David Duke - 22 November 1991

Louisiana. The name, the place, first drifted into my consciousness in the most beguiling way, through the voice in the long ago of Bing Crosby, in a song which professed his aching eagerness to get back to his roots in Louisiana, no place is gran'er, I declare, I do, do declare. The fact that Bing Crosby's roots were about 4,000 miles away from New Orleans, in the extreme north-west corner of the country, should not be held against his sincerity in loving Louisiana.

New Orleans certainly, is one city that was made for Bing. Easy-going, unbuttoned, hospitable, the cradle of jazz, a haven of a special blend of cooking traditions. Like the Vietnamese, the Louisianans have inherited French habits and local raw materials, so that Cajun cooking is something that anybody who yearns much beyond bangers and mash had better investigate.

It's easy on first acquaintance to be prejudiced in favour of Louisiana. It has the most romantic history, settled by a tenaciously heroic Frenchman, who originally staked out one third of North America as a French colony or kingdom in the name of Louis XIV and this great area, the entire Mississippi watershed, was bought eventually by the astute Thomas Jefferson from Napoleon.

The name Mississippi calls up haunting memories of Mark Twain and, in this century, the very successful sentimental industry in musical plays about showboats and beautiful half-breeds and the majestic Old Man River. Tourism is one of the great businesses of Louisiana, though it must be said that not many tourists venture for long or for pleasure into a landscape that is never higher than a hundred feet, that alternates between marsh and swampland and seen from the air, the whole state looks like a sub-tropical lily pad. It's New Orleans that's the tourist mecca and apart from the relics of the French and Spanish occupations, there are such surprising oddities as cemeteries, where you walk along avenues whose walls are the lockers of the dead. You cannot bury people underground in New Orleans. Three, four feet down and you're into water.

However, in the past year or two, Louisiana has come into the national news in a new and disturbing way and a month ago it discharged a thunderclap over the political horizon. As much as any state you can think of, Louisiana has been famous or notorious for political machines run with a smoothness and a droll cynicism, which the natives lamented but never seemed to rebel against. But four years ago the voters swept into office one Buddy Roemer, a Democrat, who ran as a reformer and an impassioned environmentalist.

Now, Louisiana has the worst industrial pollution in the atmosphere. It's the national leader in petro-chemicals. Mr Governor Roemer was determined to change that, he was also determined to save Louisiana from several other statistical records, which he freely published. Among the highest unemployment figure in the nation, least money spent on education, hence worst illiteracy. Mr Roemer soon found that the law-makers were willing to make new laws, such as enforcing environmental standards only if they could be guaranteed the usual quid pro quo or accommodation, what is in other places known as payola. Also to clean the air and the rivers, to improve education, was going to take taxes.

Now, you may remember that throughout the 1980s, Americans got used to the idea that the only sensible thing to do with taxes is to cut them, in spite of the evidence of whacking state deficits, that you can't have anything without paying for it. Well, this illusion with Mr Roemer had settled in for good when, a month ago, Louisiana held a primary election for governor, a run-off election. There were three candidates and obviously there would be two places for the final election. Buddy Roemer forlornly, gamely going at it again. A former governor, one Edwin Edwards, a veteran Democrat, three-times governor already, twice survived indictments for corruption, frankly known and some places enjoyed as a gambler and a lover of women. So to begin with, two Democrats. Now, on the Republican side, one David Duke, Mr Duke it is who, in the short spell of a month or so, made the whole country sit up and take notice and hear the sound of an alarm bell.

Mr Duke is very young for a politician with national aspirations. He's 41. Evidently a lonely boy, of strong ambition, his father took off for Asia, for Laos, when the boy was 16 and left him with an alcoholic mother. He was still in high school when he joined and became a young spokesman for the White Citizen's Council, you can guess correctly what 's that about, mainly propagating theories of the genetic inferiority of blacks and certain Asians. From school, Duke went to Louisiana State University, declared himself an American Nazi. He wore the uniform, honoured, if that's the word, Hitler's birthday, and fought with the history teachers over what he took to be their false lessons. For one thing, he asserted, and by the way very recently maintained, that the Holocaust was an Allied invention. That naturally, he said, that's the way crematoria look.

He left Louisiana after his third year in college and got a job his father had set up for him, teaching basic English to army officers in Laos. Later he decorated this experience with tales, not substantiated, of going on anti-Communist raids behind enemy lines. When he came home to Louisiana from Laos, he abruptly abandoned the Nazi uniform and joined instead the Ku Klux Klan. Now I'm sure many listeners, like many Americans, will be surprised to hear that there's any life left in that once immense army of white-sheeted, hooded bigots whose great aim in life was to eradicate all Jews and Catholics and of course blacks from American political life and restore the United States to its Protestant Christian origins. In the 1920s, this crusade had the earnest support of some very respectable people. It's a shock today to watch DW Griffiths' immortal film, The Birth of a Nation, which is nothing less than an impassioned tribute to the Klan.

Anyway, David Duke had a reforming idea for the Klan, which was to abandon the sheets and the hoods and the night-time rides and the burning crosses and the whole reputation of violent intimidation. The Klan's officers would dress like Ivy Leaguers, they would be young and engaging. David Duke was all of these things and more. He is the bluest-eyed, frankest, sweetest looking young bigot you'd ever hope to meet. He became the leader, the Grand Wizard, of the Klan in 1975. he was not an unmixed blessing to other leaders. His obsession was the Jews. He wrote, under a pseudonym, a manual of street fighting tactics for blacks. He quit the Klan in 1981.

He did not quit most of its aims, he started something the National Association for the Advancement of White People. He's twice run for a seat in the Louisiana state Senate and he made if three years ago. Within the last two years, he has sold, from his legislative office, neo-Nazi pamphlets. Once he decided to run for governor, of course his opponents and the Louisiana and national press, dug out a whole litany of beliefs, declarations, statements for use by his people. It would take an hour or more to pass on to you the full flavour of these diatribes. Think of the most outrageous, impulsive lines you ever heard from Hitler, from Doctor Goebbels, about the Jews, about blacks, and David Duke has said them.

Since he decided to run for governor, he has said quietly and over and over again that he's a penitent, that he respects Jews, has nothing against blacks. But all the policies he supports are code words as weapons against the blacks, the Hispanics and other minorities. He says he's a born-again Christian, but being challenged to name his church, he couldn't think of it. Well he was seen months ago as a threat, not least to the Republicans, since he was the only Republican running, whereupon old Buddy Roemer, the sitting governor, the good boy, environmentalist, obliged President Bush by turning Republican, so that decent Republicans would have some other choice than Duke.

It worked, in the sense that Mr Roemer did attract, if not magnetise, a solid Republican vote. The rest of the voters had the choice between the neo-Nazi Republican Duke and Mr Edwards, the reprobate Democrat. They chose the reprobate. The final tally was 61% for Edwards, 27% for the good guy, Roemer and 39% for David Duke. Mr Duke says this governor's race is only a first step in his political career.

The promise or threat of a national political career is what has aroused most people and alarmed some. The chances that that promise could be fulfilled are boosted by the fact of, in the first place, almost 40% of the white vote, needless to say the blacks came out in record numbers against him, but he did get 40% of the whites. But more significant, is that the money for Mr Duke's campaign was contributed from 46 out of the 50 states. He says he may enter, come the spring, some presidential primaries. Since his wide appeal, even to people who say they reject his anti-Semitism and his theories about blacks, since his appeal is as a protest code against the more liberal or centre policies of president Bush, Mr Duke could turn into quite a cuckoo in the White House nest.

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