These four remarks were sandwiched in among two days of political discussion about an approaching state campaign, the selection of candidates, the use of federal patronage, and matters of that sort! By way of illustration, a remark in a recent magazine article about another Louisiana representative, Congressman Otto Passman, would offer a much firmer foundation for a conspiracy charge along the lines followed by Long. Passman has dedicated himself, in season and out, to opposing and reducing foreign-aid appropriations, and President Kennedy is quoted as asking at the signing ceremony of one of these bills: “What am I going to do about Passman?” “Mr. President,” a bystander is reported as replying, “you’re surrounded by a lot of well-armed Secret Service Men. Why don’t you have one of them shoot him--by accident, of course? In fact, Mr. President, if you promise me immunity, I’ll do it myself.” No one who read that statement took it in its literal sense; no one regarded it as a serious proposal to authorize, commit, and condone the murder of a legislator. Yet that is precisely the construction Huey Long put on four similar remarks made at intervals during a two-day caucus in a New Orleans hotel. All this would tend to cast doubts upon the complicity of Carl Weiss in a murder conspiracy, even had he been the sort of person to whom a deed involving assassination would normally have been possible. However, what removes the assumption that he was the chosen executioner of a political camarilla from serious consideration is this: Carl Weiss was virtually unknown outside of his immediate professional, social, and familial circle. Not one of the leading supposed “plotters” of the hotel conference spoke of him during that meeting, none of the leaders who were asked about him later could recall having heard of him, although his wife’s father and uncle were known to virtually all of them. In sum, the hotel meeting of which Long sought to make great capital was not a murder conference, and no one dreamed of bringing to book on charges of criminal conspiracy any of those who took part in it; and even had it been such a conspiracy, the name of Carl Weiss was not even remotely connected with it. The second proposition would have it that Carl Weiss assassinated Long in reprisal for what the latter was doing to Yvonne’s father by having him gerrymandered out of office, and virtually out of public life. There are those who go so far as to say that Yvonne goaded her young husband into exacting satisfaction from the despot who was persecuting her family, who had brought about the dismissal of her uncle Paul from a school superintendency, and of her sister Marie from a position as teacher, and who was now implacably going to any lengths to close her father’s long and honorable career as judge.