On the airplane, I caught sight of someone reading the latest issue of U.S. News and World Report, with a cover story on "How to Raise a Moral Child." It sounded like typical middlebrow sermonizing, based on the assumption that morality (that is, morality as defined by the editors of the magazine) could be taught in the same way as spelling or darts. It's not that simple, as I could attest. Here I was traveling to Las Vegas with a polygraph expert to interview a man who, I believed, did not have an adult sense of right and wrong. He had bedeviled me for a year, and now I hoped I could finally determine whether he was telling the truth.



In May 1995, I had published an article in The New Republic describing how Texas Senator and presidential candidate Phil Gramm concealed his investment in 1974 in a soft-porn movie called Beauty Queens. About three weeks after the article appeared, I received a letter containing a weather-beaten membership card from July 4, 1974, for Phil Gramm from the Texas Fiery Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. It was signed by "Scott Nelson, Imperial Wizard." On the back of the card was a message to Gramm from Nelson: "Happy Birthday to you next week Phil, Scott. Glad your initiation into the local klavern was OK." Underneath that was Gramm's address in College Station, Texas. The envelope was postmarked Las Vegas, but it bore no return address.

For the hell of it, I decided to do some simple checking. What I found was disconcerting. Gramm's address was exactly what the card described; his birthday was July 8, which was the following week. I discovered through a Nexis search that Nelson had been the head of the Fiery Knights in 1974. He had run for mayor of Houston in 1975, and in 1976 was even slated to run for vice president of the United States on a national Klan ticket. Soon afterwards, Nelson dropped out of the news until December 30, 1993, when The Houston Chronicle reported from the Philippines that he had been kidnapped. A week later, the Associated Press reported, Nelson resurfaced unharmed, claiming that he had been robbed.

I called The Houston Chronicle's librarian to see if she had anything from the 1970s with Nelson's signature on it. She sent me a questionnaire that Nelson had filled out for the 1975 mayoral race. As it came in over the fax, I saw that the signature and handwriting matched that on the card. The card, I realized, could be genuine, and Gramm could have been involved in 1974 in something far worse than investing in soft-porn movies. But questions abounded: If it was Gramm's card, how did it end up in my mailbox at The New Republic? Was Nelson himself still around, and could he have sent the card to me? And what were the conceivable circumstances in which Gramm, a respectable college professor with an Asian American wife, would have joined the most notorious racist organization in America?

I went to College Station to see whether I could find anyone to attest that Gramm had been a member of a local klavern. I never supposed that Gramm had joined the Klan out of agreement with its aims. In writing a profile of him for GQ, I had spent a day with Gramm and had also interviewed his wife, brother and childhood friends. Gramm is not an easy person to read. Like other politicians, his self is buried beneath layers of calculated appearance designed to make him an appealing public figure. But, from what I could gather, Gramm's concealed self contained a blend of rebellious mischievousness and searing ambition. I couldn't discern the kind of hatred and resentment, nor the overriding sense of failure, that drives people to embrace organizations like the Klan.

If Gramm had joined the Klan, it would have been out of cynical calculation, with perhaps a dash of mischievousness thrown in. As a politician, Gramm had sometimes seemed to play the race card. In 1976, he had briefly backed George Wallace for president. It was conceivable, though not likely, that in 1974, while contemplating a run for Congress, he might have thought a secret membership in the Klan would help his chances in East Texas, where Wallace retained significant support and where the Klan was still strong. But I couldn't find any evidence in College Station of the Fiery Knights, let alone of Gramm's membership in a klavern.