Obit: Beth Rickey, exposed David Duke

Everyone in Louisiana was in her debt, yet Beth Rickey was broke and alone when she died Saturday in a Santa Fe motel room at the age of 53. It was a monstrously sad and unjust end to a life that may have changed the course of Louisiana history. Of all the people who fought to keep David Duke out of public office, Rickey was the bravest and most resourceful.

Perhaps voters would have rejected Duke anyway, but perhaps not. All we can say for sure is that, without Rickey, they would never have known how big a fraud and unreconstructed Nazi he was. The media never had a more prolific and intrepid source.

snip

She was, for instance, the first to discover that Nazi propaganda was being peddled from his legislative office, and she followed him to Chicago to tape a venomous address he delivered to a group of racist nuts.

Duke's own vanity did him in, too. He always fancied himself an intellectual with great powers of persuasion, and tended to assume that all white gentiles secretly agreed with his views.

Thus he took to calling Rickey at night to talk her round, explaining, for instance, that Josef Mengele was a great scientist who had been misunderstood. She got it all on tape. He could never get away with posing as just another respectable conservative with Rickey around.

http://blog.nola.com/jamesgill/2009/09/james_gill_republican_crusader.html