jessica overheard the men at the pool hall suggesting that they all pony up money to have Long “eliminated.”
A figure of $600,000 was suggested, which would take care of the assassin’s family.
An oil company executive said that, if anyone was short, his company and the other oil companies would pitch in and help make up the difference. A railroad executive, doctor and lawyer then agreed to do the same.
Afterwards, it was decided that the men would draw numbers out of a hat and the one who drew a blank would be the one chosen to eliminate Long.[17]
Jessica was at this point terrified. When she went back to the pool hall the next day, she observed an ear, nose and throat doctor, Carl A. Weiss, drawing the blank.
Dr. Weiss, 29, was the nephew of a judge, Benjamin Henry Pavy, whose district was being gerrymandered by Huey Long, causing him to likely lose his judgeship.
Weiss’ wife, Yvonne, had also been removed from her teaching post at Louisiana State University (LSU) by Long for political reasons. Long further attempted to remove Weiss’ father-in law from elected political office and fired Yvonne’s uncle, Paul Pavy, from his job as principal at Opelousas High School in Baton Rouge, and Yvonne’s sister, Marie Pavy, from her position as a third-grade teacher.[18]
One of Long’s bodyguards who attended the meeting reassured Dr. Weiss, telling him that he would help eliminate Long once the commotion and confusion began, and that the “problem would be solved.”
The bodyguard suggested that the murder should be carried out during a special legislative session that was scheduled to begin in two weeks.
This suited Dr. Weiss because, he said, that was when Long wanted to pass legislation against his uncle.
According to Stone, Jessica went to work the day after the last meeting and told her boss what had transpired. She also went to the police who told her not to say anything.
When the special session began in September, Long came back from Washington to try to pass 39 bills that broadened his power over state politics. He pushed for the repeal of the $1 poll tax and for redistricting the area of Judge Pavy, who had opposed Long.
At 8:00 p.m. on September 8, 1935, the rogue bodyguard called Dr. Weiss, who told his wife that he was going to the Our Lady of the Lake Hospital to make sure everything was in order for a tonsillectomy he had to do the next morning.
When the special session came to a close at 9:20 p.m., Long was elated that all but one of the 39 bills had passed on the first vote, with the other one likely to pass the next day.
Long went straight to Governor Oscar Allen’s office but was stopped by Dr. Weiss who, according to Stone, said “this is for my uncle” and punched Long in the mouth.
Dr. Weiss then pulled out a .32-caliber gun he had brought with him and fired it at Long, striking him in the chest just below the rib cage.
Long’s bodyguards reacted instantly and fired their guns wildly, shooting Dr. Weiss more than 60 times to avenge their lost friend.
The assassin bodyguard made his shot look as if it were accidental. The shot penetrated an artery leading to one of Long’s kidneys.[19]
Long survived an initial surgery but the doctors overlooked the bullet lodged in his kidney, which led to his death 30 hours later.
Afterwards, the police never carried out a thorough investigation of Long’s death—ballistics tests were never done on the bullets that hit Long, and no autopsy was ever undertaken. A mortuary worker said he saw a doctor take out a bullet from Long’s body. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover refused to carry out a federal investigation and funds for a Louisiana state investigation were withdrawn.[20]
A Coroner’s report that included testimony of 22 witnesses, was reportedly “lost” by District Attorney John Fred Odom, who claimed that his office was burglarized.[21]
Weiss’s .32-caliber gun and other key evidence in the case was kept hidden by the chief of the state police and only made public in 1993.[22]
The evidence included a letter to police from a man reporting on a plot by a group of men to kill Long a month before he was shot.
The wife of prominent southern journalist Hodding Carter told PBS in 1985 that “there wasn’t a gathering of polite [upper-class] people in Louisiana during the Long era in which talk didn’t get around to the necessity of killing Long.”[23]
Jessica had gone to the police department the day after Long’s shooting to ask why they were not doing anything about the conspiracy plot.
The police, however, treated Jessica as a suspect and began interrogating her.
After she was held in jail for four days, she was transferred to the Federal Courthouse in Baton Rouge and subjected to a secret hearing after accused of being insane.
The oil company executive from Sackem & Rackem and other men from the meeting testified that they had never seen Jessica before and that there was never any conspiracy to kill Huey Long and that Dr. Weiss was a lone gunman.[24]
The men called for Jessica to be prosecuted and in one hour, the court determined that Jessica was “not competent to carry on a normal life” because she had “spread malicious accusations of a murder plot without proof.”[25]
The judge sentenced Jessica to spend the rest of her natural life at a hospital for the criminally insane in Washington, D.C., where she was denied visitors for 46 years.
Basically, Jessica was given a life sentence and confined to hell on Earth for telling the truth.
Historical Assessment
Duel Stone’s account of his aunt is plausible in light of what we know about the political-economic forces that were arrayed against Long and circumstances surrounding his death.
One thing pointing to a larger conspiracy is the fact that someone ordered a fancy copper casket fit to Huey’s measurements that arrived at Rabenhurst funeral home in Baton Rouge a few hours before the kingfish died.[26]
The doctor operating on Long, Arthur Vidrine[27], was negligent to the point many felt he was ordered to let Long die.[28] New Orleans mobster Frank Costello allegedly told Meyer Lansky “we could have saved [Long], but I didn’t see much use to it. The doctors had their orders to let him die.”[29]
Long’s secretary, Earle Christenberry alleged that “square dealers” who opposed Long had met at the swanky DeSoto hotel in New Orleans on July 21 and 22 at a “death conference” to plan every phase of his murder.[30] Representatives of FDR had assured the other conferees the president would undoubtedly “pardon the man who killed Long.”[31]
Weiss was supposedly at the meeting where the conspirators drew straws, though his name did not appear in the transcript. Christenberry, whose brother Herbert allegedly planted a dictaphone in the meeting room that allowed Long’s inner circle to hear everything, thought a Dr. Wise and Dr. Weiss were one and the same.[32]
Weiss’ family, though claimed that Weiss was at Judge Pavy’s home in Opelousas on July 21 and spent a full day treating patients on July 22.[33]
Christenberry’s dictaphone allegedly captured an unidentified voice stating at the meeting: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would take only one man, one gun and one bullet.”[34]
The DeSoto meeting could have laid the groundwork for the picking of straws at the Sackem & Rackem pool hall, where Weiss would have been present to have selected the straw and collaborated with others who drew the straw at the hotel. Or perhaps the hotel meeting was a substitute for the pool hall meeting in Stone’s novel, which was fictionalized somewhat.
Weiss had clearly wanted Long dead as he had expressed to friends strong feelings that Huey was “a very bad thing for Louisiana and that somebody ought to get rid of him” and told a patient “all I know is somebody’s going to have to kill Huey Long.[35]
A 1993 episode of the NBC show Unsolved Mysteries that included recreations and interviews with historians, family members of key protagonists and surviving witnesses, raised questions nevertheless as to whether Dr. Weiss fired any shots at Long and was the gunman who killed him.
Hosted by Robert Stack, the show questioned how Dr. Weiss could have got past security in the Louisiana capitol building with a gun and noted that, when Weiss’s brother and cousin went to the capitol after the shooting, they found that Weiss’s car was moved from where it had been parked, that someone had gone through Weiss’s medical bag, and that the gun appeared to have been taken from Weiss’s glove compartment and probably planted next to Dr. Weiss to help advance the illusion that he was the lone gunman.[36]
A security guard at the capitol said that someone other than Dr. Weiss had removed the gun from Weiss’s glove compartment and that a bodyguard had thrown the gun next to his body after he was shot 60+ times.[37]
The bullets that killed Long were ultimately found to be from a .38-caliber gun, while Dr. Weiss’s gun was .32-caliber.[38]
Two nurses at the Our Lady of the Lake hospital who treated Long before he succumbed to his wounds said that Long had a cut on his lip significantly and that he explained to them that the cut on his lip was caused by Weiss hitting him.
They also related that Long asked his bodyguards “who was that sob who hit me?” Not who shot him but who hit him, which is highly probative that Long knew that Weiss did not shoot him.[39]
It would be inconceivable to believe that Weiss struck Long and five bodyguards standing very close would allow Weiss time to draw a gun and shoot Long after he hit him.
During a long automobile trip after a raid, state police officers who were present at the scene, including John DeArmand, disclosed to Francis Grevenberg, Superintendent of the Louisiana State Police, that Weiss had punched Long and two bodyguards, Murphy Roden, a U.S. Navy officer and graduate of the FBI academy who became Louisiana’s Police Superintendent, and Joe Messina, who had a background in organized crime, had shot Long.[40]
Afterwards, in order to frame Weiss, Roden and Messina threw down a gun next to Weiss, which was later replaced by Weiss’ own gun [taken from his car].[41]
To further the coverup, Roden and Messina appear to have spread disinformation in claiming that Weiss had suffered a nervous breakdown during his medical studies in Paris, which was denied by Weiss’ family.[42]
Roden also claimed that the cut on Long’s lip resulted from a fever blister, and that Long had told Weiss that his uncle had “nigger blood,” which is uncorroborated.[43]
These kinds of rumors were all designed to reinforce the myth of Weiss as the deranged lone gunman à la Lee Harvey Oswald, which is what authorities wanted the public to believe.
Academic historians and textbooks assigned in college classes continue to advance this myth.[44]
The available historical evidence, however, is largely consistent with Jessica Lauren Fields’ account as told by her nephew, and points to a larger conspiracy.
If Weiss was part of the plot that Fields got wind of, he was likely deployed as a decoy who was then set up by the triggerman as the fall person or patsy.
The latter would fit the pattern of other assassinations in U.S. political history where the real culprits also got away.
Ed Reed in Requiem For a Kingfish (Baton Rouge, LA: Award Publications, 1986), 5. ↑
Long had produced a book My First Days in the White House where he telegraphed his passage of sweeping reforms that would have made him the most popular U.S. president in history. ↑
Duel Stone, Recently Exposed: The Huey P. Long Assassination Conspiracy Unveiled (Monroe, LA: Lloyds of Louisiana, 1997). ↑
Richard D. White Jr. Kingfish: The Reign of Huey P. Long (New York: Random House, 2006), xi; William Ivy Hair, The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1991), 312; Harvey G. Fields, A True History of the Life, Works, Assassination and Death of Huey Pierce Long (Fields Publishing, 1948). Arguing that corporate monopoly and maldistribution of wealth were the root causes of the Depression, Huey introduced an anti-monopoly bill in the U.S. Senate and proposed a 63 percent surtax on income greater than $2 million. His voting record as a Senator was consistently pro-labor, and he was one of the first Senators to publicly support federal government guarantees on bank deposits while successfully opposing an effort to give big banks greater freedom in establishing branch operations, thus protecting local banking. ↑
Richard Briley III, Death of the Kingfish! (Dallas: Triangle Publishing Company, 1959), 16, 17. Winn Parish, Louisiana, where Huey grew up, had a tradition of rebellion. It was strongly populist in the early 20th century and in 1912 gave more than 36% of its vote to socialist presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs. Bill Haywood, leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) claimed converts among sawmill workers there. Allegedly, Huey’s father was a socialist who read Appeal to Reason, the socialist party newspaper and The Rip-Saw, whose publishers “decided to run up the red flag of the working class and nail it to the mast.” He believed that the common working man was the 20th century equivalent of the Negro slaves held on bondage before the Civil War, saying he “had seen the domination of capital…what do these rich folks care for the poor man. They care nothin’ for him and his pain, his sickness nor his death.” Young Huey was exposed to the radical doctrines that prevailed at that time. Carleton Beals, The Story of Huey P. Long (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1935), 30; Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish, 44. During World War I, S.J. Harper wrote a political pamphlet Issues of the Day—Free Speech-Financial Slavery got him indicted on the espionage act along with other dissenters of the time. Huey defended Harper in court and in the press and almost went to jail for sedition. ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, vii. For more on Long’s political career, see T. Harry Williams, Huey Long: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), and White, Jr., Kingfish. Long reduced the number of illiterates in Louisiana by 175,000. Beals in The Story of Huey P. Long, 347, a largely sympathetic portrait, criticizes Long for failing to support meaningful legislation to improve wages and working conditions in the state despite garnering support from the American Federation of Labor (AFL), owing in part to his alliance with some of the state’s wealthiest business owners such as Jules Fisher, the shrimp king of Barataria who was known for exploitative labor practices. ↑
Long was hated by the Ku Klux Klan, though his appeal to Blacks had its limitations as Glen Jeansonne details in “Huey Long and Racism,” Louisiana History, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Spring 2008), 133-51. See also Beals, The Story of Huey P. Long, ch. 30. In the U.S. Senate, Long refused to support an anti-lynching bill. ↑
White Jr., Kingfish, 162. To counter the bias of the news media, Long created his own newspaper. Huey’s son Russell said that Huey “was uprooting a lot of old advantages and traditions that a powerful oligarchy had held onto for a hundred years and they didn’t like it.” ↑
Briley III, Death of the Kingfish!, 12. ↑
Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish. Conservatives continue to loathe Long. See eg. Ellen Carmichael, “The Truth About Huey Long,” The National Review, September 7, 2019, https://www.nationalreview.com/2019/09/truth-about-huey-long/. Cold War liberal Arthur Schlesinger Jr. told Ken Burns that Long was the closest thing to a dictator the U.S. had ever seen. Schlesinger said: “It’s a mistake to regard Huey Long as an ideological figure, a man committed to a program. I think Huey Long’s great passion was for power and money, and he stole a lot of money and accumulated a lot of power and destroyed all those who got in the way of these two ambitions.” ↑
Briley III, Death of the Kingfish!, 139. ↑
Beals, The Story of Huey P. Long, 412. Beals wrote that the “opposition in Louisiana had never had any program which would attract the support of anyone with anything over a fourteen-year old child’s I.Q.” ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, xiv. ↑
Hermann B. Deutch, The Huey Long Murder Case (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co, 1963), 9. ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 49, 50. ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 90. ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 130. ↑
Fields, A True History of the Life, Assassination and Death of Huey Pierce Long, 59; White Jr., Kingfish, 264. Yvonne taught French at LSU after studying at the Sorbonne. ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 145. Historian Glen Jeansonne, author of Messiah of the Masses: Huey P. Long and the Great Depression (New York: Pearson, 1997) concluded that Long was shot by Dr. Weiss and by his bodyguard. See also Fields, A True History of the Life, Works, Assassination and Death of Huey Pierce Long. ↑
Ed Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish (Baton Rouge, LA: Award Publications, 1986), 125, 229. A bill appropriating $100,000 for a Louisiana state investigation by Rep. Ben R. Simpson was withdrawn. ↑
Nancy E. Marion and Willard M. Oliver, Killing Congress: Assassinations, Attempted Assassinations and Other Violence Against Members of Congress (KY: Lexington Books, 2014), 55; Briley III, Death of the Kingfish, 11. Odom, who Riley says was thought to be in on the murder plot, blamed the theft of the report no a “low-life Long supporter,” which was obviously an attempt to malign Long’s supporters. Why would Long supporters steal a report that identified their leaders killer(s)? ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 157, 158. ↑
John Hill, “Long Body Said Key to Killing, Best Clues May Lie With Kingfish,” The News Star, West Monroe, LA, June 30, 1991, in Stone, Recently Exposed, 289. Interestingly, in late 1935, one could buy a copy of the 50-page booklet entitled “Why Huey Long Was Killed!!” for 50 cents and learn the “full story” and “startling accusations” about a “deep laid plot conceived in iniquity and completed in sin.” ↑
Stone, Recently Exposed, 157, 158. ↑
Idem. ↑
Briley III, Death of the Kingfish!, 10. Prior to his death, Long had his presidential campaign war chest stolen from the Riggs National Bank in Washington which adds to the perception of a wider plot. ↑
Vidrine was not an incompetent surgeon generally. A graduate of Tulane medical school, he was a Rhodes scholar and director of Louisiana State University (LSU) medical school. ↑
Deutch, The Huey Long Murder Case, 142. Deutch suggests that the decision of Dr. Arthur Vidrine to operate on Huey by a frontal incision made it impossible for him to save Huey’s life. To that point, Reed in Requiem For a Kingfish, 4 describes a 1984 public forum at Tulane medical school where Dr. Frank Loria, charged that the surgery on Long was bungled and that the failure to examine Long’s kidneys and the structure around them doomed Long to death. ↑
Reed in Requiem For a Kingfish, 124. Costello got lucrative concessions for slot machines in New Orleans from members of the Long machine, though may have been in league with Long’s opposition. ↑
Briley III, Death of the Kingfish, 11; David H. Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot (Lafayette: Center For Louisiana Studies, 1993), 226, 234; Beals, The Story of Huey P. Long, 405. Long told Senator Vic Donalbey before his death: “I’ve had a hell of a fight down there. I feel that they’ll get me yet.” ↑
Deutsch, The Huey Long Murder Case, 3. District Attorney John Fred Odom admitted to being at the meeting. Four Louisiana Congressmen who opposed Long were also there: Jared Y. Sanders (D), Cleveland Dear (D), Numa Montet (D) and John. Sandlin (D). ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 234. ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 234. ↑
Deutsch, The Huey Long Murder Case, 36. Participants at the DeSoto hotel meeting admitted that there was talk of killing Long at the meeting, though they claimed that it was common to have such discussions. Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish, 119. Former Governor John M. Parker stated that “well, it looks like the only way we can get rid of Huey Long is to assassinate him.” ↑
Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish, 191. Long biographer Harry T. Williams alluded to a meeting between Weiss and four members of an organization named “The Minutemen” whose participants drew straws to see who would kill Long. It was Weiss who drew the short straw to the dismay of his fellow conspirators who believed that Weiss might fail in his mission (and so they lay plans for an alternative plan in which Weiss may have been set up as the patsy). ↑
See Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 148. Zinman also interviewed Weiss’ brother, Tom Ed Weiss who told the same story as in the Unsolved Mysteries episode. ↑
Federal Judge Lansing Mitchell, General Guerre’s attorney, acknowledged that Guerre admitted to him that Weiss’ gun was removed from his car after the shooting. ↑
After excavating Weiss’ body in 1991, famed forensic scientist and homicide investigator James Starr concluded that the fatal bullet that killed Long could not have been fired by the weapon alleged to have been carried by Carl Weiss. As part of the coverup, the mortician at Rabenhorst Funeral Home where Long’s body was brought described to historian Ed Reed in detail how Dr. Clarence Lorio removed a large bullet from Long’s body at the funeral home. He was given the bullet by Lorio, and he in turn gave it to his assistant Jack Umbehagen. Umbehagen’s relatives confirmed that he had a large caliber spent bullet on his watch chain for years describing it as the bullet that killed Huey Long. Weiss’ gun was a rather small .32 caliber. Coleman Vidrine Jr. explained how his father told him that Dr. Arthur Vidrine, his uncle, had given his father, Coleman Sr. a .38 caliber spent bullet for safekeeping, telling him that this was the bullet removed from Long’s body during surgery. Arthur’s instructions to Coleman Sr. were to keep the bullet in a safe place and tell no one about it, obviously because it was a different caliber than Weiss’ gun. Reed, Requiem For a Kingfish, 156; Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 300. ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 203. The nurses included Jewel O’Neal, a student nurse, Dr. Joseph A. Sabateur Jr. who acted as a nurse that day. The abrasion on Long’s lip was also seen by Dr. Henry McKowen, the anesthesiologist who treated him after he was shot. O’Neal said she overheard Long explain the cut on his lip by stating “that’s where he hit me.” ↑
DeArmand and the other police said that Police Superintendent Louis F. Guerre (1936-1940) had come on the scene and told the troopers that the .25 caliber gun they had planted on Weiss was too small as Long had been struck by a .38 caliber gun, so the troopers had it replaced with a .32 caliber. When the next day, Grevenberg said he called the troopers into his office and told them to repeat their story for the state police attorney, they had a sudden memory lapse. It was an unwritten rule generally among state troopers not to talk about the Long slaying. Louis F. Guerre allegedly gathered all witnesses to Long’s shooting right afterwards and admonished them to close ranks in support of the idea that Weiss was the lone gunman when evidence indicated that Long was felled by bullets from his bodyguards. ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 329; Deutch, The Huey Long Murder Case, 139. One of Long’s bodyguards, Elliot D’Evereux Coleman, a former prohibition agent who served as sheriff of rural Tensas Parish in northeast Louisiana from 1936 to 1960, claimed to have shot at Weiss twice and missed one of the shots “striking someone else,” indicating he may have been the one to hit Long. Deutch, The Huey Long Murder Case, 131. Cleveland Dear, an anti-Long politician, gave a speech after Long’s death stating that one of Long’s bodyguards—thought to be Joe Messina, a one-time foot soldier for Al Capone who had been supplied to Long as part of an accomodation Long made with gambling interests in Louisiana —had been placed in a mental institution where he was observed muttering over and over again that he had kiled his best friend. In 1989, journalist Martin Sieff wrote that he met an 89-year-old courtly Louisiana retired doctor in Bucharest, Romania who was told by a Baton Rouge priest on his deathbed that the padre had himself years before taken the deathbed confession of one of Long’s loyal but incompetent bodyguards. This dying muscleman had confessed that when the alleged killer, respected physician Dr. Carl Weiss entered the state Capitol, he was carrying in his jacket not a gun but a bulky legal deed to sign with Senator Long to end an acrimonious and well-known land dispute between them. However, Long’s bodyguards thought he was pulling out a gun and riddled the poor doctor with more than 40 bullets. They also mortally wounded their own boss by accident. However, really it was likely not an accident. Martin Sieff, “A Short History of Political Assassinations in America: From Alexander Hamilton to Donald Trump,” Pluralia, September 5, 2024, https://pluralia.forumverona.com/en/a/a-short-history-of-political-assassinations-in-america-from-alexander-hamilton-to-donald-trump/ ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 329. Roden had invented a story suggesting Weiss had covered his gun with his hat as he walked towards Long and claimed to have saved Huey from being shot through the heart after grabbing Weiss’ gun. ↑
Zinman, The Day Huey Long Was Shot, 263, 329. ↑
Columbia University historian, Eric Foner, for example, in the popular college textbook, Give Me Liberty! An American History, Vol. 2: from 1865, 6th ed. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2019), 498 writes that Long had been on the verge of announcing a run for the presidency when “the son of a defeated political rival [ie. Carl Weiss] assassinated him in 1935.” ↑
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About the Author
Jeremy Kuzmarov holds a Ph.D. in American history from Brandeis University and has taught at numerous colleges across the United States. He is regularly sought out as an expert on U.S. history and politics for radio and TV programs and co-hosts a radio show on New York Public Radio and on Progressive Radio News Network called “Uncontrolled Opposition.” He is Managing Editor of CovertAction Magazine and is the author of six books on U.S. foreign policy, including Obama’s Unending Wars (Clarity Press, 2019), The Russians Are Coming, Again, with John Marciano (Monthly Review Press, 2018), Warmonger. How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory From Bush II to Biden (Clarity Press, 2023); and with Dan Kovalik, Syria: Anatomy of Regime Change (Baraka Books, 2025). Besides these books, Kuzmarov has published hundreds of articles and contributed to numerous edited volumes, including one in the prestigious Oxford History of Counterinsurgency . He can be reached at jkuzmarov2@gmail.com and found on substack here.
