TV REVIEW : A Disturbing Portrait of David Duke

“Who Is David Duke?,” Hodding Carter’s “Frontline” investigation of Louisiana’s controversial son (at 9 tonight on KCET Channel 28 and KPBS Channel 15, and at 8 on KVCR Channel 24), glances past any predictions of what Duke will do in the fall presidential campaign, and keeps an eye on the past that made him a grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan and, now, a would-be wizard of the ultra-right.

It exemplifies the strengths and weaknesses of a biographical approach to politics.

Duke’s childhood was stabile, until a family tragedy ignited his mother’s alcoholic collapse. But neither this, nor an early fascination in the genetic differences in rats, explain young Duke’s plunge into neo-Nazi race politics. If there were outside influences or other personal reasons for his rabid attachment to the cult of “white power,” Carter misses them.

(Duke refused Carter’s interview request.)

On the core issues, though, Carter is methodical and consistent. Duke’s conservative college rival, Mike Connelley, recalls that Duke boasted of reading Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” some “10 times” and vowed that he would “become mainstream” and gain political power for the time when “the inevitable race war occurred.” Thus, Duke’s recent “conversion” to Republican Party politics is the latest phase in a long-term strategy he plotted out long ago.

“Who Is David Duke?” spends much time on Duke’s method of double-talk: He is a KKK leader at one moment, and renounces the Klan another; he claims that he fought in Laos, which is denied by witnesses; though he’s tried to distance himself from the National Assn. for the Advancement of White People, the offices, Carter reports, are in his home.

Ultimately, though, who David Duke is may be less important than who his supporters are--that base of angry voters who conceal their feelings to pollsters, then reveal them in the ballot box. Now that Pat Buchanan is charging through the South, will they defect, or stay with Duke? Carter reveals a disturbing portrait, but it’s only part of the picture in this election season.