“The thing was delivered in due course, and I put it on and went to his room and showed it to him, and suggested that on occasion it might be wise to wear it as a protection against some unpredictable attack. He told me to send the damn thing back, adding ‘it would be ridiculous for me to wear it. I don’t need no goddam bullet-proof vest.’ So I sent it back and that was the end of it.
“I have never spoken about this incident from that day to this. I didn’t think another soul knew about it. But evidently the story must have leaked out somewhere; from the manufacturers, I suppose. At any rate, I was the one that wore the bullet-proof vest, one day for a few minutes. He never did in all his life.”
Seymour Weiss, the sartorial mentor who weaned Long away from the flashy clothes in which he first came to public notice, put it more succinctly.
“Huey wouldn’t have known what a bullet-proof vest looked like,” he said.
Other aspects of the available evidence cover not merely the category of stories about Weiss’s bullet missing its target, being deflected by a bullet-proof vest, etc., but the next category as well. This embraces what is far and away the most widely believed and oft repeated version of what took place. It holds that a bullet from the gun of a bodyguard inflicted the mortal wound of whose effects Huey Long died, even though Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber missile likewise struck him.
Three points are the ones most frequently stressed by those who cling to this theory.
The first is that “no small-caliber bullet was ever found.” This has been interpreted to mean that the Weiss bullet was still in Long’s body and, no autopsy being authorized, was buried with him. There is general agreement on one point. The fatal injury was sustained near the wound of exit, in the region of the right kidney. It was there that a continuing hemorrhage was the immediate cause of death.
The argument runs that Weiss’s bullet of small caliber never having been found, and therefore remaining in the body of the victim, the wound of exit must have been made by some other bullet. No other bullet was fired by anyone except the bodyguards, who discharged a wild barrage of pistol fire which left the body of Dr. Weiss riddled with wounds, and pocked the marble walls of the corridor with bullet scars which for years official guides pointed out to visitors touring the capitol. The injury near the point of exit was the only demonstrably fatal one; ergo, a bodyguard’s bullet killed Long.
The view that the Kingfish perished from the effects of a bullet-wound inflicted by one of his own guards also had a certain superficial plausibility that appealed strongly to dedicated leaders of anti-Long factionalism and their followers. It carried with it an overtone of Matthew’s “All-they-that-take-the-sword-shall-perish-with-the-sword” retributive justice. Finally it was labored in season and out by the Home Rule campaign speakers who sought to rid themselves of the Assassination Ticket stigma by proving that Long had died at the hands of one of his own men.
It would be difficult to overestimate the fashion in which all this tended to perpetuate what began as a campaign legend. For example, Elmer Irey, whose career as postal inspector and finally chief of the Treasury Department’s Intelligence Division spanned more than a generation, assuredly must be accounted a professional in the realm of gathering, sifting, and assaying evidence. Yet in his book he reports that——