LOUISIANA: The Governor Goes Home

Locked in his room at a mental hospital in Galveston early last week, Louisiana’s Governor Earl Long was raging. He wanted out, demanded that he be permitted to return to his home state. He hired lawyers; then he fired them when they refused to do his bidding. At length, he implored his wife Blanche to get him released, promised her that he would submit to psychiatric treatment in New Orleans. Blanche Long, worried about her husband’s loss of weight and fearing for his weak heart, agreed. After Earl signed a paper releasing his wife and state officials from any liability stemming from the scheme they had engineered to spirit the Governor out of the state (TIME, June 15), Blanche Long arranged for Earl to go back home.

But once he was back in his own state, Louisiana’s mad Governor erupted once more. Scarcely had he signed in at New Orleans’ Ochsner Foundation Hospital than he began demanding his release again. For three hours his doctors tried to outtalk him, but Earl insisted that he wanted only to drive to his farm—or maybe a friend’s farm—where he could rest. He was, after all, still the Governor of Louisiana; nobody could stop him, he cried. But wife Blanche did.

The Law. She moved fast. Determined to have her husband committed again, she called Dr. Chester Williams, the coroner* of East Baton Rouge Parish (i.e., county), arranged for Williams to get commitment papers ready, then sped up the 80-mile, Huey-built Air Line Highway to Baton Rouge to sign them. While she was on the way, Coroner Williams and Parish Sheriff Bryan Clemmons ordered two detectives onto the highway at the parish line to wait for Earl Long, who would surely soon be racing for Baton Rouge to reclaim his power.

Sure enough, a half hour later, a white, unlabeled, state-police Ford sped by. A trooper was driving, and with him sat Earl Long. In the back sat an oldtime Long friend, Physician-Oilman (reputed annual income: $7,000,000 to $8,000,000) Martin O. Miller. The two detectives radioed the word to the sheriff’s office, swung behind the Ford and began trailing it. In a few minutes came a message from Sheriff Clemmons: “The papers have been signed. Put your plan into effect.”

The Ruse. The detectives pulled abreast of the Ford, waved the driver to the roadside. They greeted the Governor pleasantly, told him that they had been ordered to escort him to the capital. Long’s driver got out of the Ford; Chief Detective Herman Thompson slid in behind the wheel and made for Baton Rouge. The disheveled Governor seemed delighted with the attention, spent the remainder of the trip trading small talk.

It was only after Thompson pulled into the basement-ramp area of the courthouse at Baton Rouge that Earl Long realized that he had been tricked. “What’s going on?” he cried. Thompson told him about the commitment papers. “Goddam! Goddam you all,” screamed Earl. “You all are doing it again. Goddam you, I’ll get you! I’ll get all of you!” Turning wildly to a deputy whose father holds a state job with the Department of Corrections, Long yelled: “Your old man just lost his job!” As Earl thundered and cried, a crowd of incredulous onlookers pressed in close. Frantically, Earl boomed: “You all look here! You all look! See?”

The People. The police tried to get the Governor to leave the car for an interview with three examining doctors. He refused, insisted that the doctors could talk to him in the car. As aides went off to get the doctors, Earl moaned over and over, “Goddam, all because of a woman, all because of a woman.” The doctors came, spoke to Earl through the open car window. Plaintively, he begged them to let him go on to his farm, but the doctors refused. At last the two detectives eased into the car, firmly helped him out, led him to another automobile with two other officers. As they drove off, the crowd pushed back, waving. “Goodbye, Governor!” they called. “So long, Earl.”

Heading east, Ole Earl simmered down, began chattering away with his small talk again, somehow confident that he was being returned to New Orleans. As the police car sped through town after town, Louisianians, who had heard the news on the radio, lined the streets to wave and shout greetings, and Ole Earl waved back. (“Don’t you believe that old boy doesn’t have the people with “him,” said one cop later. “The way they lined up waiting for him to pass was something to see.”)

Soon the car passed Madisonville, and

Earl Long looked out the window at a sign: MANDEVILLE, LA., 8 MILES. “Why, that’s an asylum,” said the Governor. “I hope you all aren’t bringing me there.” Sadly, Thompson told him. Earl, his hollow face bristled with a two-day beard, his eyes tired, fell silent. Inside the gates of the Southeast Louisiana Hospital in Mandeville, Thompson stopped the car. The Governor got out. Acting Hospital Director Dr. Charles Belcher came over to shake the Governor’s hand. “I’m Dr. Belcher, Governor,” he said politely. Snapped Earl: “The hell you are—you were Dr. Belcher.” As the doctors took him to his room, Earl Long still insisted fervently that everybody else was crazy, that he was still Governor, still very much the boss.

Until he could be legally adjudged incompetent, or else impeached, Long was indeed officially the Governor. In Baton Rouge, turmoil mounted as top officials tried to straighten the tangled reins of government. Lieutenant Governor Lether Frazar took over the gubernatorial duties only hesitantly, “until I learn something else.” Long’s longtime enemy, Secretary of State Wade Martin Jr., cannily announced that Frazar’s assumption of Long’s job was illegal; Long’s enemies hoped that the Governor would be kept locked up for the duration of his term, so that Earl would be unable to make a comeback by resigning and running for election this fall (under law he may not succeed himself). But Attorney General Jack Gremillion nipped Martin’s claim quickly, declared that Frazar was legally the acting Governor until Long could resume his duties. Blanche Long, so bitterly denounced as a conspirator by her own husband, quietly fled the spotlight’s glare. So did Russell Long, Earl’s 40-year-old nephew—himself at odds with his uncle—who also has his eyes set on the next gubernatorial election.

Oblivious to all the confusion about him, Ole Earl Long stalked his rooms at the mental hospital, called for lawyers to help set him free. The doctors called it paranoiac schizophrenia and started plans for treatment.

* Louisiana’s powerful parish coroners, under the state constitution, hold combined powers, in some circumstances, of chief physician, tax collector and sheriff.