Naturally the President was suspected. Oscar very much doubted that the President would have stooped to a tactic so archaic and crude. The failed assassination actually strengthened Huey’s hand—and his hand came down hard on Louisianans, and on the Regulator hierarchy in particular. It was of course Louisianans who had the greatest reason to kill their leader, who in pursuit of his own ambitions had placed their state in a hopeless struggle against the entire Union. The Regulators in particular—Huey’s favorite fall guys—had a grim future ahead of them, if and when they faced federal vengeance. Regulators from outside Louisiana—and there were many such—were sensing which way the wind blew, and were signing up in droves for the quasi-legitimacy of the President’s CDIA. Huey had been good to the proles, he had made them a force to be reckoned with—but even proles understood power politics. Why go down in flames with a Governor, when you could rise to the heights with a President?