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Next: Previews of Coming Attractions. And coming to this theater is—what else?—Fire Over England, yet again. Huey Long is murdered.

My whole family delighted in Huey Long not for his politics but for his comic speechifying. After my father divorced my mother he rented an apartment in the same Connecticut Avenue building where Huey was bacheloring it. Though my father disliked most politicians, Huey always made him laugh. The Kingfish, as Long was known, began performing when he stepped out of the elevator in the morning and confronted the day in the form of a desk clerk, a meek young man, whom Huey enjoyed lecturing on Success, to the young man’s embarrassment. Huey would declaim: “Why, when I was your age I would spend what little idle time I had with an instructive book not that racing form I see that you’re now trying to hide. Of course I was not given to late-night dissipation in the fleshpots of the District of Columbia! Oh, you can’t hide your ruinous habits from me! I can see by the trembling of your hands what demon rum is doing to you…” The poor clerk was indeed trembling—with terror—as the great voice thundered in his ears and Huey, particularly if an audience had now filled the lobby, would become prayerful as he invoked the lad’s aged mother back in Butte, Montana. “I know how each night she prays for your success—on her knees, little suspecting that all those hours that should be golden with study are scarlet with vice…” Tears would fill Huey’s eyes on cue as he contemplated that little old lady who had mothered a son so reprobate. Only my father’s arrival with his car would stop the great flow of language, and Huey would cadge a ride from the director of air commerce while lecturing my father on aviation as they proceeded to the Capitol where Huey had all sorts of somber public advice for President Roosevelt.

The great Huey Long is ready to crown every man a king, until a mysterious doctor gunned him down in the Louisiana State Capitol. He was preparing to run for president on a third-party ticket, splitting FDR’s vote for reelection.

Lately, Huey had been discussing a run for the presidency on a third-party ticket in 1936. Many thought he could keep FDR from being reelected and then in 1940 he would be the Democratic candidate and win the presidency. Possible? We shall never know. Huey was gunned down in the Louisiana State Capitol at Baton Rouge by a medical doctor with no known motive. It was rumored that Huey had actually been killed by his own guards. Forever after, the Long family believed that FDR had ordered his killing, which seems farfetched even in Louisiana. But it was about then that the conspiracy theorist doctrine was promulgated to make it impossible for anyone to investigate much of anything and so it was that we, a naturally suspicious and garrulous people, were officially silenced through our institutions and by a media seemingly devoted to a Sicilianesque omertà, even when Marine Corps General Smedley Butler revealed that he had been approached by right wing elements to overthrow FDR in his first term, a story that never really broke despite Butler’s own memoir of the events. Huey’s murder was the first of a number of stylized “unsolvable” murders committed by solitary lone killers given to motiveless acts of violence; witness, Lee Harvey Oswald at Dallas. More later. It is as if we have a permanent Federal Bureau of Non-Investigation ever ready to chuckle about the relation between flying saucers and political assassinations or the “alleged” torture of those held in our military prisons.

In any event, Huey, whose slogan was “every man a king,” never did have his proper day. But there is a wonderfully comic bit of newsreel where he is sampling a New Orleans bartender’s Sazerac, a lethal cocktail full of whipped egg white. He praises his old friend behind the bar, sips delicately at the brew, and gives gentle instruction on the correct proportion of the ingredients. He finishes one glass which is refilled. Ever the perfectionist, he savors this ambrosia, complimenting the bartender—so let us leave the Kingfish there, contented, presidential, the people’s friend who built so many schools, roads, hospitals, and gleefully taxed “The Standard Oil” to pay for it all.