Volume 39, Number 10 · May 28, 1992
The Not So Great Dictator
By Nicholas Lemann
The Kingfish and His Realm: The Life and Times of Huey P. Long
by William Ivy Hair
Louisiana State University Press, 406 pp., $24.95
A.J. Liebling opened his wonderful book on Earl Long, The Earl of Louisiana (1961), by recounting his two meetings with Earl's older brother, Huey Long, in New York in the early 1930s. Huey favored doing business in bed in his hotel room dressed in silk pajamas, a habit he probably had picked up during his years as a traveling salesman in the rural South. While his eight bodyguards looked on, he spent the time telling Liebling jokes and bragging about the bridges and roads he had provided the people of Louisiana, 'which,' Liebling remarked, 'we had had in New York since before he was born.' 'Southern political personalities, like sweet corn, travel badly,' he wrote. 'They lose flavor with every hundred yards away from the patch.'
Review, 6457 words
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