Whether or not that is why he stripped the Riggs Bank box of its contents no one can say. But it is certain that if Long had lived, and Dan Moody had impounded the contents of this box for evidence of unreported income, he would have made a water haul.... The T-men brought to trial only one other of the indictments pending against Long bigwigs; they considered it their strongest case, but the jurors found the defendant “not guilty.” It was not until the government filed charges of using the mails to defraud that convictions were obtained some three or four years later.
What it all came down to is this: the apparently impregnable political structure created by Huey Long, and the hard-and-fast line of cleavage that separated Long from anti-Long while the Kingfish was present to maintain his dictatorial hold on all phases of his organization, began to disintegrate at 4:06 A.M. of September 10, 1935. As is almost invariably the case, the dictatorship died with the dictator. After the Leche landslide majority of 1936 the governor-designate epitomized the result rather ruefully by observing:
“They didn’t vote for or against a live governor; only for or against a dead senator.”
Today the Long faction, what there is of it, is just another loosely knit political coalition. The number of those who still recall the self-anointed Kingfish of the Lodge becomes smaller with each passing day.... In the spring of 1962 Johnny Carson, then a television quizmaster, asked a couple of contestants on his “Who Do You Trust?” program this question:
“What statesman who was elected governor in 1928, was assassinated at Baton Rouge in 1935?”
The two contestants, who had otherwise proved themselves reasonably well informed, simply looked blank. Neither of them could give the answer.
Before many more years have gone by, Huey Pierce Long will be just another vague figure out of a history text, and there will no longer be any disputes about the architect of his assassination, the manner in which it was carried out, or the motives that prompted it. But in the meantime----
“_One cool judgment is worth a thousand hasty counsels._”
The various versions of “what really happened” during the assassination of Huey Long can be grouped into four general classes under some such headings as the following:
