Epilogue
“Finality is not the language of politics.”
——DISRAELI
To the Huey Long murder case the preceding chapters offer a solution which fits every determinate fact of what took place in Baton Rouge on September 8, 1935, everything pertinent that led up to the climactic moment of violence, and what followed. Yet it goes without saying that many will reject this rationalization of available evidence. The arguments will go on and on.
We are prone to cherish certain myths. As though in wish-fulfillment we still tell our children Parson Weems’s absurd fable of the boy Washington, the cherry tree, and “I did it with my little hatchet.” Similarly, the myth of the bodyguard’s bullet, product of a compulsive necessity for political escape from the onus of assassination, will retain adherents and win fresh believers, despite the obvious fact that wherever else the truth may lie, the bodyguard-bullet hypothesis is false.
Paradox remains a continuing footnote to Huey Long’s career. Surrounded by fanatically loyal bodyguards, he was none the less done to death by a shy, retiring young stranger in whom neither he nor his myrmidons recognized any trace of menace. His injuries were critical and might in any case have proved fatal; but it was a decision on the part of the same Arthur Vidrine whom Huey Long had elevated to high command which sealed the Kingfish’s doom. True, the alternative Dr. Vidrine chose was one many another physician, confronted by the same circumstances, might have selected inasmuch as mere delay in taking action could have proved fatal.
On the other hand, it is not to be disputed that Dr. Vidrine’s decision to operate by a frontal incision made it impossible for him or any one else thereafter to save Huey Long’s life. In consequence, he fell under the ban of the Long faction’s permanent and extreme displeasure. As soon as he took office in 1936, Governor Leche appointed Dr. George Bel to the superintendency of Charity Hospital, thus automatically displacing Vidrine from that position. Within the year, Dr. James Monroe Smith, president of the State University, speaking for its Board of Supervisors, notified him that Dr. Rigney D’Aunoy had been made acting dean of the medical school but that he—Dr. Vidrine—might retain a place on the faculty as professor of gynecology.
Rather than accept such a demotion he resigned in August of 1937. Returning to Ville Platte, he founded a private hospital there, and maintained it until his retirement in ill health from active practice in 1950. Five years later he died.
Death also thwarted Long’s design to place the Pavy gerrymander at the head of what became his last demonstration of dictatorship as the legislature’s Act Number One. It became Act Number Three, since the first two were concurrent resolutions, one expressing the grief of House and Senate over the leader’s untimely end, the other creating a committee to select a burial place on the capitol grounds for what remained of his physical presence among them.