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| Capitol in Baton Rouge |
The stench of spent powder and panic hung in the air at the state capitol in Baton Rouge, and the rotunda still echoed with the report of dozens of rounds, all fired rapidly, blindly perhaps and at near-point-blank range. Blood pooled on the gleaming marble floor where the young doctor lay, his body riddled with some 30 bullet holes, though in the melee, no one had bothered to count the number of rounds that had been fired.
In the hellish confusion of that moment, Huey Long, "the Kingfish," as he called himself, had vanished. The man who had turned Louisiana into his personal political playground, who liked to depict himself as a man of the people who had pulled himself from near poverty to become not only the most powerful man in the Depression-era South, but among the most powerful politicians in the country had, it seemed, dashed for cover in a hidden stairwell and was, on that September Sunday in 1935, cowering in an isolated corner of the massive building that had been constructed at his instruction.
But it was too late.
A single .22-caliber bullet, or a fragment of one, had ripped through Huey Long's abdomen and out his back. It shouldn't have been a mortal wound. But a surgeon, handpicked by Long to head the medical school at another of the edifices he had constructed as he built his empire on the bayou, would later fail to notice that the bullet had nicked Long's kidney. By the time the error was noticed, Long's life was slipping away.
It is said that on his deathbed, Huey Long pleaded with his maker. "God, don't let me die, I have so much to do."
But die he did.
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| Movie Poster: All the King's Men |
And with his death, one of the most dramatic, and colorful characters in American political history crossed into legend. In the three-quarters of a century since his death, Huey Long has been the subject of countless articles, some scholarly, some not, a bevy of books, documentaries and even a couple of feature films. A fictionalized version of his life, "All the King's Men," judged to be among the greatest political masterpieces in American literature, is again bound for the screen with Sean Penn in the role of Willie Stark, the politico with the huckster's touch corrupted by his own power.
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| Sean Penn |
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