JACKSON, Miss. (AP) – Clarke Reed, a Mississippi businessman who developed the Republican Party in his home state and throughout the South starting in the 1960s, died Sunday at his home in Greenville, Mississippi. He was 96.
Reed served as chairman of the Republican Party of Mississippi from 1966 to 1976, beginning at a time when Democrats still dominated the region.
At the 1976 Republican National Convention, delegates were closely divided between President Gerald Ford and former California Governor Ronald Reagan. Reed rallied the Mississippi delegation behind Ford – a move that led to a decades-long feud with William D. “Billy” Mounger, another wealthy businessman prominent in Mississippi’s Republican Party.
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Reed recalled in a 2016 interview with The Associated Press that deputies were under significant pressure. Movie stars visited Mississippi’s thirty delegates to press for Reagan, and Betty Ford called on her husband’s behalf.
Reagan met with the Mississippi delegation twice — once with his proposed running mate, Sen. Richard Schweiker of Pennsylvania — and once without, according to Haley Barbour, who served as executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party in 1976 and from 2004 to 2012 was governor of the state. .
“Everyone came to see us,” Reed said. “These poor people had never seen this before, the average delegate.”
Mississippi delegates showed the stress during a rally outside the convention floor in Kansas City, Reed said.
“I looked out and about half of them were crying,” he said.
Reed initially supported Reagan, but said he moved to the Ford camp because he thought Reagan had made “a huge mistake” by choosing a more liberal running mate from the Northeast in an effort to win support from the uncommitted Pennsylvania delegation.
“In my opinion, Reagan was the best president of my lifetime. I didn’t know that at the time,” Reed said in 2016. “And if he had been elected with Schweiker, he might have taken a bullet from an inch away and Schweiker would have been president.”
Ford won the party nomination at the convention and then lost the general election to Jimmy Carter, the Democratic former governor of Georgia.
Reed was born in Alliance, Ohio, in 1928, and his family moved to Caruthersville, Missouri, when he was about six months old. He earned a business degree from the University of Missouri in 1950. He and Barthell Joseph, a friend he had met at a high school boarding school, founded a farm equipment company called Reed-Joseph International, which used technology to get rid of birds hunting from farms. and airports.
Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said Monday that Reed “has been a mentor, supporter and advisor to me for more than 56 years.” Wicker said he was 21 when Reed put him on the Republican Platform Committee in 1972.
“There is no more important figure in the development of Mississippi’s modern Republican Party than Clarke Reed,” Wicker wrote on social media. “Our state has lost a giant.”
