The Brother

"My weakness," confessed Earl Kemp Long some time ago, "is that I spout off too much. But if I ever closed this mouth, God help Uncle Earl." Last week, only nine days after he won the Democratic primary nomination (and thus the election) for Congress from his home district, contentious Ole Earl Long, 65, three-time Governor of Louisiana, uneasy heir to the political fortunes of his rabble-rousing dictator brother Huey, said his last. Bedded in an Alexandria hospital, his body ravaged by a weak heart and his mind deteriorated, he gulped a cup of coffee, turned over in bed. coughed and died.

It was Earl Long's fate to live and strive in Huey's shadow. It was a striving founded on Earl's passionate conviction that he was twice the man Huey was--and, ironically, he was, save for the vital inability to match Huey's inner fire, his failure to plumb the imagination of Louisianians with Huey's black magic.

Piracy & Patronage. Earl had a sharp political instinct and, unlike Huey, the courage of a bull. He fought Huey's childhood battles for him, and later after he followed Huey from their Winnfield homestead as a traveling salesman, lawyer and political guerrilla, he fought some of his older brother's political battles for him too (once Earl nearly chewed off the finger of an opponent, another time lunged at a man and bit him in the throat). Yet, even at the peak of Huey's power, Earl was still in the shadow, forbidden by the Kingfish to climb the higher reaches. Their falling out was bitter; to Earl, Huey was "the yellowest coward that God ever let live."

After Huey's assassination in 1935, Earl fought his way at last to the big time on his own. He became lieutenant governor under the corrupt Richard Leche, who soon went to jail with some of Huey's old henchmen, leaving Earl in the driver's seat for two years. In 1948, Earl won his first full term as governor, and proceeded to out-Huey Huey. Where once Huey had said of a legislator. "We bought him like a sack of potatoes," Earl chuckled. "I just rent 'em. It's cheaper that way."

He stuck his face into legislative meetings and sessions, collared recalcitrant lawmakers, threatened, cajoled. His technique, as he liked to explain it: "Don't write anything you can phone, don't phone anything you can talk face to face, don't talk anything you can smile, don't smile anything you can wink, and don't wink anything you can nod." Earl wiped up a $45 million budget surplus, then went on a piratical tax spree. True to Huey's method of giving the people what they wanted while soaking them for it. he expanded welfare programs and at the same time allowed the patronage-hungry legislature to kill off the civil service system.

Dream & Nightmare. The crack-up came last year, during Ole Earl's second full term. Though he was prohibited by the state constitution from succeeding himself, he planned to run again for Governor by resigning, letting his lieutenant governor take over, and then registering himself as a candidate. His heart weakened, his mind aflame with his dream. Earl embarked on a mad binge. He began drinking heavily (swigging in public from a Coke bottle), flew into foulmouthed rages over real and imagined affronts (a real one: U.S. taxmen were investigating his records). He took up with a stripteaser, squandered money on bookies and in nightclubs.

Then in May 1959, after the lawmakers blocked his grand plan, he turned up at a joint session of the legislature, crazed with booze, and sailed into a long, disjointed, profanity-studded speech (TIME. June 15 et seq.). In the nightmarish weeks that followed he was spirited in and out of three mental hospitals, then failed miserably to make a comeback as lieutenant governor, and finally won his last small victory in the congressional race.

Even in death he was overreached by his brother's remarkable shadow. His coffin last week was placed in the lobby of the state capitol for 24 hours. Oldtimers recalled that that was just the way old Huey was laid out--not far from the spot where Huey was martyred by an assassin's bullet.

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