Kingfish was thus tapped for a vaulting effort to become America’s Duce or Führer when violence put an abrupt end to the design and to the life of its protagonist. Official records in the coroner’s office at Baton Rouge give no details beyond those embodied on a printed form, whose blank spaces were filled in to note the name, age, bodily measurements, color, and sex of the decedent, together with a curt notation ascribing death to a “gunshot wound (homicidal).”
Nearly thirty years have passed since those notations were entered on an official form to be filed in the archives of East Baton Rouge parish. Death has by now claimed many of the witnesses whose testimony might have been of value in determining what actually took place in the marble-walled corridor where the Kingfish, hurrying along with characteristically flapping stride, received his mortal wound. But many other presential witnesses yet survive.
No inquest worthy of the name has ever been conducted to decide and record officially what the circumstances of Huey Long’s assassination were. The family refused to authorize a necropsy. The death of Dr. Vidrine in 1955 was a portent of the rapid and inevitable approach of the day when the last eyewitness would have passed on. No one would then be able to relate at first hand any detail of the violent moment which averted a conflict pitting the two best-known public figures in the United States against one another for virtual sovereignty over this nation.
That violent moment would thus pass into history as a confused welter of mutually contradictory versions, of rumors, half truths, and whole untruths. Amid these the Huey Long murder case would remain an unsolved and probably insoluble mystery. It was for this reason that I undertook several years ago to gather and collate whatever eyewitness testimony might still be available. I had known Senator Long and his family for many years. Of the newsmen who heard Huey Long make his first state-wide political address at Hot Well on July 4, 1919, I am the only one still actively reporting the course of events and the doings of public figures. I had accompanied him not only on any number of his state campaigns, but also on the remarkable Caraway campaign of 1932.
I knew nearly all of his intimates, and was on first-name terms with most of them then in the easy camaraderie of journalism. Without exception every surviving witness I approached has given me his version of what took place in the capitol corridor at the time of the shooting. With but one exception every witness who was present in the operating room and in the sickroom where Huey later died, has told me all that he saw, heard, or did on that occasion.
These several accounts do not agree at every point. Indeed, here and there they are rather widely at variance. For that very reason they merit belief. Such differences validate the integrity of testimony so given. Had these accounts tallied in every minute particular after the passage of more than a quarter of a century, or even after the passage of twenty-five minutes, they would have been suspect, and properly so. It is axiomatic that eyewitness accounts of the same event invariably differ, even when given at once. The classic illustration of this is the prize fight at whose conclusion one judge awards the victory to Boxer A, the referee calls the combat a draw, and the other judge selects Boxer B as the winner.
The fact that there is no variance whatever between accounts given by several witnesses, especially when their testimony concerns an occurrence involving violence, is as certain an indication of collusive fraud as is the fact that two signatures, ostensibly penned by the same individual, show not the slightest difference in form, shading, or pen pressure at any point. Unless one or both such signatures are forgeries, absolute identity is a practical impossibility.
The question of whether or not the Kingfish could have wrested political control of the United States from Franklin Roosevelt became academic when a bullet found its mark in his body. But a glance at the highlights of his career offers some of the clues to what happened to him on September 8, 1935.