This is a work of fiction. For reasons of the plot, massive liberties have been taken with the historic record. To name a few: Mayor Cermak died in a hospital the day after he was shot, not in the car; the “Night of the Long Knives” took place a full year before the assassination of Huey Long, there is no indication whatsoever that Vice President Garner was anything but a loyal American, and there is no indication whatsoever of a Nazi connection with the Long organization.
On the other hand, some of the seemingly unbelievable events mentioned in the novel really did occur. To name a few: before he died in the hospital, Cermak really did tell Roosevelt that he was glad that it had been him who was shot, not the President-Elect. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow really did accomplish the seemingly impossible feat of freeing two of their gang members from a Texas prison, the dying prison officer really did extract a promise to kill Bonnie and Clyde, rather than capture them alive (a promise that Hamer honored), and although confusion surrounds the issue to this day, it seems possible that Huey Long was not killed by a bullet fired from Dr. Weiss’s gun.
Although this story is fiction, it was my intention to give the reader a flavor of the times that were so important to making us the country we are today while sharing an entertaining story. If I have done those two things, my job is done.
The following are brief notes on some of the historic figures who appeared in this story.
Clyde Barrow (1909-1934) and Bonnie Parker (1910-1934) - Brought up in a Dallas, Texas slum, Clyde Barrow was arrested for stealing cars at the age of fifteen. Thrown into prison with adults, he was repeatedly sexually assaulted until he finally beat one of his assailants to death with a pipe. The authorities were not overly concerned and brought no charges. When he was released, he made no effort to go straight, but embarked on a career of increasingly serious crime and violence. Bonnie Parker was married at fourteen. When the marriage, not surprisingly, broke up, she went to work in a diner, where she is reputed to have met Barrow in 1931. Bonnie and Clyde immediately took off in a joint life of crime. They and other members of their gang killed at least nine police officers and five unarmed civilians before Frank Hamer and his men brought their murderous rampage to an end. Starting with the release of a film in 1967, pop culture began to romanticize them and their exploits. One wishes the families of their fourteen victims could be heard on this subject.
Ana Cumpanas (1889-1947) - A Roumanian immigrant, Ana Cumpanas pursued a career as a prostitute and madam in Chicago. In return for a $5,000 reward and a promise not to be extradited, she led John Dillinger into an FBI ambush wearing a bright orange dress (not the red dress of legend and newspaper accounts). The promise not to extradite her was not kept. She was deported to her native land in 1935, where she lived the rest of her life in obscurity.
John Dillinger (1901-1934) - The son of a poor Indiana farmer, John Dillinger got an early start on his life of crime. Released from prison in 1931, after serving nine years for robbing a grocery store of $50, he immediately began a crime spree that would end only with his death. Forming a gang with a fluctuating membership, he would specialize in bank robberies; his crimes ranging across the nation from Florida to Arizona, Indiana to South Dakota. Despite being a stone-cold killer, his good looks and outrageous antics caused newspapers and their readers to look upon him with some indulgence. One time when he was captured, he bluffed his way out of jail with an “automatic” that he had carved out of a bar of soap and darkened with shoe black. He had learned how to walk on his hands while in prison, and amused his gang members (and hostages) with stunts based on that skill. Despite dozens of successful bank robberies, life on the run was expensive. At the time he was killed outside the Biograph Theater in a federal ambush, he was found to have only a few hundred dollars.
John (“Cactus Jack”) Garner (1868-1967) - A long-time Texas Congressman who attained the position of Speaker of the House in 1931, Cactus Jack Garner was Franklin Roosevelt’s only serious competition for the Democratic Presidential nomination in 1932. As part of a deal to seal his nomination, FDR gave Garner the Vice-Presidential spot. During his time as Vice President, Garner drifted further and further from Roosevelt, being isolationist, anti-labor, and anti-black. The final straw for the President was when Garner unsuccessfully challenged him for the Presidential nomination in 1940. In retaliation, FDR replaced Garner on the ticket with Henry Wallace. Wallace caused his own problems for Roosevelt, but that is a story for another day.
Frank Hamer (1884-1955) - Hamer was a legendary Texas Ranger. In his career he had survived being shot seventeen times and, in turn, had killed no less than fifty-three armed criminals. His reputation in Texas was such that armed, cornered desperados would often quietly surrender when he simply announced his name. In the 1967 movie about the exploits of Bonnie and Clyde, he is portrayed as stupid, cowardly, and vindictive. Vindictive he might be, but never stupid or cowardly. When the movie was released, Warner brothers was sued by Hamer’s widow and son for defaming his character. The studio settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
Heinrich Himmler (1900-1945) - A physically small man with the face of a timid teacher and the soul of a demon, Himmler rose continuously in the Nazi regime from being the head of Hitler’s personal bodyguard until by 1944 he was clearly the second-most powerful man in Germany. Always maneuvering to gain more and more power and authority for himself, he became head of all police forces, including the dreaded Gestapo. He was the architect who created the infrastructure of murder squads, death camps and factories to implement Hitler’s genocidal Holocaust. An agnostic with a hatred of all Christianity, especially Catholicism, he directed a massive campaign to implement a kind of pagan Nazi state religion which even Hitler found to be a bit strange. He believed in all kinds of mystic fads, and in the middle of Nazi Germany’s fight for existence, he devoted considerable state resources to “proving” various fringe theories. He took over various advance weapons projects, such as the Me-262 jet fighter and the V-2 ballistic missile. He even found time to dabble, unsuccessfully, in secret attempts to influence American politics. In the last months of the war, he attempted to negotiate a separate peace with the Western Allies, actually believing that they would make him head of a post-war Germany. Captured by a British patrol, he committed suicide by swallowing cyanide, taking fifteen minutes to die in agony. It was a far, far easier death than he deserved.
John Edgar Hoover (1895-1972) - Appointed head of the scandal-ridden Bureau of Investigation in 1924 (it only became the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1935) and remaining in that post until his death in 1972, J. Edgar Hoover was a controversial figure in his lifetime, and remains so till this day. Using tactics that were questionable, even by the looser standards of his time, he reformed a corrupt and incompetent organization into a model for the world. He was accused of politicizing the agency by threatening elected officials with release of embarrassing information. Without defending what was, in essence, blackmail, I believe this was usually done to prevent these officials from politically interfering with the agency, and to maintain its status as an impartial protector of the public. In the years since his death, the Bureau has been increasingly politicized, to the detriment of its effectiveness. Although many of the tactics the Bureau used during his stewardship are of unquestioned unconstitutionality, it should be noted that there was little criticism when he used such tactics to break up the Midwestern crime spree of the 1930s, Axis espionage/sabotage efforts of the 1940s, organized crime activities of the 1950s, and Ku Klux Klan violence of the 1960s. It was only when the FBI turned such tactics against groups favored by the intellectual elite that such people swiftly discovered their objections to the tactics. It should be remembered that Hoover was a product of his time, and that he was personally incorruptible, bequeathing to his country a nonpolitical national police.
Earl Long (1895-1960) - Earl Long probably suffered from bipolar disorder, a disease largely untreatable during his lifetime. He would often suffer periods of bizarre, almost manic behavior. Despite this, and because of his relationship to the martyred Huey Long, he was quite a successful politician in Louisiana. He served as Lieutenant Governor from 1936 to 1939, then as Governor from 1939 to 1940, 1948 to 1952 and 1956 to 1960. Late in life, he entered into a relationship with an “exotic dancer” named Blaze Starr, outraging and amusing the people of Louisiana in equal amounts. His angry and embarrassed wife had him committed to the state insane asylum. While there, he did some research and confirmed that under state law the fact that he was committed did not remove his powers as Governor. He promptly fired the head of the asylum and appointed a crony as the new head, who immediately signed an order for Long’s release. Perhaps Earl was not as insane as people thought.
Huey Long (1893-1935) - Despite his continual claims in speeches to be of humble origins, Huey Long was in fact the son of a wealthy landowner in northern Louisiana; this claim so humiliated his father that in later life they were completely estranged. A brilliant speaker and a tireless campaigner, Long was Governor before his 35th birthday. As Governor, he built up an efficient, ruthless political machine that stopped at nothing; even kidnapping was used to remove an opponent for a while, if it was deemed necessary. He promised the people of Louisiana many things, and delivered many of them: free textbooks for poor children, roads and bridges to end the isolation of the rural poor, new schools and hospitals, even for the then-disenfranchised blacks. Elected to the United States Senate, it became very obvious that Long was intending to challenge Franklin Roosevelt for the Presidential nomination in 1936, running on his “Share the Wealth” program. Although Long was wildly popular with the poor of Louisiana, and increasingly those of other states, those ‘better-off’ acquired a growing hatred for the man. Some of the opposition was generated by Long’s increasingly dictatorial methods; some by selfish opposition to spending much money on the needs of the poor. At the height of his popularity, Long was apparently shot by Dr. Weiss. To this day, there is some doubt that Weiss fired the bullet that killed Long.
Frank Nitti (1886-1943) - Starting out as a bodyguard to Al Capone, Frank Nitti impressed his boss with his intelligence and business acumen, rare qualities in the criminal underworld of Prohibition Chicago. Nitti was rapidly promoted through Capone’s organization until he was the number two man. When Capone went to prison for tax evasion in 1931, he designated Nitti as his successor. In 1943, Nitti was charged with several serious crimes related to his attempts to have his mob infiltrate the film industry. Already suffering from cancer, fear of a long prison sentence caused him to shoot himself.
Franz von Papen (1879-1969) - Von Papen was a Prussian nobleman who served on the German General Staff during World War I. Entering the confused politics of the Weimar Republic, he was Chancellor of Germany for a few months in 1932, but lacked enough support in the parliament to continue in the position. With no one party able to command a majority in parliament, a coalition government was established in January 1933, making Hitler the Chancellor. But with only two other Nazis in the Cabinet, it was arranged for von Papen to be Vice-Chancellor (the non-Nazi members of the government assumed he would act as a check upon Hitler). After the fire in the Reichstag, a panicked legislature voted Hitler wide emergency powers, which were added to upon the subsequent death of the senile President von Hindenburg. As the Nazis established sole control of the government and began to implement increasingly brutal and anti-Semitic legislation, von Papen decided he needed to speak out. At the University of Marburg, he delivered a speech denouncing the excesses of the Nazis. Propaganda Minister Goebbels guaranteed that the speech received no coverage, Himmler had the friend who had helped von Papen draft the speech brutally murdered, and Hitler accepted von Papen’s “resignation” as Vice Chancellor. His life was spared—foolishly or bravely—when von Papen refused to join the Nazi Party, despite several “requests” to do so. He lived quietly throughout the war, his political activity being limited to serving as Ambassador to Turkey. After the war, he was tried at Nuremburg as a war criminal, but was acquitted largely on the evidence of the Marburg Speech and his refusal to join the Nazi Party. His attempts to re-enter politics after the war were unsuccessful.
Dr. Carl Weiss (1906-1935) - Dr. Weiss was a rising young physician, married to the daughter of a fierce critic of Huey Long. Perhaps because of that, or because he had done post-doctoral research in Vienna and had witnessed the rising tide of fascism first hand, or for both reasons, he shared his father-in-law’s hatred of Long. There is no doubt at all that Weiss fired two shots at Long on that fateful day in 1935, but there is a small but persistent doubt shared by some researchers that either of those shots was the one that killed Long. In any event, Long’s bodyguards pumped no less than sixty-two slugs into the young doctor’s body.
Guiseppi Zangara (1900-1933) - A five foot tall veteran of the World War I Italian army (which trained him to be a sniper), Zangara immigrated to America, failing to find success due to increasing health problems. On 15 February 1933, during a speech FDR was giving from the back of an open car, Zangara fired five .32 caliber shots; four people were wounded, and Chicago Mayor Anton Cermak was killed. Conspiracy theorists have argued that Cermak, who had sworn to clean up organized crime in Chicago, was the real target. Nevertheless, Cermak was standing next to the President-elect of the United States, and it seems unlikely that the cautious Frank Nitti would have ordered a hit when the bullet might have struck Franklin Roosevelt. There are some strange facts surrounding the case. For instance, the shooting took place on 15 February, while Zangara was tried, convicted, and executed by 20 March. Even in those days, that was an astonishingly fast process. It might almost seem that someone was anxious to see Zangara under the ground before he could do much talking.