13 —— The Motive
“Life is the art of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises.”
——SAMUEL BUTLER
The difficulty encountered when seeking to rationalize the assassination of Huey Long is implicit in two circumstances. The first is the total absence of fact or testimony about the motive for it, so that conclusions are necessarily based on surmise.
The second is the apparently irreconcilable disparity between the known nature of Carl Weiss, the man, and the obvious nature of his act. Why would someone whose closest personal and professional associates unhesitatingly declare him to have been incapable of any dark deed of violence commit a murder by shooting down an unsuspecting victim as if from ambush? What could conceivably account for the metamorphosis of a mild, retiring young man, happily married and fulfilled in the birth of a dearly beloved son, into an indomitably resolute killer, ready to sacrifice his own life, rich with promise, in order to take the life of another?
In this instance the problem is not merely one of drawing sufficient conclusions from insufficient premises. Conclusions must be drawn from two mutually contradictory sets of insufficient premises.
Barry O’Meara, the Irish ship’s surgeon aboard the vessel that brought Napoleon to St. Helena, volunteered to remain there with him, but was one of the first to be deported when Sir Hudson Lowe subsequently took over the governorship of the island. He was one of the fallen emperor’s few confidants during the desolate days of that terminal exile. In his memoirs of their association he quoted Napoleon as saying:
“A man is known by his conduct to his wife, to his family, and to those under him.”
The members of Carl Weiss’s family are still not convinced, or at least are still unwilling to admit, that he took Long’s life. The nurses who were his principal subordinates, and many of whom still survive, looked on him not merely as a physician, but as a teacher. To this day they agree he could not have done what all available evidence conclusively proves that he did.
Miss Theoda Carriere, the first registered nurse called to attend Senator Long after the shooting, now lives in a piny woods retreat near Amite. “Dr. Weiss just wasn’t the kind of person who would do a thing like that,” she insists. “He taught us chemistry when we were in training, and every girl in our class looked on him as one of the gentlest and kindest of men. None of us believe he was the one who shot Long.”