Robertson Calls for GOP Probe of Duke : Politics: The evangelist asks Louisiana backers to investigate alleged racist activities by the ex-klan leader, whose appeal is a problem for Republicans.

Pat Robertson, the television evangelist who sought the Republican presidential nomination in 1988, says he is urging his Louisiana supporters--a dominant force in the state GOP here--to investigate alleged racist activities of state Rep. David Duke, a former Ku Klux Klan leader.

Duke, elected as a Republican to the Louisiana Legislature in 1989, ran a surprisingly strong second in the U.S. Senate race here last month, and he has indicated that he may run for governor next year. He has campaigned on “pro-white” issues, including opposition to affirmative action programs.

“If he really in a sense has a secret agenda that he’s not talking about that comes from not only his past but the associations with people like Nazis, we just can’t have that in American politics,” Robertson said in a telephone interview from his office in North Oak, Va.

Robertson’s statement is a sign of trouble for Duke from the Republican conservative wing, and it also underlines the party’s difficulty in dealing with Duke’s populist appeal.

Duke, speaking by phone from the office of the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People in suburban New Orleans, responded: “Mr. Robertson’s never met me--never even talked with me--and I don’t think it’s very Christian of him to judge me without even speaking to me--to judge me by what some of the liberal press has said about me.”

Robertson followers have controlled the Louisiana Republican Party’s policy-making Central Committee since 1988. Led by Dr. Billy McCormack, a Shreveport minister who was Robertson’s presidential campaign manager in the state, the so-called “Born Again” Republicans won 45 of the 140 committee votes and, with alliances, have commanded as many as 80 votes, according to McCormack.

In September, 1989, when the “Born Agains” were clearly in control, the state GOP voted overwhelmingly to table a motion to investigate charges that Duke was selling Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and other racist books and tapes from his tax-supported state office.

Robertson said he is asking McCormack to examine Duke’s past statements and more recent associations.

“I am violently opposed to racism,” Robertson said. “I fought this in this community (Norfolk, Va.) years ago. I helped in my early days to integrate a white church in Westchester County, N.Y. I also went to live with my family in an all-black community in Bedford-Stuyvesant (a New York housing development) in 1959.”

Robertson said he had not taken Duke seriously until last month’s election. “He was sort of an anomaly,” the Christian leader said of the former klansman.

But now, Robertson said, “we owe it to the people down there to give leadership in this regard.”

Neil Curran, one of the co-sponsors of last year’s unsuccessful GOP State Central Committee resolution to investigate Duke’s activities, said: “I think Pat Robertson’s statement concerning David Duke is very important. It means that Duke is not likely to fool and deceive as many people as he has in the past, being even more closely examined by the leadership of the Republican Party and the conservative movement within the party.”

Curran, an evangelical Christian but not a Robertson follower, noted that, until now, scrutiny of Duke has mostly come from liberals. Therefore, it’s significant, Curran said, for a “conservative element in the party and within Christianity to take a much harder stand on Duke.”

The national Republican Party censured Duke in March, 1989.

When asked what he would do if the state Central Committee were to censure him, Duke replied: “How can they censure me when 80% of the Republicans in the state vote for me? What they’re doing is rejecting their own party, their own people.”

However, state GOP Chairman Billy Nungesser rejected Duke’s claim of 80% GOP support. “That’s typical of David Duke,” Nungesser said. “When you’re not used to telling the truth, you can say anything. It’s just like after the election, when he claimed he got a big black vote. That wasn’t true either.”

But Duke’s surprising 44% vote in the Oct. 6 U.S. Senate election has caused consternation in the state GOP policy-making body once again. Its secretary, Lafayette attorney Roderick L. Miller, recently circulated a letter to the Central Committee’s 140 members suggesting that accommodation with Duke was possible.

“The lame excuse that the election of David Duke would embarrass the Republican Party is unacceptable,” Miller wrote on Oct. 11, five days after the election of incumbent Democratic Sen. J. Bennett Johnston to a fourth term.

“Duke was not our nominee, and there’s no reason why the party should feel any shame if the people of Louisiana had chosen to elect him.” Miller’s letter to the GOP council read.

State party Chairman Nungesser said of Miller’s letter: “I think it was pitiful. For anybody even subtly to say we should vote for David Duke is bad news. I bawled Rod out.”