Almost without formal education himself—he never finished high school—he was like one possessed in his determination to put schooling within the reach of all by providing free textbooks, free transportation, free lunches, and the like. The medical school he founded at Louisiana State University, as though merely to spite Tulane for not conferring upon him at least one honorary degree, has won a recognized place as a great center of research and instruction; it fills what admittedly became a genuine need ... and while today’s income and inheritance levies do not set arbitrary limits like those proposed by Long in the early 1930s, the underlying principle of decentralization of wealth by heavy upper-bracket taxes is basically what he advocated.
None of this mitigates the heritage of corruption in public life that he bequeathed to Louisiana, or his ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and other reprehensible qualities. But he was very far from being merely another gangster.
The fact that the sons of both men whose lives ended so abruptly in September 1935 followed brilliantly in their fathers’ footsteps may well be part of this same pattern of paradox.
Russell Long, only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, enlisted in the Navy as a seaman during World War II, serving with distinction in the invasions of Africa, Sicily, and Italy (at Anzio), and advancing through promotion until he was a lieutenant at the time of his demobilization in 1945. In the election of January 1948 he supported the successful gubernatorial race of his uncle, Earl K. Long. In September of that same year, when Senator John H. Overton died with two years of his term yet to run, Governor Long supported his nephew for election to the vacancy.
He barely won by the slimmest sort of majority. The city of New Orleans cast a majority of twenty-five thousand votes against him. But he received much more ponderable support when he ran for the full Senate term two years later, and a more impressive vote still when he was re-elected in 1956. Finally, he was swept back into office in 1962 by a veritable landslide, receiving some 84 per cent of the votes cast.
In part this was a response to his generally independent stand on both local and national issues. In 1952, for example, he supported one of his father’s uncompromising opponents, T. Hale Boggs, for governor against the candidate backed by his uncle Earl, then nearing the end of his first term as governor. But four years later he vigorously supported Earl against Mayor deLesseps Morrison of New Orleans when the latter made the first of two unsuccessful races for the governorship.
Beyond doubt, at least part of Russell’s steadily growing strength was also due to the unmistakable fashion in which he proved himself an exceptionally able member of the Senate, being one of the first ranking figures in United States officialdom to recognize in Castro’s rise to power a sinister portent, and to advocate immediate revision by this country of the sugar quota to counter the Fidelista drive toward Communist affiliation.
Following his sweeping victory in the late summer of 1962, he issued a modest victory statement in which he said in part:
“The most striking feature of my [re-election] was the majority recorded for me in New Orleans. In some of the wards where I had been defeated by a margin of seven to one fourteen years ago I was given a majority of as much as six to one. This could never have happened without a lot of people casting their first vote for a man who bears my family name.... I shall always appreciate those tolerant and generous persons who have seen fit to endorse me as the first member of my family to enjoy their support.”
Dr. Carl Austin Weiss III, who was but three months old at the time of his father’s death, was taken to New York by his mother when she left Louisiana to make her home in the East. He was graduated from Columbia in 1958, and set out to make general surgery his field of medical practice. He was a full-time resident at St. Vincent’s hospital for two years, but in July 1961 decided to specialize in orthopedic surgery, and entered the same hospital—Bellevue—where his father had been chief of clinic thirty years before.