Beware the Obvious and Logical

What every good police detective knows that the rest of us must remember

On September 8, 1935, in Baton Rouge, a man approached Senator Huey Long, pulled out a pistol, and fired a shot. Long’s bodyguards responded with a hail of bullets, instantly killing the assassin. But the man’s shot had found its mark. Long died shortly afterward.

It was a seismic event in American politics. And it’s worth recalling in light of talk about who attempted to murder Donald Trump and why.

Given who Trump is, many Republicans are saying, the shooter must be a leftist. Maybe a Democrat. Whipped up by extremist rhetoric. And that says all we need to know about his motives. Someone who tries to kill a right-winger is a left-winger, and politics are the motivation. It’s obvious and logical. As Senator and vice-presidential candidate J.D. Vance put it, “the central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.”

Maybe. But let’s first consider the case of Huey Long, famously known as “the Kingfish.”

Huey Long

Long was the former governor of Louisiana who had turned the state into a personal fiefdom. Even when Long left Baton Rouge for Washington DC and the national stage, he used a puppet governor to maintain his iron grip at home. After firing state civil servants at all levels, Long turned state jobs into gifts he distributed to those who swore personal fealty. Nothing happened in Louisiana without Long’s personal approval. Criticism of the Kingfish was punished in countless ways, ranging from the dubiously legal to the flagrantly criminal, and with bodyguards sometimes dubbed “Cossacks” and “skullcrushers” by Long’s critics, the threat of violence was constant. Running for governor, Long personally punched his 60-year-old opponent in the face. His rural and working class supporters loved it.

But by the time of his murder, Long had transcended his state and become a rising star in federal politics.

Once a supporter of Franklin Roosevelt, Long denounced FDR as too timid and his populist rhetoric grew increasingly extreme. In 1933, at the bottom of the Great Depression, Long proposed what he called his “Share Our Wealth” plan. Annual incomes would be capped at $1 million, fortunes at $100 million, and inheritances at $5 million. Everything above those sums would be confiscated. That money would be used to fund a guaranteed annual income for ordinary people. It was a straightforward class-based appeal for massive wealth redistribution. And Long was arguably the most powerful communicator in the United States at a time when people were desperate to hear new ideas.

Although Long was smart as hell and educated, he had no use for ideological talk. He would never use a word like “ideological.” His language was simple. Anyone could understand what he wanted — and how evil his opponents were — with just a phrase or two. When Long spoke, what he said felt like homespun wisdom. Plain old common sense. Huey Long seduced audiences with humour, candour, and ferocity.

In early 1935, Democratic polling concluded that if Long ran as an independent he could already take 10% of the national vote, which could be enough to hand the 1936 presidential election to the Republicans. And the danger was growing as Long escalated his attacks on Roosevelt. It was not inconceivable that Huey Long could win the presidency. Some historians argue that Long’s threat from the left pushed Roosevelt’s “Second New Deal” reforms, in 1935, further left than they would have otherwise gone.

But then Long was shot and killed. Who had done it? And why?

Long’s supporters immediately claimed conspiracy. Long was a threat to the rich, to the establishment, to the capitalists and right-wingers. Long’s opponents in Louisiana had even organized militias and talked openly about taking “direct action.” To Long’s supporters, who had murdered Long, and why, seemed obvious and logical.

Just as the who and why of the attack on Donald Trump feel obvious and logical to so many today.

The man who murdered Huey Long, Carl Weiss, turned out to be a young physician with a wife and an infant. Was he an FDR stooge? A cat’s paw of frightened millionaires?

No. Long had been in Baton Rouge to oversee legislation that would gerrymander some electoral districts. So far, so routine. But this particular gerrymander was specifically designed to spoil the re-election of a long-serving judge who had been a pebble in Huey Long’s shoe.

Why is any of that relevant? Because Carl Weiss was the judge’s son-in-law.

No one could have predicted that.

And that is my point.

What is obvious and logical in situations like this often turns out to be wrong. Why? The world is fantastically complex — so complex that any time a major event happens the number of possible explanations for that outcome is huge. Now, a big chunk of those possible explanations will be extremely improbable. Like, “that’s ridiculous” improbable. “Roll my eyes” improbable. "Shut up don’t waste my time” improbable. We tend to dismiss those possibilities out of hand — if we can even imagine them at all. After all, they are so improbable they are, by definition, almost certainly not correct.

But the world is so fantastically complex that these extremely improbable possibilities exist in huge numbers. And if you add one wild improbability to another wild improbability to another wild improbability … pretty soon you get to a significant probability. That’s why what seems obvious and logical often turns out to be wrong.

When Ronald Reagan became president most Democrats considered him a Republican ideologue hellbent on cutting taxes for the rich and dangerously escalating the Cold War. When he was shot it was obvious and logical that the would-be assassin was a leftist of some sort. Let the conspiracy theories begin!

The shooter turned out to be John Hinckley Jr., an unknown, a nobody, who was mentally ill. Hinckley had watched the movie Taxi Driver, starring Robert de Niro and a young Jodi Foster. He became obsessed with Foster and somehow concluded that the best way to win her attention and love was to shoot the president.

Nothing about that was obvious and logical. If someone had proposed exactly the set of facts which turned out to be true, they would have been laughed at.

I could pile up stories like this.

In the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, careful observers spotted a man in the crowd holding a black umbrella. But the day Kennedy was murdered, there wasn’t a cloud in the Dallas sky. Why was a man holding a black umbrella? In the cottage industry of conspiracy theorists that sprang up after the assassination, the man with the black umbrella was a central figure, with the umbrella usually posited to be the secret weapon that fired the shot or shots that really killed president. After all, no other explanation was possible. The man with the black umbrella had to be nefarious. It was obvious and logical.

Errol Morris did a brilliant short film about the mystery and its ultimate resolution. I won’t spoil the conclusion. Watch it here at The New York Times. Thank me later.

And all of this applies far beyond shootings and other grim events.

Did you know that Dennis the Menace was created simultaneously in the United States and Britain? The two Dennises (Dennii?) were even introduced publicly on the same day — March 12, 1951. Conclusion? Well, it’s obvious, isn’t it? One ripped off the other. The only question was which is the original and which the copy. Call a lawyer.

But as it turns out, both creations were inspired and developed entirely separately. It was a coincidence so improbable it could not possibly be coincidence. But so it was.

The human mind is a compulsive hypothesizer, taking observations, drawing out inferences, and conjuring explanatory stories — “this caused this which led to that” — almost as easily and automatically as the brain regulates breathing. That capacity is marvellous. It has done us a world of good.

But we don’t experience those hypotheses as mere hypotheses, so we routinely fail to think, “this is one possible explanation but there could be others. We need to investigate further.” Instead, we think, “this is true.” And stop looking.

And that has done us a world of bad.

As always, we need to cultivate self-awareness and humility. And remember that, to paraphrase Mencken, our solutions are often obvious, logical, and wrong.