Finally, there is no agreement to this day on what could have prompted Dr. Weiss to commit an act which almost everyone who knew him still regards as utterly foreign to his nature. No valid motive for this deed has ever been definitively established. One assumption has it that the doctor was the chosen instrument of the “murder conference” whose discussions Long made the text of the last speech he delivered on the Senate floor. Others feel that inasmuch as Long was on the point of gerrymandering Mrs. Weiss’s father, Judge Ben Pavy, out of the place on the bench he had held for seven successive terms, Dr. Weiss’s act was one of reprisal. At least one connection of the Weiss and Pavy families has held that Dr. Weiss was actuated purely by a patriotic conviction that only through the death of Long could his authoritarian regime be demolished and liberty be restored to Louisiana. In view of the foregoing, one question poses itself rather relentlessly: At this late date is an effort to compose such far-ranging differences of conviction and surmise worth while? Can any purpose beyond a remotely academic recording of facts be served thereby? Is there anything that distinguishes in historical significance the assassination of Huey Long from the public shooting which in time brought about the death of, let us say, Mayor William Gaynor of New York? It is because those questions seemed to answer themselves, and unanimously, in the affirmative that the data chronicled in the following narrative were gathered. They represent among other items the statements of every surviving eyewitness to the actual shooting, and of surviving physicians who were present during, or assisted in, the emergency operation performed by Dr. Vidrine. They include the never previously revealed hospital chart of the thirty hours Senator Long was a patient at Our Lady of the Lake Sanitarium. This was no easy search for truth. There are still those who refuse to discuss the assassination of Huey Long with anyone who does not share to the fullest their individual views of what took place. None the less, the significance of two figures--Franklin Roosevelt and Huey Long--so curiously alike and yet so dissimilar, indicated a genuine need to weigh every scrap of obtainable evidence and assess any rational conclusions to be drawn from them.