The Klansmcm's Secret

"If you publish that," the sallow-faced little man told the New York Times reporter, "I'll come and get you and I'll kill you. I may kill you right now." Wedged into a narrow booth in a dingy luncheonette in Queens, Timesman McCandlish Phillips watched the man, who had been trained in exotic varieties of violence, toy with a table knife. Finally, Phillips suggested that they go outside, where "I figured I had more maneuverability." Phillips got away as soon as he could and went back to the city room to write his story.

It turned out to be just the kind of dramatic local story that the Times's Metropolitan Editor Abe Rosenthal likes. It was a fresh and surprising New York sidebar to Ku Klux Klan investigations in Washington and Klan murders in the South. Phillips revealed that a top Klan Kleagle, Daniel Burros, 28, a violent anti-Semite, had been brought up as an Orthodox Jew.

Even a Bar Mitzvah. Lanky "Long John" Phillips, 37, had started digging into Burros' background after Rosenthai got a tip from a Jewish organization. A Times feature writer for the past ten years, with a special interest in such phenomena of evangelical Christianity as glossolalia, or "speaking in tongues," Phillips soon confirmed that Burros' parents had been married in a Jewish ceremony. Another Times reporter, who speaks Yiddish, canvassed synagogues in Queens, learned that Burros had attended a Hebrew school and had celebrated his bar mitzvah.

Burros, the Times story made clear, had spent a frustrated youth. He told Phillips that he had been "disgusted with left-wing kids in school." He had been turned down by West Point, joined the Army, was sent to paratroop school, rose to the rank of specialist third class and served a stint under General Edwin A. Walker, a "man of destiny." Later he joined one extremist group after another: the American Nazi Party, the National Renaissance Party and the Klan. He was arrested in Washington for defacing a Jewish building, and he served two years in jail in New York for inciting to riot. And all the time he never let his fellow Klansmen know that he was a Jew. Said Roy Frankhouser, Grand Dragon of the Pennsylvania Klan: "It was the best-kept secret since the atom bomb."

Threat Carried Out. "I had no idea what Burros might or might not do," says Phillips, who was taken out of town under police guard after the Klansman phoned the paper alternately threatening to kill the reporter or "wipe out" the Times. Shortly after the story appeared, Burros did carry out his threat of violence--but on himself. After storming around Frankhouser's apartment in Reading, Pa., and demolishing a bedstead with a karate kick, he shot himself to death with a pistol.

Playing the story for all it was worth, the Times ran as long a piece on Burros' death as it had on his secret. Seldom had one front-page Times story so quickly triggered another.

* The others: A.P. Photographers Bernard J. Kolenberg and Huynh Thanh My, Freelancer Pieter van Thiel. A fifth casualty, Jerry Rose, who had been a part-time correspondent for TIME-LIFE and the Saturday Evening Po&' was working for the South Vietnamese government when he was killed.

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