Duke’s Talk of Piety May Further Erode Credibility

David Duke’s strategy of inserting Christianity into his campaign for the Louisiana governorship is apparently running into trouble.

For the last three weeks, Duke has said religion has changed his life and helped moderate the negative views he held towards blacks and Jews when he was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and a Nazi sympathizer. But that sudden use of Christianity may have damaged his already shaky credibility, and appears to have failed to blunt an onslaught of attention to his racist past.

Duke, 41, a Republican state legislator, began emphasizing his Christianity in speeches and talk show conversations just after finishing second in Louisiana’s open primary last month, thus winning a runoff spot against former Democratic Gov. Edwin W. Edwards.

But this week Duke’s state campaign coordinator, Bob Hawks, quit in a huff, claiming that Duke “has not changed and is a racist.” Last week a small group of evangelical ministers met with Duke to evaluate his claims of newfound Christian tolerance, and found him wanting.

“Duke told us that he became a Christian at age 13--28 years ago,” said Neil Curran, a leader of the state evangelical Republicans. “Well, since then, Duke has had a lifestyle that’s inconsistent with Christian principles--burning the cross, twisting it into a swastika.”

Two polls released Wednesday indicated that Duke is having a rough go of it in the final days of the campaign. A poll by the University of New Orleans showed Edwards leading Duke 52% to 26%. Adjusting the poll to take into account those who would not admit voting for Duke made it much closer: 46% for Edwards, 40% for Duke. In a Mason-Dixon Poll, 49% of the voters said Duke worried them the most, compared to 31% for Edwards. Last month, only 41% of the voters said Duke worried them the most, compared to 31% for Edwards.

“The bottom line is that Edwards has a 7 to 10 point lead as of last weekend,” said Susan Howell, director of the University of New Orleans poll. “Duke’s momentum has slowed down considerably.”

Part of the reason, political experts say, is that for all his protestations that he has changed, Duke is suffering from being put under the microscope, combined with a torrent of advertising against him and feverish work by the business community in support of Edwards.

“It’s apparent that his past is getting closer and closer to him all the time,” said John Maginnes, a longtime political observer and editor of the Louisiana Political Review. “His past is not only catching up with him, it’s piling on.”

In a recent radio talk show, Duke said “the biggest element in my change has been my relationship with Christ and I think that’s what changes more lives in our country and world than anything else. We grow older and become more wiser. We become more mature. We see things in the world and it’s a natural process for people to moderate.”

But in recent days, evidence has piled up that religion has been fairly scarce in Duke’s life until now.

“I spent hundreds of hours with this guy and Christ never came up,” his biographer, Michael Zatarain said in an interview Wednesday.

Duke was asked what church he belonged to and he replied that he was a member of the Evangelical Baptist Church. The problem is there is no such church. Duke then said he belonged to an evangelical study group. He named as his minister a man who had not been in the pulpit full time for 14 years and who also happened to be Duke’s campaign photographer and pilot.

Lance Hill, director of the Coalition Against Racism and Nazism, said Wednesday that Duke may have stumbled in his effort to lure the religious right into his camp.

“His newfound piety is a two-edged sword,” Hill said. “It can be an explanation of his kind of baffling and rapid conversion. The other edge of the sword is that if there is any hint of duplicity, it will destroy his political calling. He’s playing with fire on this one.”

Maginnes contended that Duke is now “getting a real introduction into big-time politics. There has been a major research project into the life and times of David Duke. The more he is in that glare, the more damaging it becomes. Baggage makes the man.”

Fortunately, or perhaps unfortunately in Duke’s view, there is a long written and oral history about David Duke. He has been in the public spotlight from the time he entered Louisiana State University more than 20 years ago.

The scenes, repeated in anti-Duke commercials and news stories here, flash by in quick succession:

--Duke espousing fascism at LSU’s Free Speech Alley and taking German so he can read Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” in the original language. Duke speaking at a full-dress Nazi rally in 1970. Duke, at the tender age of 25 becoming the grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan.

--Duke founding the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People in 1980. His newsletter advocates, among many other things, dividing the United States into a number of ethnic nations.

--Duke running for President on both the Democratic and Populist Party tickets in 1988. The Populist Party is made up of ultra right extremists, including neo-Nazis and klansmen.

--Duke winning a seat in the state House of Representatives in 1989 and continuing to sell Nazi and racist materials in his office.

There are also plenty of writings and interviews of Duke, including one in which he said Jews belonged in the “ash bin of history.” In a 1986 copy of his newsletter, Duke wrote that the “racial make-up of America is vital to her well-being, that our genetic and cultural heritage must be preserved and that the best elements in our people must be promoted and cultivated so that our people can realize our promise in the stars.”

In that same year, Duke wrote about a trip he took to India in 1971, where he encountered the abject poverty of that country. He wrote: “I wonder if, a few hundred years from now, some half-black (descendant) of mine will be sitting in the ruins of our civilization brushing away the flies. Every day, our nation grows a little darker from massive nonwhite immigration, high nonwhite birth rates and increasing racial miscegenation, and with each passing day we see the quality of our lives decline a bit more.”

As late as 1989, Duke was espousing beliefs that he always had, said Beth Rickey, a state Republican Party official. Rickey said that during a two-month period, Duke “was trying to, as he put it, bring me over to the movement.”

She said among the things he tried to convince her of during numerous conversations was the Holocaust never existed, that the Aushwitz death camp was merely a rubber factory, that there should be no mixing of the races and that slavery was acceptable because there was nothing against it in the Bible. She said he even read passages of a sex manual he wrote--under the pseudonym of “Dorothy Vanderbilt.”

“That was a real hoot,” said Rickey, who has been branded by Duke as a liberal trying to undermine him. “He wanted to prove the book was not pornography. He was really proud of that book.”

Rickey said that she, like so many others, found herself under Duke’s spell--not in a romantic way, but in how convincing he could be on the subjects that mattered the most to him--Jews and blacks.