David Duke

    With his broad smile and boy-next-door looks, former Ku
 Klux Klan leader and Nazi sympathizer David Duke has leaped
 from the radical right fringes to mainstream conservative
 politics in less than 3 years.
    Despite White House and Republican party attempts to bury
 him with scorn, Duke has bounded into the biggest political
 arena of all. He announced Dec 4 that he will challenge
 President George Bush for the 1992 GOP presidential
 nomination and hopes to run in primaries all over the
 country.
    In his hard-fought but losing campaign for Louisiana's
 governorship this fall, Duke tried to distance himself from
 more than 20 years of involvement with neo-Nazis, white
 supremacist groups and the Klan, where he was a grand
 wizard.
    But his background gave an overtly racist edge to the
 conservative Republican dogma he now espouses.
    Duke, who is 41 but looks years younger, attacked welfare
 mothers, "affirmative action" racial equality policies and
 rising crime, which he blamed on the "welfare underclass."
    He was trounced almost 2-1 in the Nov 16 Louisiana
 governor's election by former Democratic Governor Edwin
 Edwards, who had the benefit of nationwide bipartisan
 support including denunciations of Duke by Bush.
    But Duke carried 55 % of the white vote. Analysts
 attributed his strong showing, in part, to Louisiana's bad
 economic times. In 1990, Duke lost to Democrat J Bennett
 Johnston for the US Senate, but took 44 % of the vote,
 including 58 % of the white vote.
    Duke is making it clear he is not about to quit the
 national political stage.
    Duke has even broadened his target-issues to include
 opposition to immigration and to a proposed free trade
 agreement with Mexico he said would "take jobs away from
 Americans".
    He converted to the Republican Party in 1988 after
 running for president on the extremist Populist Party
 ticket, whose members include neo-Nazis and skinheads.
    Shortly after the switch, he won a seat in the Louisiana
 legislature from a predominantly white New Orleans suburb.
    Horrified party leaders deny he is a true Republican and
 Bush has called him an "insincere charlatan.
    Duke has chided the Republican party for refusing to
 accept him at face value and says his newfound Christianity
 grants him forgiveness for his "earlier intolerances".
    "As a presidential candidate, I could bring a lot of
 working people across this country" into the party, he says.
    Duke's activism dates to the 1960s when New Orleans was
 in the throes of desegregating its schools.
    He was born in Tulsa, Okla, on July 1, 1950. His family
 moved to New Orleans when he and his older sister were
 young.
    By age 17, he held full KKK membership. Later, at
 Louisiana State University, classmates often heard him
 preaching white supremacy and Nazi philosophy.
    At 19, Duke was photographed in a Nazi uniform during a
  1-man demonstration. The photo continues to haunt him.
    "I was just a kid," he says. "Everyone has done something
 at some time in their youth that they regret later."
    In 1972, he married Chloe Hardin of West Palm Beach, Fla,
 also a right-wing activist. They divorced amicably several
 years later and his 2 teen-age daughters often appeared with
 him during his campaigns.
    His ex-wife is now married to Don Black, Duke's
 handpicked successor when he left the Klan.
    Duke began receiving national attention by traveling, in
 Klan robes, to areas suffering racial tensions.
    He injected himself into a furor over racial school
 busing in Boston and later organized vigilante border
 patrols in the Southwest US to keep out illegal immigrants
 from Mexico.
    In 1979, he was booted out of Britain for trying to
 organize KKK chapters at Oxford and Cambridge universities.
    That same year he resigned from the Klan.
    Duke then founded the Natl Association for the
 Advancement of White People. Its newsletter often blamed
 Jews for world problems and attacked blacks as being
 intellectually inferior to whites. He called it a white
 civil rights group.
    The NAAWP continued to operate from Duke's home--and he
 remained its president--until 1990.
    Duke says he won't run in New Hampshire's February
 primary, but will use his campaign to disseminate his views
 across the country.