JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Clarke Reed, a Mississippi businessman who developed the Republican Party in his home state and across the South starting in the 1960s, died Sunday at his home in Greenville, Mississippi. He was 96.
Reed was chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party from 1966 to 1976, beginning at a time when Democrats still dominated in the region.
During the 1976 Republican National Convention, delegates were closely divided between President Gerald Ford and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan. Reed united the Mississippi delegation behind Ford — a move that created a decadeslong feud with William D. “Billy” Mounger, another wealthy businessman who was prominent in the Mississippi Republican Party.
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Reed recalled in a 2016 interview with The Associated Press that delegates faced considerable pressure. Movie stars visited Mississippi’s 30 delegates to push for Reagan, and Betty Ford called on behalf of her husband.
Reagan met twice with the Mississippi delegation — once with his proposed running mate, Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker — and once without, according Haley Barbour, who was executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party in 1976 and served as the state’s governor from 2004 to 2012.
“Everybody was coming to see us,” Reed said. “These poor people had never seen this before, the average delegate.”
Mississippi delegates were showing the stress at a meeting away from 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 into the Ford camp because he thought Reagan made “a hell of a mistake” by choosing a more liberal northeastern running mate in a gambit to win support of the unpledged Pennsylvania delegation.
“In my opinion, Reagan was the best president of my lifetime. I didn’t know that then,” Reed said in 2016. “And had he been elected with Schweiker, he might’ve gotten a bullet one inch over and Schweiker would’ve been president.”
Ford won the party nomination during the convention, 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 an agriculture equipment business called Reed-Joseph International, which used technology to scare birds away from farms and airports.
Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said Monday that Reed was “a mentor, supporter and advisor to me for over 56 years.” Wicker said he was 21 when Reed put him on the Republican Platform Committee in 1972.
“There is no more significant figure in the development of the modern day Mississippi Republican Party than Clarke Reed,” Wicker wrote on social media. “Our state has lost a giant.”
