There is likewise the statement of the first physician to examine the gravely wounded man at the hospital, when Judge O’Connor voiced the belief that Long had been shot in the mouth because of the bloody spittle that stained his clothing. After an examination the young doctor declared “that is just where he hit himself against something.”
There is the unanimous testimony of Justice Fournet, Sheriff Coleman, and Murphy Roden that the assailant later identified as Dr. Weiss did have “a small black pistol” and did fire it, as well as the testimony of Frampton, Justice Fournet, and Coleman that this pistol was lying a few inches from Dr. Weiss’s lifeless hand immediately after the shooting.
But above all, the belief that the young physician was unarmed and merely struck Long with his fist is proved fallacious by one circumstance: the identity of the bullet-riddled body on the floor of the corridor where the shooting took place was not established until long after the weapon was found, in fact, not until the coroner arrived and examined the contents of the dead man’s wallet.
It goes without saying that if Dr. Weiss came unarmed to the capitol, some other person must have brought his gun there from the car where his father testified he carried it. The argument is advanced that this was done by a bodyguard, a highway patrolman, or an officer of the state bureau of identification, to direct suspicion away from the “fact” that a wild shot from one of the bodyguards was the only missile that inflicted a mortal wound on Long.
But this presupposes that those who could not identify a riddled body on the marble floor of a capitol corridor were none the less able to pick out the slain man’s automobile from among the hundreds, possibly thousands, of cars parked on the capitol grounds and along every nearby street, search it for a weapon, and place that weapon surreptitiously where it was picked up by the authorities moments after the shooting. This so far transcends even the most remote possibility, that any version based on the assumption that Weiss, unarmed, merely struck at Long with his fist, can be discarded out of hand.
The second category includes all versions of the proposition that Carl Weiss did fire one shot, but missed. There is even one account which holds that, at the time, Long was wearing a bullet-proof vest which Weiss’s small-caliber bullet could not penetrate.
Everyone who knew Huey Long well, who traveled with him on his campaign tours, stopped at the same hotels with him, and so on, can testify to the fact that he was never known to wear a bullet-proof vest. He surrounded himself with armed guards wherever he went; a cadre of militiamen in full uniform, with steel helmets and side arms, accompanied him to the washroom in what is now the building of the National Bank of Commerce while he was conducting one of his murder-plot probes there. But he wore no armor.
Of my own knowledge I can testify that I have seen him in his suites at the Roosevelt and at the Heidelberg when, after breakfast, he bathed and dressed for the street, that I have traveled with him during his campaigns through Louisiana and through Arkansas, that I have been with him in his home on Audubon Boulevard, and that never, from the day I first met him in 1919 to the day of his death in 1935, have I known him to wear anything that remotely resembled a bullet-proof vest.
But to make assurance doubly sure, I checked this point with Earle Christenberry and with Seymour Weiss, his two closest friends.
“I can’t imagine how that story got about,” Christenberry said, “but I know exactly on what it must be based. About six months before Huey died I got the bright idea that it would be a smart thing for him, when he went out stumping the country in the approaching presidential campaign, to wear a bullet-proof vest. So without saying a word to him about it, I wrote to Elliott Wisbrod in Chicago, a manufacturer of such equipment, and asked that a vest of this type be sent to me for the Senator’s approval.