American Hayride

...Three decades later it remains a source of wry amusement in Baton Rouge--steel-and-concrete proof that in politics there is no boodler like the boodler who preaches reform...

...Fortunately for Claiborne, Congress had no intention of extending the franchise to what Washington then regarded as a territory of odd-speaking foreigners...

...Huey Long, the "Kingfish," once said that without his restraining hand the rapacious crew around him would end up in prison...

...Duke, who by that year had acquired a reputation for -- as Earl Long once said of an opponent--"running for any office not nailed down," had edged into the run-offby virtue of Louisiana's bloc-favoring Open Primary system...

...Or so they're saying...

...Maginnis has recommended Juban, a Creole-Cajun restaurant not far from the LSU campus that offers, to my surprise, a gumbo etouff6 that excels even that served at Galatoire's...

...whose public charm and quicksilver tongue allow him, time and again, to survive scandals that would end the careers of most politicians...

...Pointed memories, but in this instance Edwards's sure sense of where he is and how he got there failed him...

...Charles, where my wife indulges an incredible appetite for raw oysters while I fill up on gumbo and crawfish...

...Traditionally, the regional divide in Louisiana's electorate-northern Protestant and redneck, southern Catholic and Cajun--had worked against downstate candidates running for governor...

...Unreachable, untouchable, a man gifted with gris-gris...

...Or, if they're old enough to remember the Great Flood of'27, since the Kingfish himself...

...Edwards, however, was an ethnic rarity-a south Louisiana Cajun with a non-Gallic surname that didn't turn off Scots-Irish voters upstate...

...REPORTER: Do you know anything about Tongsun Park supplying congressmen with women...

...Slick Willie" Clinton and "Fast Eddie" Edwards: So much in common, yet different as piney woods and Spanish moss, hog iowl and crawfish etouff6, Orval Faubus and Huey Long...

...Another case of Edwards getting into bed with a couzain hustler, Jules LeBlanc, a campaign contributor fallen on hard times...

...Harnett T. Kane, Louisiana Hayride (1928-594o) The campaign Kane referred to was the raucous extravaganza of 1939 , the year of the greatest Louisiana scandal of them all...

...The year was 1985...

...z,5oo), Edwin Washington Edwards once hadto hide under his house to escape giggling girls intent on kissing him...

...But by that time, a dozen years into the Edwards era, few expected anything else...

...On an unseasonably warm October day Dale and I travel up I-lo to meet with the Lafitte scholar himself, John Maginnis--the one observer, we're told, who can lift the fog around the Cajun King's latest brush with the law: INSURANCE INDICTMENT SNAGS BROWN, EDWARDS This indictment comes, understand, while Edwards, now five years out of office, is still awaiting trial on a year-old charge that he rigged the award of riverboat gambling licenses to benefit, among others, his friend and casino-mate Eddie DeBartolo, of the San Francisco Forty-Niner DeBartolos...

...Though Edwards had shares in TEL (the building was to be called One Edwards Square), he would back away when Vidrine's fundraising methods came under press scrutiny...

...We have, after all, been here before, and until they show, in open court, the boy live or the girl dead, I'll take my rumors about the Cajun King, like my headlines, with a grain of salt...

...When LeBlanc bankrupted, then took the Fifth Amendment before a legislative subcommittee, a Baton Rouge grand jury weighed in with a report that DCCL had been "manipulated to funnel money to friends of then-Governor Edwards," who, it developed, "held a financial interest in the company...

...It all started, according to Maginnis, with Jean Lafitte, the swashbuckling bayou buccaneer best known outside Louisiana for having joined forces with General Andrew Jackson to defeat the British at the Battle of New Orleans, January 1815...

...Maginnis is an independent journalist in his forties who made his reputation as the foremost expert on Edwin Edwards's political career with publication of The Last Hayride, a chronicle of the Edwards-Treen governor's race of 1983...

...Pure Cajun in the way he dressed and the way he talked...

...perhaps in sports, but in politics, more often than not, luck is a matter of being blessed with the right enemy at the right time...

...and the headlines on any given day, month, or year that Dale and I return, which tell of Governor Edwin Edwards, whether in or out of office, either facing indictment or standing trial at some nearby federal courthouse...

...EDWARDS PLEADS INNOCENT IN FEDERAL FRAUD CASE EDWARDS GRAND JURY DELVES INTO NEW TERRAIN - - Headlines, autumn 1999, New Orleans Times-Picayune return home to Louisiana every year or so to rekindle old memories and ponder the future of American politics...

...I remember," he told New Orleans magazine, 36 March 20 o o _9 The American Spectator when government made it possible for electricity to be brought to my home...

...Within four years of his death the prediction proved true, beginning at the top, with Governor Richard Leche and James Monroe Smith, president of the state university...

...When Glaiborne placed a $5oo bounty on Lafitte's head, the audacious privateer responded by posting a $1,5oo reward for the kidnapping and delivery of the governor to Lafltte's hideaway in Bayou Barataria...

...9 The Tongsun Park Affair...

...I wandered backstage and ran into the Reverend C.D...

...Passman was indicted, tried, and though acquitted, ended up a broken man...

...Fast Eddie" was twelve years old at the time, an impressionable age in a state where politics is a passion absorbed through the pores...

...Suppose he did...

...the prosecutor is a Democratic, not a Republican appointee...

...Dressed in summer white with a white Bible in hand and a stunning blonde nearby, he quoted scripture, then handed the preacher a "love offering"an envelope with a $5,000 contribution...

...But Marksville stayed with him through his law school years at Louisiana State University...

...Edwards never fell into that trap...

...And if the brigand crew should skim a few shares off the top...

...The crowd was on its feet, clapping, cheering...

...the fabled Roosevelt Hotel is now a mere link in the Fairmont chain...

...my old neighborhood Tivoli is a funeral parlor, and the K&B drug stores, a local institution, have sold out to Rite-Aid...

...Though hardly a mandate for Edwards-Dick Leche resurrected would have done as wellthe Cajun King took it as such...

...Not only would he be nearing Social Security retirement age by the next election, but after twenty years and four campaigns, "Fast Eddie's" act, for all its style and flair, had played out...

...Or, as it were, a soupqon of Tabasco...

...Just the sort of in-your-face excess that made Edwards's strait-laced critics at home cringe in embarrassment...

...Or when, a year later, Volz's streak of high-profile criminal convictions ended with Edwards's complete acquittal by a second jury...

...The American Spectator _9 March 20 o o 37 ing foreign agents...

...REPORTER: You're telling us he cheats on his wife...

...The DCCL Inquiry...

...Look what the people got...

...Not even, for the benefit of prayer-breakfast soulmates, a lip-biting promise to reform his philandering ways...

...But Edwin's brain"--a tap of the head--"that boy was pure hustler, always playing some angle...

...Not much different, all in all, from any other LSU law student with an urge to live in the governor's mansion...

...Any prosecutor who could send Carlos Marcello to prison could nail a Cajun king...

...John Maginnis, though he's covered Edwards long enough to hedge his guesses, sees signs, portents of an outcome different from the jury verdict of thirteen years ago: for one, the venue is Baton Rouge, not juryfriendly New Orleans...

...Volz, on the other hand, was dealing with a sitting governor only a year after he had won not simply election but an unprecedented third term by a landslide...

...I'm a wizard under the sheets myself...

...Two years later he would be in the crash of reporters and TV cameras at the federal courthouse in New Orleans, on hand to cover the trial of the first Louisiana governor under criminal indictment in nearly halfa century...

...Well,' he said, 'he don't drink or smoke.'" There is a Republican governor now, Mike Foster, fairly popular, north and south...

...John Maginnis, The Last Hayride The parallels are striking: A Southern governor of rural origin whose passion for power is rivaled only by his relentless pursuit of campaign funds and extra-marital sex...

...Maginnis, in The Last Hayride, went back to early nineteenth-century history to explain why Louisiana voters, rather than being shocked by the consistent venality of their chosen leaders, "applaud chicanery and corruption as good political theater...

...for Edwards, no hot denials that he ever had "sexual relations with that woman," no solemn meetings with Reverend Fix-it, Jesse Jackson, for drive-by absolution...

...The more he embarrassed the swells the better...

...DCCL--the Deferred Compensation Corporation of Louisiana--was given an exclusive franchise to sell tax-shelter retirement plans to state employees...

...Not that the Teflon Governor emerged from the trials unscathed...

...Earl missed, but the incident left the usually insouciant Pegler with a lasting impression of Louisiana politics...

...His image and his resulting immunity were so firmly established by the end of his first term that he could tetI a reporter the only personat scandal that could hurt him would have him "caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy...

...I remember when government made it possible for me to eat a free, hot lunch at school...

...Yet, reassuringly, some things of memory never change: fresh Gulf oysters, savory gumbo, robust coffee, the dinner line outside Galatoire's...

...Since the Baton Rouge of my youth was defined, in terms of good eats, as the home of unsurpassed chili-dogs, it occurs to me that all change in the past four decades has not been for the worse...

...Or since Uncle Earl, before he went crazy...

...whose fundraising involves sizable and frequent contributions from agents of an Asian country intent on influencing the political process in this country...

...Add to that the good looks that drove little girls crazy and the roguish charm of a shell-game operator at a parish carnival-a certain gleam that Louisianians, north and south, relish in their politicians...

...But Edwards, this classmate adds, entered the Louisiana political arena with assets his future rivals could only envy...

...With the coming of John Volz, a hot-eyed federal district attorney who had tried, and won, criminal cases against the president of the state senate and the godfather of the local Mafia, Edwards's days as a scofflaw were numbered...

...If we had caught him, we'd have eaten him up...

...Later, though stuffed, we head for the Caf6 du Monde, on the riverfront, for a nightcap round (or two) of card au lait and beignets...

...Through his Cajun mother--a Brouillette--he appealed to Catholic voters in the bayou parishes (Un de nous Autres--"He's one of us"), while his father "Boboy" of mixed Welsh heritage, along with a sister married to a Nazarene minister, gave him Protestant credentials...

...as did his visits to the legislature where, after watching the people's representatives at work, he wrote: "They do not permit a house of prostitution to operate within a proscribed distance of the state university, but exempt the state Capitol from the meaning of the act...

...Edwin Edwards, campaigning in 1991 against David Duke Luck, as Branch Rickey famously defined it, is but the residue of preparation...

...TWO TARGETS MAY CUT DEAL WITH PROSECUTION J " ohn Maginnis tells the story of Edwin Edwards campaigning at a Pentecostal revival meeting outside the town of Tioga on a Fourth of July...

...He was so cute," recalled one in later years...

...I wanted to be a politician and a lawyer so I wouldn't have to work...

...the eats come first...

...In Lafitte's day the power was that of the ruling Anglos in distant Washington and their local satraps...

...Philandering is a habit normally associated with politicians, but so is hypocritical Puritanism...

...Now the Faustian twist, the devil's bargain that turned a high-seas bandit from rogue to role model for future Louisiana politicians: "Lafitte was Louisiana's first Robin Hood...

...But Interstate lo, a 75-minute scenic stretch from downtown New Orleans to the campus of Louisiana State University, has no such history, though it does pass Donaldsonville, close by the notorious Sunshine Bridge...

...Few Louisiana political observers were surprised when--after Edwards's lawyers portrayed Volz as the tool of a rich-folks' Republican Justice Department out to crucify a populist governor-the case ended in a mistrial...

...The book proved embarrassing, but a Baton Rouge grand jury, given Vidrine's own shady background, took no action...

...In his memorable profile of Earl Long (The Earl of Louisiana), Liebling saw the state as a misplaced Mediterranean province, picaresque and volatile...

...The hayride, more garish than ever, would roll again...

...Or so they said...

...Lafitte was no pirate, but a privateer, operating with letters of marque, to prey on the merchant vessels of Spain," Maginnis tells us...

...EDWARDS GAMBLING TRIPS PROBED BY 1RS AGENTS I t was T. Harry Williams's contention that, bad press notwithstanding, Louisiana polities is no more corrupt than the politics of any other state...

...As Dick Leche said of his predecessor O.K...

...Edwin Edwards to Louisiana farm audiences, 1971-1991 As a boy growing up in the small Louisiana town of Marksville (pop...

...The brainchild of Edwards's closest aide, Clyde Vidrine, TEL Enterprises was a quick-dollar development operation to raise funds, through the cachet of the Governor's Office, toward construction of a 62-story skyscraper in downtown New Orleans...

...Or so they said...

...Instead, for the entertainment, indeed enlightenment, of the churchly bourgeoisie of Louisiana, from Bible Belt north to Mass-going south, there is the spectacle of their once-and-future governor, the Cajun King, slyly "poking at other politicians' carefully preserved image of righteousness" while flaunting his own venery: EDWARDS (ofa well-known politician): I know for a fact he has a mistress...

...Share Our Wealth, Huey called it, the American welfare state ahead of its time...

...the eye-winking ioie de viwe that seems to say, Pay your money, take your choice, catch me if you can...

...Questions about inquiries into Edwards's financial affairs, either while he was governor or between terms, had by the mid-eighties become so routine as to be, in some cases, back-page stories...

...Asked by reporters outside a federal courthouse if he thought his phone was tapped, he said no but added, "Except by jealous husbands...

...It was more than I could take," Maginnis recallS...

...Louisianians have ever prized a brazen irreverence in their leaders, a mocking contempt for the power held by the ruling elite...

...Defeated by Charles "Buddy" Roemer, a onetime aide, he entered the private practice of law and seemed, by all Las Vegas odds, to be a man whose time had passed...

...Tell me, I asked, how can pious people support a man who is known to gamble, chase women, and constantly face investigation for corruption...

...Presumably they'll say the same if, as now seems possible, "Fast Eddie's" run of luck plays out at the federal courthouse this round of indictments...

...When Park, working through Congressman Otto Passman, brokered a huge foreign-aid sale that emptied Louisiana rice bins, Edwards shared the credit and gained a statewide reputation as a man who got things done for his constituents...

...For The American Spectator _9 Marc h 2 o o o 35 Clinton, the hypocritical Puritanism of the political weasel...

...Questioned after he became governor about a $xo,ooo gift from Park, "Fast Eddie" uncharacteristically offered a Clintonesque denial, but later reverted to form by admitting that yes, Park had given $1o,ooo to his wife, but it was no big deal...

...There would be a grand dinner (with dancing) at the Versailles palace, high-rolling at the casino tables in Monte Carlo...

...Running as a Republican, the neo-Nazi/ex-Kluxer was swept away in one of the greatest landslides in state history...

...The Reverend looked at me as if I'd just checked in from another planet...

...whose obsessive womanizing is so uncontrolled as to alienate his wife and lead personal aides (used as procurers) to worry about its effect on his career...

...Case in point: "Fast Eddie's" comeback in the 1991 Louisiana governor's race, in which Edwards, given only a marginal chance to defeat incumbent "Buddy" Roemer, was instead blessed with David Duke as a run-off opponent...

...Those were days when you drove from New Orleans to Baton Rouge via the Airline Highway, noted in history as the road traveled by speeding black limousines, preceded by wailing police sirens, the night Huey Long was shot...

...He stole treasure from the Spanish, snuck it past the Americans and sold it cheap to the French...

...government in New Orleans...

...or, closer to home for the under-forty generation, the road traveled by Edwin Edwards's soulmate Jimmy Swaggart, the motel-dwelling evangelist, in his fall from grace...

...EDWARDS: He's not as good at it as I am, but he does...

...In the event, no fewer than 6oo revelers took the tour...

...Park would end up indicted on thirty-six separate counts of bribery, illegal lobbying, and violation of federal statutes regard1 "Coonass," for the benefit of the politically correct, is a non-pejorative synonym for"Cajun" widely used by people of French-Acadian stock in Louisiana's bayous-as when Edwards, on the night of his 197x vietory, defined the moment in terms of"The Coonasses have done it...

...Laissez les bons temps fouler...

...Over the campaign was the incubus of Huey and his methods...

...The American Spectator _9 Marc h 2 o o o 39...

...His father, he would say, was a shar-cropper...

...So important was Lafitte to the economic lives of the first settlers that if Congress had allowed free elections in the newly acquired territory, the American [Governor William] Claiborne would have had a hard time holding his job against the wealthy privateer...

...Other than rural electrification, every governmental blessing named--the school bus, the free hot lunch, the books-came not from the Great White Father in Washington but the Kingfish in Baton Rouge, bought and paid for by soak-the-rich taxation-privateer's loot taken from Rockefeller's galleon...

...There are questions, many questions, we have for Maginnis, but in the time-honored way of Louisiana (as opposed to Anglo) business lunches, they can wait...

...Many have pondered the effect on Louisiana youth of the object lessons in demagogy which Huey held forth so vividly...

...The Sunshine, which spans the Mississippi from nowhere-to-nowhere, was built in the sixties to enrich the friends of then-Governor Jimmie Davis, the singing cowboy...

...And so it went until, by the mid-eighties, "Fast Eddie" had earned, among frustrated political critics and grudging federal investigators, a Teflon label...

...a century-plus later there would come a new power elite, John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, and not long after, a modernday Robin Hood who, in Maginnis's words, "played to his audience, the teeming masses of poor folk who took special delight not only in his taxing the rich but in his thumbing his nose at the genteel sensibilities of the privileged class...

...As it was, the American governor, a stiff-necked autocrat, had a difficult time just holding onto his dignity...

...EDWARDS DENIES TAKING TONGSUN PARK MONEY A t the conclusion of his third succes, sful race for ouisiana s governorship in the winter of x983, Edwin Edwards asked his brother Marion to come up with some stylish way to pay offa masisive campaign debt...

...but five years and two indictments after Edwin Edwards left the mansion for (by all odds) the last time, there are still those who will tell you, at Mother's in New Orleans, or Mulate's in Breaux Bridge, that for all his gambling, cheating and loose way with a solemn oath, "Fast Eddie" was the best damned governor Louisiana ever had...

...Nothing would come of the federal inquiries (FBI, IRS) into the Paris-Monaco junket...

...You could say or write what you wanted of his personal life but you didn't call him a hypocrite...

...mate...

...A great deal has changed in New Orleans over the past quarter-century, much to my regret: Canal Street has run down, streetcar fares have gone up...

...I remember when government made books available to me that I otherwise would not have been able to have...

...In fact, the eouzains ate it up, just as Huey's followers had vicariously enjoyed the Kingfish's escapades in New York and Chicago four decades before: One of theirs had made it big...

...I remember when government made it possible for a bus to pick me up and drive me eight miles into town...

...He and his brother Pierre were smugglers on a grand scale...an affront to the newly-installed U.S...

...This, however, was about to change...

...Rogge, however, had more than law on his side...

...Cut cold, Vidrine then turned on his former boss, writing a tell-all book (lust Takin' Orders) that went into lurid detail about Edwards's shady fundraising tactics and hyperactive sex life...

...The record shows that young Edwin, given time, got over his shyness with the opposite sex...

...the judge a no-nonsense fast-tracker who, when asked for a two-month discovery period, simply banged his gavel and snapped, "Are you kidding7" Add to that the prospect of two trials on separate, unrelated charges, a double gauntlet made more hazardous by the sworn testimony of former cronies gone over to the federal enemy: the Teflon worn down, so thin there is even talk that Edwards, side-by-side with his son and co-defendant Stephen, is resigned to the possibility that he might have to spend his next few birthdays behind prison walls...

...Though neither bounty was ever collected, Lafitte's Cajun followers loved the show...

...That it appears more corrupt, said Williams, is due to Louisiana politicians practicing their art "with style and flair...

...Bates, a Pentecostal preacher who learned politics from Earl Long and was lOO percent behind Edwin Edwards...

...Or, at least, the best since John McKeithen...

...Volz was tenacious, a bulldog prosecutor who reminded old-timers of O. John Rogge, the 38 March 2 o o o _9 The American Spectator incorruptible federal prosecutor sent down by Washington in 1939 to nail the remnants of the Long gang...

...In a 1991 interview he would claim that the Longs, Huey and Earl, had only a passing influence on his political evolution, that his true mentor was Franklin Roosevelt...

...Williams, the LSU professor who wrote a prize-winning biography of Huey Long, shared this unorthodox view with two other authorities on Louisiana political culture, A. J. Liebling and John Maginnis...

...I wasn't very smart, but I knew as a six-year-old I didn't want to farm...

...EDWARDS: I'm not aware of that, but it's certainly better than cash...

...A decade before, when Edwin had won his first term in the mansion (defeating Bennett Johnston), Marion had broken new ground in imaginative fundraising by putting together a fatcat junket to Latin America to pay the bills...

...Ten thousand might seem like a lot of money to a reporter," he told the press, "bur there's a big difference between what's illegal and what causes you people to raise your eyebrows...

...Surely, they thought, this would be too much for even Edwards's Coonass 1 couzains in the bayou...

...Me, I wait and see...

...Allen, "They're saying he stole millions...

...EDWARDS WILL ENTER PLEA IN COURT TODAY I n the summer of 1934, at a time when young Edwin Edwards was hiding under houses to get away from girls, nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler came to Baton Rouge to cover a legislative hearing involving Huey Long...

...True believers...

...Edwards was just a south Louisiana rice-country congressman when he came to know Park, the smooth-talking South Korean businessman-lobbyist who impressed Washington during the early seventies with lavish parties and large campaign contributions...

...Now he would exceed even that lxiumph: For a Sxo,ooo fee any fun-loving lobbyist, office-seeker, or corporate CEO doing business with the state could join Governor Edwards and his family on a pleasure jaunt to Paris and Monaco...

...Edwards emerged unscathed...

...Most of the candidates used Huey's oratorical tactics, retained his platform, worked hard to be "second Hueys...

...He was as country as you could get," according to a former classVICTOR GOLD/S The American Spectator's national corresDondent...

...You have to work too hard...

...Ronald Reagan sat in the Oval Office...

...The race ~against Republican David Treen had cost between four and five million dollars-a record-breaker for state politics at the time-and the Cajun King didn't relish the prospect of spending the next four years attending humdrum dinners to satisfy his creditors...

...Having spent half his four-year term dividing time between the Capitol and the courthouse, Edwards would run for re-election in 1987 with his poll numbers at an all-time low...

...Pegler's initial report was so lacerating that Earl Long, in defense of his brother, threw a roundhouse punch at the columnist...

...My first stop, within hours after arriving, is either Felix's in t h e Quarter, or The Pearl on St...

...Among the major inquiries: "The TELAffair...

...Hardly a clean bill, but no indictments- just a tongue-clucking suggestion that "This is the kind of activity a state code of ethics should protect against...

...Style, flair, above all audacity...

...bythe time he arrived in New Orleans the court of public opinion had already convicted Leche and his cronies...

...As John Volz and his team of federal attorneys saw it at the time, they had built an airtight case, one that involved Edwards in a scheme to sell-cash upfront-state approval for the construction of hospital projects...