Of my own knowledge I can testify that I have seen him in his suites at the Roosevelt and at the Heidelberg when, after breakfast, he bathed and dressed for the street, that I have traveled with him during his campaigns through Louisiana and through Arkansas, that I have been with him in his home on Audubon Boulevard, and that never, from the day I first met him in 1919 to the day of his death in 1935, have I known him to wear anything that remotely resembled a bullet-proof vest.
But to make assurance doubly sure, I checked this point with Earle Christenberry and with Seymour Weiss, his two closest friends.
“I can’t imagine how that story got about,” Christenberry said, “but I know exactly on what it must be based. About six months before Huey died I got the bright idea that it would be a smart thing for him, when he went out stumping the country in the approaching presidential campaign, to wear a bullet-proof vest. So without saying a word to him about it, I wrote to Elliott Wisbrod in Chicago, a manufacturer of such equipment, and asked that a vest of this type be sent to me for the Senator’s approval.
“The thing was delivered in due course, and I put it on and went to his room and showed it to him, and suggested that on occasion it might be wise to wear it as a protection against some unpredictable attack. He told me to send the damn thing back, adding ‘it would be ridiculous for me to wear it. I don’t need no goddam bullet-proof vest.’ So I sent it back and that was the end of it.
“I have never spoken about this incident from that day to this. I didn’t think another soul knew about it. But evidently the story must have leaked out somewhere; from the manufacturers, I suppose. At any rate, I was the one that wore the bullet-proof vest, one day for a few minutes. He never did in all his life.”
Seymour Weiss, the sartorial mentor who weaned Long away from the flashy clothes in which he first came to public notice, put it more succinctly.
“Huey wouldn’t have known what a bullet-proof vest looked like,” he said.
Other aspects of the available evidence cover not merely the category of stories about Weiss’s bullet missing its target, being deflected by a bullet-proof vest, etc., but the next category as well. This embraces what is far and away the most widely believed and oft repeated version of what took place. It holds that a bullet from the gun of a bodyguard inflicted the mortal wound of whose effects Huey Long died, even though Dr. Weiss’s small-caliber missile likewise struck him.