LOUISIANA: Invictus?

The majesty of Louisiana law was District Judge Robert D. Jones, presiding over his court from a dais beneath the folded-up basketball backboard of the Covington (pop. 5,000), La. junior high school gymnasium. Around him, jamming available folding chairs and pressed back against the peeling green walls of the gym, were arrayed more than a thousand sweltering Louisianians—many of them leathery farmers in shirtsleeves, who had arrived before dawn (and had been sustained through the humid hours by soft drinks sold by the ladies of the P.T.A. for the benefit of the junior high encyclopedia fund). At precisely 10:40 a.m. there was a rustle at the rear of the gym and a voice rasped: “Push ’em back! Push ’em back!” Behind a wedge of deputies, to the roar of yells, applause and cheers, Louisiana’s embattled Governor, Earl Kemp Long, walked waveringly to a chair next to the judge, acknowledged the ovation with a tight smile and upraised arms and sat down.

Fingering his floppy straw hat, gaunt Earl Long then stared silently, grimly at his lawyer, Joe Arthur Sims. Sims turned to the judge. “Your Honor, I’d like to read some letters.”

Succession. Briskly, Attorney Sims intoned the contents of five official letters, worked out only moments before in a back-room huddle with the state board of hospital supervisors. One pair of letters, signed by the Governor, the Lieutenant Governor, and the state senate president pro tern, announced the discharge of Jesse Bankston, director of state hospitals, and Dr. Charles Belcher, acting director of Southeast Louisiana Hospital, where Earl Long had been committed by his wife Blanche (who by now had fled the state). The second pair of letters announced Long’s appointment of two of his oldtime cronies to the jobs. The fifth letter came from Bankston’s newly appointed successor, addressed to Belcher’s newly appointed successor. The gist: Earl K. Long is sane; he should be released from the mental hospital. Attorney General Jack Gremillion stood up: “Your Honor, there is no one now with authority to hold Earl K. Long at the hospital. The state joins in a motion to discontinue.” Judge Jones leaned forward. “Since there is no opposition, the motion [to free the Governor] is granted and the suit is dismissed.” The hearing had lasted five minutes.

With the judge’s pronouncement came a loud, long cheer from the crowd. Earl Long, smiling thinly, his near-cadaverous hulk worn down from 203 lbs. to 162 lbs., pushed his way through the throng. Voices shouted greetings. Hands clapped his back, shook his hand, reached out from all directions. Flanked by his pals and deputies, he advanced through the tumult to his car. A newsman asked: “What are you going to do now, Governor?” Growled Earl Long: “I’m gonna be Governor.”

Pole to Pole. Behind wailing sirens he was driven in his air-conditioned Oldsmobile to Covington’s pink brick Southern Hotel. There, in a deputy-guarded second-floor room, he called for a can of hot tamales and some ice water, summarily fired his state police superintendent, John Nick Brown, whose deputies had helped commit him the week before (TIME, June 29). To well-wishers and old friends, he announced that he would certainly run again for Governor next fall (a process that requires him to resign before term’s end to bypass the state law forbidding a Governor to succeed himself). Soon he sent for a Baptist minister to deliver a prayer of thanks. Tiring of the hotel, he sneaked out the back door, led his retinue to the Pine Manor Motel, three miles south of Covington, where he called on his sister, Mrs. Lucille Hunt, to read William Ernest Henley’s famed poem, “Invictus,” because “it was Huey P. Long’s favorite and my favorite”:

Out of the night that covers me Black as the Pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.

“Indestructible!” bellowed the Governor for good measure.

Horse Collars. Feeling mighty indestructible, Earl Long sent a message to the public, assuring them that “I have never been insane one second of my life,” hopped into an air-conditioned Cadillac, and with state police escort poured out of town and, deliberately bypassing Baton Rouge, headed north to his old family home (“tin shack,” Blanche called it) in Winnfield Parish. On the way, he stopped to pick up some standard farm implements: two horse collars, a pesthole digger, a pitchfork.

At week’s end he was resting comfortably, but was still volubly aggrieved at his wife Blanche, whom he blamed for all his troubles. “I’ve put up with her as long as I can and I’m going to get a divorce now,” he rattled. “Most jealous wife God ever put on this earth.” And though he was glorying in his new freedom, the Governor voluntarily placed himself under the care of a Tulane psychiatrist, Dr. Paul Pratt. He had done this, in his characteristically puzzling way, when four top Louisiana psychiatrists, determined to stand by their professional ethics, declared publicly after the Covington spectacle that Long was still a sick man. Typically, Earl Long sent for the doctors with a flourish, asked to have one of them stay close by. Among the Governor’s ailments: a paranoiac-schizophrenic condition as well as auricular fibrillation of the heart, a serious medical condition in itself.

In Baton Rouge, where politicos waited nervously for the next Long explosion, a few anti-Long legislators began talking guardedly about impeachment proceedings, and there were rumblings of an Internal Revenue investigation. But, for the time being, Earl Kemp Long, if not master of his fate, was once again Governor of his state.