Clarke Reed, who helped Gerald Ford win 1976 Republican nomination, dies at 96

JACKSON, Miss — JACKSON, Miss. (AP) — Clark Reeda Mississippi businessman who grew the Republican Party in his home state and the South beginning in the 1960s, died Sunday at his home in Greenville, Mississippi. He was 96 years old.

Reed was chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party from 1966 to 1976, beginning at a time when Democrats still held sway in the region.

During 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 created a decades-long feud with William D. “Billy” Mounger, another wealthy businessman who was prominent in the Mississippi Republican Party.

Reed recalled in a 2016 interview with The Associated Press that delegates faced considerable pressure. Movie stars visited Mississippi’s 30 delegates to make Reagan, and Betty Ford called on her husband’s behalf.

Reagan met twice with the Mississippi delegation — once with his proposed running mate, Pennsylvania Sen. Richard Schweiker — and once without, according to Haley Barbour, who served as executive director of the Mississippi Republican Party in 1976 and was governor of of the state between 2004 and 2012. .

“Everybody was coming to see us,” Reed said. “These poor people had never seen this before, the common delegate.”

Delegates from Mississippi showed their stress at a meeting away from the convention hall 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 believed Reagan made “one hell of a mistake” by choosing a more liberal running mate from the Northeast to win the support of Pennsylvania’s uncommitted delegation.

“In my opinion, Reagan was the best president of my lifetime. I didn’t know that then,” Reed said in 2016. “And if he had been elected with Schweiker, he would have gotten a bullet an inch over and Schweiker would have been president.”

Ford won the party’s nomination during the convention, then lost the general election to Jimmy Carter, the former Democratic 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 business called Reed-Joseph International, which used technology to scare farm birds. and airports.

Republican U.S. Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi said Monday that Reed has been “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 Mississippi Republican Party today than Clarke Reed,” Wicker wrote on social media. “Our state has lost a giant.”