Congress did adjourn in due course, and now it is time to follow Long almost hour by hour through the final ten days of his life, assembling an unbiased chronicle in order to dispel myths and reveal truths about his assassination. His first concern was the publication of his book. His only other fixed commitment before having Governor Allen call the legislature into special session for the enactment of a final dossier of dictatorship laws, was delivery of a Labor Day address at Oklahoma City on September 2. He had accepted this invitation gladly, since it would afford him an opportunity to couple evangelistic grandiloquence about wealth-sharing with kind words about blind Senator Thomas Gore, who faced stiff opposition in his campaign for re-election.

Earle Christenberry was left in charge of the Washington office, where he was to pack for transportation all documents and records which might be needed to elect a Long-endorsed governor and other state officials in Louisiana. Meanwhile, Mr. Long with the manuscript of his book and three of his bodyguards went to New York for a few days of relaxation.

It was also part of his long-range design to seek the Democratic Party’s nomination for president at the 1936 convention. To be sure, he was under no misconception as to the sort of fate this bid would encounter. For one thing, Roosevelt’s personal popularity had reached new heights as his first term drew to a close. His nomination for a second term was all but inevitable. Long had attacked not only the administration as such. He was carrying on corrosive personal feuds with Postmaster General Farley, Interior Secretary Ickes, NRA Administrator Hugh Johnson, Senate Majority Leader Joe Robinson, and a host of other party bigwigs.

Naturally, Louisiana’s Kingfish realized fully that these leaders, controlling the party machinery in the convention of 1936, would see to it not merely that F.D.R. received a virtually unanimous nomination for a second term, but that even were Roosevelt eliminated from contention, Huey Long’s effort to become the party’s standard bearer would be rejected.

Unquestionably, that is exactly what the Kingfish wanted. He already had a virtually crackproof national organization in his swiftly expanding Share-Our-Wealth clubs. The growth of this movement was now so rapid that his staff found difficulty in keeping pace with it. So valuable had its name become that both “Share Our Wealth” and “Share the Wealth” were copyrighted in Earle Christenberry’s name.

Long’s purpose was to rally from both the Republican and Democratic camps the many who were still embittered by their struggles to escape the Great Depression. Times had undeniably bettered. The economy would reach a peak figure in 1937. But even the WPA “shovel leaners” were convinced that the government owed them much more than was being doled out on payday, and were entranced by the vision of a future in which Huey Long would soak the rich to provide for each toiler, however lowly his station, an income of $5000 a year and a span of mules.

In the prairie corn and wheat belts, in the Dakotas and in Oklahoma, in all the places where Long had preached wealth-sharing while campaigning for Roosevelt, desperate landowners on the verge of eviction from mortgaged or tax-delinquent acres their forebears had carved out of the wilderness, were still rallying their friends and neighbors to help keep potential bidders from foreclosure auctions. These too would recall Long’s clamorous efforts to bring the Frazier-Lemke bill to a vote, and the conservatives’ success in holding it back from the floor. One and all, they would read My First Days in the White House, and they would learn in its pages how readily a wealth-sharing miracle could come to pass if only Huey Long were president....

None the less, publishers were chary of bringing out the book under their imprint. To Long this was no matter for concern. Over a period of at least three years a war chest for the presidential campaign he planned to wage in 1936 had been growing steadily. It included not merely money—a levy on the salaries of all public employees under his domination in Louisiana, and major campaign contributions from corporations that felt themselves obligated to show tangible appreciation for past favors or sought to insure themselves against future reprisal—it included also a solid stockpile of affidavits about the boondoggles of divers federal agencies. Hard-pressed men, driven to almost any lengths by the crying need of their families for such bare necessities as food and shelter, were being forced to promise they would “praise Roosevelt and cuss Long” before being granted a WPA laborer’s pittance.

At the outset of Long’s senatorial career this entire trove of cash and documentary dynamite was kept in some strongboxes of the Mayflower Hotel, where the Senator first established his capitol residence. But for various reasons, at least one of which was the hotel’s refusal to bar his political opponents from registering there while in Washington, his relations with the Mayflower deteriorated rapidly to the point where he moved to the Broadmoor, at 3601 Connecticut Avenue. The view from one of the windows of his apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park charmed him. At the same time the campaign cash and documents were transferred to the safety-deposit vaults of the Riggs National Bank, where the Senator kept a Washington checking account, or rather, where Earle Christenberry kept it for him.

Hence the question of paying for the publication of My First Days in the White House presented no problem. For that matter, neither did the seeming permanence of a few scattered centers of anti-Long resistance in Louisiana. Since the dictatorship laws enacted during the previous twelvemonth made it virtually impossible to defeat Long proposals in the legislature, or Long candidates at the polls, the fixity of a few isolated opposition enclaves was desirable because, to quote Mr. Long, “it gives me somebody to cuss out, and I can’t make a speech that’s worth a damn unless I’m raising hell about what my enemies are doing.”