On the other hand, those who casually dismiss Long as a conscienceless political gangster overlook the number of respects in which he was far, far ahead of his time. It is only since the mid-century’s turn, for example, that clamor has become general to provide special advanced training for school children with well-above-normal mentality. Long proposed a program of this sort for Louisiana State University in his last broadcast, delivered two nights before he was shot. One of his last rational statements, expressed only moments before he lapsed into the drugged stupor from which he never really returned to consciousness, was a lament that he would be unable to carry out this project. He enormously increased Louisiana’s public debt with what proved to be a remarkably sound system of funding dedicated revenues into bonds, in order to give the state a highway network geared to the impending expansion of motorized traffic. In the 1960s the federal government followed the same line by laying out and constructing a vast system of interstate super-highways. Almost without formal education himself--he never finished high school--he was like one possessed in his determination to put schooling within the reach of all by providing free textbooks, free transportation, free lunches, and the like. The medical school he founded at Louisiana State University, as though merely to spite Tulane for not conferring upon him at least one honorary degree, has won a recognized place as a great center of research and instruction; it fills what admittedly became a genuine need ... and while today’s income and inheritance levies do not set arbitrary limits like those proposed by Long in the early 1930s, the underlying principle of decentralization of wealth by heavy upper-bracket taxes is basically what he advocated. None of this mitigates the heritage of corruption in public life that he bequeathed to Louisiana, or his ruthlessness, vindictiveness, and other reprehensible qualities. But he was very far from being merely another gangster. * * * * * The fact that the sons of both men whose lives ended so abruptly in September 1935 followed brilliantly in their fathers’ footsteps may well be part of this same pattern of paradox. Russell Long, only sixteen at the time of his father’s death, enlisted in the Navy as a seaman during World War II, serving with distinction in the invasions of Africa, Sicily, and Italy (at Anzio), and advancing through promotion until he was a lieutenant at the time of his demobilization in 1945. In the election of January 1948 he supported the successful gubernatorial race of his uncle, Earl K. Long. In September of that same year, when Senator John H. Overton died with two years of his term yet to run, Governor Long supported his nephew for election to the vacancy.