It must not be forgotten that Long too had a highly proficient intelligence service, and that therefore he was beyond question well aware that the T-men were busily seeking evidence to be used against him. He knew who their operatives in Louisiana were, where their headquarters office in the Masonic Temple Building was, and in general, exactly how the Irey unit functioned. He had no illusions about their knowledge of his Riggs Bank safety-deposit box. He knew how they had traced such depositories in other cases, and also that, in the past, variations of “this money does not belong to me, it is merely the political campaign (etc., etc.) fund of our association” had proved to be no valid defense.
Whether or not that is why he stripped the Riggs Bank box of its contents no one can say. But it is certain that if Long had lived, and Dan Moody had impounded the contents of this box for evidence of unreported income, he would have made a water haul.... The T-men brought to trial only one other of the indictments pending against Long bigwigs; they considered it their strongest case, but the jurors found the defendant “not guilty.” It was not until the government filed charges of using the mails to defraud that convictions were obtained some three or four years later.
What it all came down to is this: the apparently impregnable political structure created by Huey Long, and the hard-and-fast line of cleavage that separated Long from anti-Long while the Kingfish was present to maintain his dictatorial hold on all phases of his organization, began to disintegrate at 4:06 A.M. of September 10, 1935. As is almost invariably the case, the dictatorship died with the dictator. After the Leche landslide majority of 1936 the governor-designate epitomized the result rather ruefully by observing:
“They didn’t vote for or against a live governor; only for or against a dead senator.”
Today the Long faction, what there is of it, is just another loosely knit political coalition. The number of those who still recall the self-anointed Kingfish of the Lodge becomes smaller with each passing day.... In the spring of 1962 Johnny Carson, then a television quizmaster, asked a couple of contestants on his “Who Do You Trust?” program this question:
“What statesman who was elected governor in 1928, was assassinated at Baton Rouge in 1935?”
The two contestants, who had otherwise proved themselves reasonably well informed, simply looked blank. Neither of them could give the answer.
Before many more years have gone by, Huey Pierce Long will be just another vague figure out of a history text, and there will no longer be any disputes about the architect of his assassination, the manner in which it was carried out, or the motives that prompted it. But in the meantime——