----UNIDENTIFIED VOICE FROM A DICTOGRAPH RECORD QUOTED BY HUEY LONG IN AN ADDRESS BEFORE THE UNITED STATES SENATE Long’s charge that he had been selected for assassination by a cabal in whose plot President Roosevelt was involved at least by implication made headlines from coast to coast and filled page on page of the _Congressional Record_. But it fell quite flat, being taken in a Pickwickian rather than in any literal sense. Even the unthinking elders of the Share-Our-Wealth clubs, their numbers now sadly shrunken by reason of the march of time, still cling to a rather pathetic belief in this extravagant bombast only by reason of an uncanny and unrelated coincidence: within less than thirty days after making the charge Long actually was assassinated. His climactic thrust at the White House was not taken too seriously at the time, however, because, for one thing, Long had cried “plot against me” too often. By the fall of 1935 the story was old hat, even though it had never before been blazoned in so august a tribunal as the Senate, and had never before involved, even by indirection, a chief executive. On two previous occasions he had placed Baton Rouge under martial law, calling out the militia, to defend him against plots on his life. Only seven months before making the Senate speech in question he had “exposed” the plot of a group of Baton Rouge citizens, a number of high officials among them, to waylay his automobile on a given night while he was being driven to New Orleans, and kill him at a lonely bend of the River Road where the car would of necessity have to slow down. In proof of this he put on the witness stand an informer who had infiltrated into the ranks of the supposedly plotting group, and who testified as to the details of a conspiracy. Early in his senatorial career he had made himself so offensive in the washroom of a club at Sands Point, Long Island, that the irate victim of a demand to “make way for the Kingfish” slugged him. Since the blow split the skin over an eyebrow, the incident could not be concealed. Long promptly charged that hired bravos of the House of Morgan had assaulted him in the club washroom, intent on taking his life. Finally, when what he told the Senate on that August day in 1935 was boiled down in its own juices it made pretty thin gruel, as anyone who cares to wade through the fine print of the _Congressional Record_ for that date can see for himself. The truth is that on the eve of Congress’ adjournment, Long was trying to build up against Roosevelt something he could tub-thump before the voters in the next year’s presidential campaign. On the principle that “the best defense is an attack,” he was keeping the New Deal hierarchy in Washington so busily occupied on another front that he could take advantage of their preoccupation to infiltrate Louisiana’s federal patronage with his followers.