Robert Satloff is executive director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy.
When I learned that the man accused of shooting innocent bystanders Sunday at a Jewish community center and Jewish retirement home in Overland Park, Kan., was a former Klansman named Glenn Miller, I shuddered.
Thirty-three years ago, when I was an undergraduate at Duke University, I read a small item in the Raleigh News & Observer that mentioned Miller, then the grand dragon of the Carolina Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. Miller, it turns out, ran a paramilitary training campin rural North Carolina.
I couldn’t understand how, in late-20th-century America, the KKK could operate in the open less than an hour from our elite, ivory-tower campus. I was an editor of Duke’s daily newspaper, the Chronicle, so I did what any reporter would do: I called Miller and asked for an interview. Always looking for publicity, Miller readily said yes, but he had one condition. “We ain’t no equal-opportunity employer, you know,” he said. “So don’t bring down no blacks and no Jews.”
