If not for one momentous decision in 1976, Mississippi’s Clarke Reed would be considered one of the great heroes of the Republican Party renaissance of the latter 20th century.
The reality that he spent his last 48 years detested by a swath of Reaganite activists should not obscure his larger contributions to the cause.
Journalist-historian Jon Meacham, a liberal who nonetheless was a favorite of former first lady Nancy Reagan, wrote a wonderful Dec. 9 obituary of Reed, who died the day before at age 96. Like eventual governor Dave Treen of neighboring Louisiana, Reed began his Republican activism in an era when Democrats so dominated the South that well under 10% of his state’s population considered themselves Republicans, and even fewer actually registered as such. Reed, who had a proverbial “big personality,” began building the Mississippi Republican Party way back in the 1950s when Southern Democrats were the party of vicious segregation and Southern Republicans were, by definition, the anti-racists.
Reed was that sort of anti-racist conservative and was a friend of National Review Editor William F. Buckley and his brother, former Sen. James Buckley. He served as a mentor for a spate of Mississippi-based politicians and strategists who played an outsize role in the Republican takeover of Washington power. Haley Barbour, whose savvy strategic helmsmanship as Republican National Committee chairman helped the 1994 “Gingrich Revolution” that achieved the first Republican House majority in 40 years, was chief among Reed’s onetime acolytes.
“The secret to his success was persistence,” Barbour told Meacham. “Sheer persistence.”
Reed’s biggest national moment, though, came when conservative former California Gov. Ronald Reagan challenged incumbent President Gerald Ford for the 1976 Republican nomination. Reed repeatedly had assured the Reagan team that he was an ally, but as the national convention approached, Reagan and Ford were in an incredibly tight battle for majority delegate support, with Ford ever-so-slightly ahead. When the incumbent president starts pressuring someone, or wooing him with Oval Office visits, it can be tough to resist.
And — here’s a lesson for those too young to remember when conventions really meant something and when “ordinary American” delegates made decisions that could change the course of history — party conventions can allow for all sorts of unique sets of rules. Smaller states such as Mississippi, which otherwise would seem less powerful, adopted what was known as the “unit rule,” which meant that if a candidate enjoyed even the barest majority of support among the state’s delegates, the whole delegation had to vote for that candidate.
Mississippi, with 30 delegates, knew it would have more leverage for promises of projects and patronage if it could deliver a 30-0 vote for one candidate rather than, say, a 16-14 vote. As it so happened, Mississippi’s delegation, with Reed as its chairman, was evenly divided.
The definitive, and gripping, account of all this can be found in Reagan historian Craig Shirley’s Reagan’s Revolution. After months of pressure from both sides, Reed switched allegiance to Ford and brought a few other delegates with him. On the key procedural vote at the convention, with the unit rule prevailing, Mississippi went 30-0 for Ford. Everybody knew what that meant: If Mississippi had gone with Reagan while there was still a smattering of enough other undecided delegates from other states, the Gipper still had a serious fighting chance. But the arithmetic was clear: With Mississippi going for Ford, Reagan’s bid was doomed, and remaining undecided delegates, wanting to be with the winner, scurried to Ford’s side, too. In the end, the overall convention vote was for Ford, 1,187 to 1,070.
Many Reaganites never forgave Reed. As it was, his decision led to one of the great “what if” games in modern history: If Reagan had won the nomination instead of Ford, would he have defeated Democrat Jimmy Carter? And if he had been elected president in 1976 instead of waiting until 1980, would he have engineered the fall of the Soviet Empire four years earlier, or would the circumstances have made his efforts premature and unavailing?
For those who believe the latter, that the delay of four more years before Reagan finally became president was crucial for man and moment to meet, then the question becomes: Did Clarke Reed’s 1976 decision ironically change history for the better?
We’ll never know. What we do know is that without the party-building work of Reed and a few other politically courageous Southern Republicans, both the national Republican GOP and the conservative movement would have lacked fertile political soil to grow from its condition as a decadeslong, frustrated minority.
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“President, senators, congressmen, and governors depended on this political pioneer for counsel and leadership,” famed political strategist Karl Rove said. “He made politics not only consequential but interesting and fun.”
That’s a pretty darn good way to be remembered.
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Addendum: Reed also bequeathed to the world a notable daughter, the journalist-essayist-author Julia Reed, who was an absolute force of nature before dying of cancer in 2020 at age 59. If you asked her about the 1976 convention and the Reaganites’ subsequent disdain for her father, her eyes would flash angrily. “[Expletive]!” she would say, in a voice that sounded like a weird mix of Southern drawl and New York rapidity, something like this: “They shoulda thanked my dad. He saved their man from ending his career by losing to Jimmy Carter.”
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
