Admittedly, Dr. Chester A. Williams, Jr., the present coroner of East Baton Rouge parish, cannot be regarded as a Long partisan. It was he who pronounced Earl Long insane in 1959 while the latter was still governor, and committed him to a mental institution. Yet he set down the following restrained obiter dictum after transcribing and studying the microfilmed hospital chart of Huey Long’s final hours:
“Most of the doctors who lived in Baton Rouge and are still living do not feel that Dr. Weiss shot Long.”
In a strictly technical sense, only Carl Weiss himself, his lips irrevocably sealed within seconds after he did what “his family and those under him,” not to mention his professional associates, still regard him as incapable of doing, could have given a conclusive solution to this paradox.
Since that is out of the question, the best that can now be done is to list the various possible motives which either have been or could be considered as impelling Dr. Weiss to sacrifice his own life in order to put an end to that of Huey Long. From the roster thus compiled, the obviously impossible and then the logically infirm assumptions can be eliminated one by one, to see whether any hypothesis which might fit such of the facts as are ascertainable will withstand searching scrutiny.
Four motives have been or can be imputed to Dr. Weiss in connection with the shooting of Long. They are:
The young physician was the executioner chosen by a group of plotters in a cabal of which he was a member, to carry out the death sentence there secretly decreed against an otherwise invincible political oppressor.
The assassination was an act of reprisal for the gerrymander which would bring to an abrupt end the twenty-eight-year judicial career of Yvonne Weiss’s father through a fraudulent mockery of legislative procedure deliberately rigged to deny the parish of St. Landry the free exercise of home rule.
An abstract idealism inspired a quixotic young patriot to sacrifice himself on the altar of the common weal by destroying a dictatorship through the death of the autocrat who stood at its head.
Haunted by anxiety born of a suspicion that, in campaigning against Judge Pavy, Long would raise the specter of an all-but-forgotten and long since refuted racial slur against the Pavy family, Dr. Weiss paid with his life for the assurance that libelous words resurrecting the false stigma would never be uttered.
The first of these four propositions can be given short shrift. The Senate speech in which Long sought to implicate the Roosevelt administration, and in effect President Roosevelt himself, in a “plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” was the latest of several revelations charging others with plotting his murder. It happened also to be the last one because within a month after making this charge in the Senate, he was assassinated.