The Huey Long Murder Case

On September 8, 1935, a gunshot tore through the Louisiana State Capitol, killing two men in a single act of violence that would spark a century of controversy. One was Senator Huey Long, the populist demagogue who had risen from Louisiana's backwoods to challenge Franklin Roosevelt himself. The other was Dr. Carl Austin Weiss, Jr., a young physician who official history names as the assassin. But the truth has never been so simple. Hermann B. Deutsch, who covered the case as a journalist and later investigated it for decades, builds a devastating portrait of a murder shrouded in contradiction. Why did the bullet trajectory never quite make sense? Who benefited from Long's silence? And what role did Long's own allies play in the affair? The book traces the rivalry between Long and FDR, the strange alliances of Louisiana politics, and the institutional machinery that settled on a narrative before the facts could be gathered. What emerges is not just a murder investigation but a window into American political violence itself: how populists rise, how they are destroyed, and how history writes its verdicts.