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All this was of considerable embarrassment to District Attorney John Fred Odom of East Baton Rouge. It was up to him to investigate both the murder of Long and the execution of Dr. Weiss by Long's guards. Unfortunately District Attorney Odom is an anti-Long man, for Baton Rouge is an anti-Long town which did not mourn much for the Dictator's passing last week. What was more, Mr. Odom was among those present at the New Orleans meeting under discussion.
Mr. Odom dismissed the Christenberry charges with "a derisive laugh." In all candor, however, he added: "It is possible that someone said something about shooting Long. Wherever two or three people gathered together that thought was expressed—on street corners, in hotel lobbies and in barrooms."
Vacancy. Outside of his own clique of back-scratchers in Louisiana, Huey Long had few friends in public life. On the principle of de mortuis nil nisi bonum, his numerous enemies gave the Kingfish a charitable verbal sendoff. Spokesmen like General Johnson, Father Coughlin, James A. Farley and the New York Times chorused, in effect: "I didn't like anything about him, but I'm sorry he was assassinated."
The polite obituaries over, speculations as to just how big a hole the late Senator had left in the nation's political life were in order. His death had certainly put an end to any radical independent Democratic threat to split the party in 1936.** His Louisiana followers had enough to keep them busy at home. Governor Floyd Olson of Minnesota is going to test his radicalism by opposing Senator Thomas D. Schall for his seat. Governor Eugene Talmadge of Georgia, whose abuse of President Roosevelt and the New Deal has been second only to that of the Kingfish, has Long's mannerisms but not Long's mind.
*In an impassioned radio address last week Share-Our-Wealth Preacher Smith aired his own suspicions as to who was responsible for the Kingfish's murder, laid the blame on New Orleans newspaper publishers and Senator Theodore Gilmore Bilbo of Mississippi, whom he darkly accused of journeying to New Orleans week before with $25,000 in his pocket. In his best form, "The Man" Bilbo snapped back: "The Reverend ... is a contemptible, dirty, vicious, pusillanimous, with-malice-aforethought, damnable, self-made liar!"
**Issued this week by the Harrisburg, Pa. Telegraph and Telegraph Press was a book which was to have been Candidate Long's big campaign publication. My First Days in the White House. Modeled after Upton Sinclair's I, Governor of California, but wittier, the book presents an imaginative narrative beginning with Huey Long's election to the Presidency, concludes with his setting up his Cabinet, among whom were: Secretary of the Navy, Franklin Roosevelt; Secretary of Commerce, Herbert Hoover; Secretary of State, William F. Borah; Secretary of War, Smedley D. Butler; Secretary of the Treasury, James Couzens; Attorney General, Frank Murphy.