Some of those initially put off by the decision did see the light. “A classic Reagan bitter-ender is Malcom Mabry, a 43-year-old state legislator and small farmer from Dublin, in the Mississippi Delta. An ardent Reaganite, he was stunned by Schweiker’s selection and instantly decided to abandon Reagan. But after a sleepless night, Mabry changed his mind while working in the pea patch the next morning and determined that Vice President Schweiker was a lot easier to take than Secretary of State Kissinger,” reported columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak.
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However, one passionate conservative from Mississippi, Clarke Reed, was about to make the biggest leap of any delegate anywhere and anytime. Reed had professed his admiration and devotion to Reagan countless times over the years. In summer of 1976, he was unofficially for Reagan, yet officially uncommitted. But through his apostasy he would write himself deeply into the 1976 Reagan campaign and the history of American politics. Reed was about to become, according to Ford political aide Harry Dent, “the most wooed delegate in the GOP.”
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“Well, screw them, not me!”
D
on’t worry about Clarke.” Dave Keene must have said that a thousand times to dozens of people over the spring and summer of 1976 about the mercurial, slightly unstable, voluble, and certainly excitable Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, Clarke E. Reed.
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Unfortunately for Ronald Reagan, Keene, and company, it would turn out they did have Reed to worry about.
“Reed was right out of some Hollywood casting director’s dream of the political operator. He was slick and so fast talking as to be almost incomprehensible. On top of that he was a whisperer; he liked to pull people aside and exchange confidences mouth-to-ear. He was Byzantine in style, and consumed with the intricacies of politics. He was consumed also, to his ultimate misfortune, with a desire to always be on the winning side, to hold onto power and influence,” wrote Jules Witcover in
Marathon
.
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Keene thought he had good cause not be concerned about his old friend. They had waged many ideological battles together over the years, despite Keene’s relative youth.
Elizabeth Drew described Keene in her insightful book about the campaign,
American Journal: The Events of 1976,
as “a blue eyed, somewhat chunky, and utterly pleasant young man.”
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At thirty-one years of age, Reagan’s Southern Political Director had already fought liberals at the University of Wisconsin, had worked on the Goldwater 1964 campaign, had been elected National Chairman of the Young Americans for Freedom, and had been a top political adviser to Vice President Spiro Agnew and later Senator Jim Buckley of New York before joining Reagan’s challenge to Ford.
Keene had three weaknesses. First, he was a self-proclaimed “wiseass.” The second was that he lacked the tact that most other men in Washington attempted to exhibit and live by. He said what was on his mind, didn’t give a damn, and if you didn’t like it you could go pound salt. Years later, in 1989, Keene was leading a coalition of conservatives opposed to a nomination made by President George H. W. Bush. Bush’s Chief of Staff, John Sununu, asked Keene to come over to the White House for a meeting to discuss the matter. Sununu told Keene the offending nominee was being withdrawn and then pleaded with him to be more cooperative and try to work with Bush to help the next nominee. Keene responded to Sununu’s olive branch by saying, “That’s fine, Governor, but you have to realize that I’m better at destroying things than I am at creating them.” In 1986, when he was advising Lee Atwater on how to deal with then Vice President Bush’s Ivy League friends, Keene pointed out to the drawling South Carolinian, a self-described “cracker,” that there were certain things that simply could not be overcome, including culture. “Lee, those people think you talk funny, and their problem with me was I went to a land grant college.” Keene’s third weakness was an unrequited love for the hapless Chicago White Sox.
4
But he took his politics and his libertarian/conservative philosophy seriously and was an effective member of the Reagan team. When Keene joined the campaign in 1975, his reputation had preceded him. But with a blue-collar background with roots in Illinois and Wisconsin, he did not opt for that region. Instead, he traded regions with Charlie Black. “You shouldn’t do politics in your own backyard,” Keene said. “You gotta say ‘no’ to too many friends, and who needs that s—?” Black concurred, but in more diplomatic terms. So Black, the wily Confederate, took the industrial belt from New Jersey to Illinois. Keene, the Yankee, took the South.
5
Keene was also tapped because of his experience working with conservative activists in the South, which was expected to be a bulwark for the forthcoming Reagan insurgency. One key reason Sears recruited him to join the campaign was his longstanding relationship with the South’s “Mr. Republican,” Clarke Reed.
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Reed came from a wealthy family and proceeded to make even more money, mostly in agriculture. He also owned a Mississippi River barge company. In his late twenties, Reed decided he needed to get involved in politics. But Mississippi, from the time of Reconstruction until the 1960s, was a “yellow dog” Democratic state. There was a long line ahead of Reed in the Democratic Party, so he decided to become a Republican. In the GOP, the hunting would be easier and the chances better for ascending quickly in the party ranks.
“For a Southern gentleman, Reed looked the part but didn’t act the part,” Keene said. “He was one high-strung character. And he called everybody ‘cat’ like ‘Man, this cat is good’ or ‘Man, that cat is smart.’”
7
Witcover also wrote that Reed talked like a “Motown hipster.”
8
Although he was only forty-eight years old, Reed, with his mane of silver hair, exuded the “white shoe” linen-jacketed image of the Southern gentleman, except for one thing: unlike the stereotype and to Reagan’s eventual dismay, Reed could not keep his word.
9
In every story, there is an antagonist and there is a protagonist. There is the introduction, conflict, and resolution. There is the bitter fight, the acrimony, the retribution, and the finger pointing. And history, as judged by political scribes and especially Reagan’s revolutionaries, recorded that Clarke Reed would become their “Benedict Arnold.”
In fairness to Reed, he had done a commendable job building the Mississippi Republican Party over the years. The party had actually begun to elect Republicans to office, including state legislators, as well as the youthful Trent Lott and Thad Cochran to the U.S. Congress in 1972.
Reed had been a critical backer of Richard Nixon eight years earlier in Miami, when Reagan made his eleventh hour bid for the nomination. In 1972, he had been a valuable ally of Keene’s when they stopped an attempt by liberals to rewrite the party rules and instead wrote their own rules. These new party bylaws included, ironically for Reagan in 1976, the reapportionment of delegates to future conventions that recognized the growing power of the West and the South and the waning influence of the North in the Republican Party.
By 1975, however, Reed had had enough of the “split ticket” mentality of the Republican Party, as practiced to perfection by Ford when he had picked Nelson Rockefeller. The Reaganites thought they had nothing to be concerned about when it came to Clarke Reed or Mississippi. Although he was officially neutral, he was known by all to be a Reagan man. Reagan’s State Chairman, Billy Mounger, another successful businessman, was a lifelong friend of Reed. In Mississippi, they had become known as the “Gold Dust Twins.”
Reed told Elizabeth Drew, in reviewing the situation in his state, “What Ford needs right now is to show that he’s going to pick a running mate that will be compatible to his philosophy. The split ticket is a nightmare and a horror.” He then added, coldly, “With the so-called balanced ticket between a liberal and a conservative, you vote for a conservative and if he dies you get a liberal.”
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Mounger had been recruited out of high school to play football for the legendary Red Blaik at West Point in the 1940s. Afterward, he was in the first class out of the “Point” to join the new Air Force. Mounger flew B-29s and B-50s and delivered nuclear bombs to post-war Europe. After his tour, he eventually settled back in Jackson and made a fortune in banking, especially financing for oil and gas companies. At only 5'7" and 175 pounds, what Mounger lacked in size, he made up in toughness. And discretion. And loyalty. While Reed was constantly talking to the media, Mounger was quietly doing his job for Reagan.
Furthermore, the incoming Chairman of the Party, State Senator Charles Pickering, was also a solid Reagan man, and this was added insurance.
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Mississippi seemed the least of the Reagan campaign’s worries in 1976. Both Mounger and Pickering were too gentlemanly and too discreet to complain at the time about their oft-quoted colleague. They may have resented the national media and national politicians who ignored them in favor of talking with Reed, but they never said anything publicly. Still, it must have rankled, and Keene and others occasionally urged Reagan to call Mounger and Pickering, seek their advice, and keep their spirits up.
“Billy is also our Chairman in Mississippi and should be singled out for some kind remarks,” Keene wrote in one memo to Reagan. In another, he said of Pickering, “He is with us . . . however, he should not be taken for granted. Pickering is a good man and may slightly resent the fact that he is often by-passed by people dealing in Mississippi who are more likely to call Clarke Reed.”
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In the early stages of the Republican primaries, columnist John Lofton had interviewed Reed and Barry Goldwater.
Human Events
excerpted portions of the article, which was about the nasty tone the Ford campaign was taking against Reagan. Goldwater described the treatment of Reagan as a “very poor tactic.” The conservative weekly wrote,
In a similar vein, Clarke Reed, the highly influential Chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party who is officially neutral but believed leaning toward Reagan, told Lofton that the President’s charges against Reagan “turn me off bad. When he says Ronald Reagan is an extremist, he is calling me one, too.” Reed called the President’s attacks on Reagan “irresponsible,” “divisive,” and “damaging to the party.”
“This kind of stuff is kamikaze,” said Reed. “I was very disappointed to see the President join with people like Rockefeller and Scranton, who have made careers out of attacking conservatives who make up a majority of the Republican party.”
“If the President really thinks Reagan is too far right to be elected,” said the Southern GOP leader, “then why has he been moving so rapidly in Reagan’s direction lately?”
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Still, Clarke’s wobbly reputation preceded him. Early in January of 1976, Tom Anderson, Congressman Trent Lott’s Administrative Assistant, met with John Sears and Jim Lake and implored them to overrule Reed’s plans for a state convention and tell him that Mississippi should hold a statewide primary between Reagan and Gerald Ford, instead. “You can’t trust Clarke Reed. He’s a slippery, no good son of a b—,” Anderson told Sears and Lake. He informed them that there was enough time to pull together a primary to replace the planned April state convention. “You will win all thirty delegates and not have to worry about them,” Anderson told them.
14
Sears told Anderson he would get back to him after huddling with Keene and others at Citizens for Reagan. Sears asked Keene, “Can we trust Reed?” Keene replied in the affirmative, and Sears decided to ignore Anderson’s suggestion.
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Because Citizens for Reagan was strapped for cash, a state convention that was paid for by the state party was certainly preferable to a primary—which might require several hundred thousand precious dollars that could go elsewhere for Reagan.
At the Mississippi state GOP convention, Reed cobbled together a group of thirty delegates and thirty alternates who would go to Kansas City. Each had one half vote on all matters. Mississippi Republicans had used the “unit rule” as a means of leveraging their position in national politics. Although this practice was against the bylaws of the national party, it was ignored. Ominously, not all of the sixty chosen were the “true believers” who would follow Reagan to the ends of the earth.
In late 1975, Keene and Reed had discussed a commitment to Reagan, and Keene extracted a solemn promise from Reed that he would support Reagan publicly at the right time and deliver thirty delegates to Reagan when needed. Reed had stipulated that if Reagan’s campaign failed seriously and became a joke before the Republican National Convention, then he would be off the hook and free to support Ford. Mounger had also extracted the same promise from Reed. “So when the time came, I simply asked him to keep up his work—and keep his pledge to Reagan,” Mounger recalled.
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In the fall of 1976, Keene wrote an article on the “Battle for Mississippi” in
The Alternative: An American Spectator
. He explained, “Early in the campaign, Reed had personally indicated that he was with us, but refused to endorse Reagan publicly or deliver his delegation to us before the convention.” Reed told Keene he wanted to do it his way, and that his way would ensure that Reagan would receive twenty-eight and possibly all thirty delegates. Consulting with Sears, Keene went ahead and allowed Reed to handle the situation as he saw fit. Keene contacted Reed again and told him “that we were both on the line. He because he had given his word and me because I had backed him up. He told me that he understood and that I had nothing to worry about.”
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