Duke, Edwards Quizzed on Their Pasts in TV Face-Off

NEW ORLEANS —  David Duke denied Sunday that he was ever a Nazi Party member and again apologized for his past intolerance as the campaign for Louisiana governor moved into its last week.

Duke, a renegade Republican, and ex-Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, a Democrat, sparred on NBC-TV’s “Meet The Press.” They spent most of their time disagreeing and interrupting each other and trying to shake off their pasts.

The side-by-side meeting in the TV studio was the last scheduled joint appearance by the two before their runoff election on Saturday.

Duke, a state representative who has been disowned by President Bush, was grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan in the late 1970s and was a Nazi sympathizer.

When quizzed about his qualifications to lead Louisiana and his knowledge of the state, Duke couldn’t identify the top three employers or say how many residents live below the poverty line.

Host Garrick Utley asked Duke about his past, holding up a picture in Sunday’s edition of the New York Times showing him wearing a Nazi armband in 1969 and carrying a sign that read “Gas the Chicago 7.”

Duke, 41, said he was 19 at the time, was frustrated and trying to protest what he believed was the wrong direction his country was taking, but he admitted that he “didn’t choose the right method.”

“I was never a member of the Nazi Party or anything like that,” Duke said.

Asked about his past, Edwards, a high-stakes craps shooter in Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe, Nev., said: “Well, I’m not a gambler. . . . I don’t bet on football games, baseball games, basketball games. . . . On occasion when I go to Las Vegas or Atlantic City, where it is legal, within my means, I gamble.”

Edwards was asked if for the sake of the state he would try to recast his image away from that of a gambler and womanizer.

He twice evaded the question, then replied: “I’m 64 years old now, and I want this opportunity to do something for myself and for my state, and I’m not going to blow it.”