The young physician was the executioner chosen by a group of plotters in a cabal of which he was a member, to carry out the death sentence there secretly decreed against an otherwise invincible political oppressor. The assassination was an act of reprisal for the gerrymander which would bring to an abrupt end the twenty-eight-year judicial career of Yvonne Weiss’s father through a fraudulent mockery of legislative procedure deliberately rigged to deny the parish of St. Landry the free exercise of home rule. An abstract idealism inspired a quixotic young patriot to sacrifice himself on the altar of the common weal by destroying a dictatorship through the death of the autocrat who stood at its head. Haunted by anxiety born of a suspicion that, in campaigning against Judge Pavy, Long would raise the specter of an all-but-forgotten and long since refuted racial slur against the Pavy family, Dr. Weiss paid with his life for the assurance that libelous words resurrecting the false stigma would never be uttered. The first of these four propositions can be given short shrift. The Senate speech in which Long sought to implicate the Roosevelt administration, and in effect President Roosevelt himself, in a “plan of robbery, murder, blackmail, or theft” was the latest of several revelations charging others with plotting his murder. It happened also to be the last one because within a month after making this charge in the Senate, he was assassinated. But significant factors must not be overlooked. The first is that after none of these spectacular accusations of murder plots was anyone ever formally charged before any court with conspiracy to commit murder. The second is the undeniable fact that the so-called murder conference in the De Soto Hotel was neither more nor less than a political caucus of the type customarily held behind closed doors in order to facilitate full freedom of discussion about personalities, political prospects, and the like. The third is that when all the verbiage about patronage plums and job distribution and endorsement of candidacies is sifted for substance, a pitiably small modicum of grain is recovered from a mountain of chaff. Here are the only specific references to the infliction of bodily harm by those hotel conferees actually quoted by Long in his Senate speech: Oscar Whilden is reported as saying: “I am out to murder, bulldoze, steal, or anything else to win this election.” An unidentified voice said: “I would draw in a lottery to go out and kill Long. It would only take one man, one gun, one bullet.” Another unidentified voice said: “I haven’t the slightest doubt but that Roosevelt would pardon anyone who killed Long.” And still another unidentified voice said: “The best way would be to just hang around Washington and kill him in the Senate.”