Jon Meacham, a Reed family friend, is a presidential biographer and the Rogers Chair in the American Presidency at Vanderbilt University.
Clarke T. Reed—businessman, Mississippi civic leader, and a key architect of post-World War II Southern politics—died on Sunday, December 8, 2024, at his home in Greenville, Mississippi. He was 96.
Longtime chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party and informal power broker whose reach extended to the highest levels, Reed was an important political force in the years of Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and George W. Bush. He hired college students who became governors and United States senators; he helped change the course of at least one presidential campaign, stopping Ronald Reagan’s momentum against President Ford at the 1976 GOP convention; and he watched the party’s post-2016 nationalist turn with skepticism, wariness, and concern.
Handsome, charming, peripatetic, Reed, who spoke in a Delta patois that was best described as a drawling mumble or a mumbled drawling, was a Cold War conservative, an admirer of Whittaker Chambers, a student of Edmund Burke, a reader of Russell Kirk, a pal of William F. Buckley, Jr., and of Robert Novak, and an ally of the liberal Mississippi editor Hodding Carter III, who saw Reed’s Republicanism as a weapon in the long war against the segregationist elements of the southern Democratic Party.
His was a big, consequential, fascinating life. Reed was not only present at the creation of a Republican South, he was one of its creators, and his politics seem quaint now. Never an extremist, he believed in an America that was engaged in the world. You could disagree with Clarke, but his motives were not petty but patriotic, not reflexively partisan but civic-minded.
“It’s hard to explain now, but when Clarke started out, there were almost no Republicans in Mississippi,” said Haley Barbour, a Reed alumnus who rose to become President Reagan’s White House political director, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and two-term governor of Mississippi. “The first political poll I ever saw was for Nixon in 1968. Six percent of Mississippians said they were Republicans. One-two-three-four-five-six. So we started out as close to nothing as you can get. And Clarke just kept at it. He wouldn’t give up. The secret to his success was persistence. Sheer persistence.”
“Starting in the 1950s and 60s, Clarke Reed was a Mississippi Republican when such creatures were rare and considered exotic,” said Karl Rove, President George W. Bush’s chief political strategist and deputy White House chief of staff. “By dint of personality, vision, and charm, this principled conservative not only led the GOP to dominance in Mississippi but also the South and hence America.”
“When Clarke got involved in Mississippi politics, it was a one-party state controlled by conservative Democrats,” recalled Curtis Wilkie, a Mississippian who covered national politics for the Boston Globe and became a professor of journalism at the University of Mississippi. “Clarke was good friends with Hodding Carter III, a young Greenville newspaperman and ardent Democrat. They worked quietly together to encourage a two-party system. It would help Clarke build his then-little party and might help Carter, a liberal, break the power of Democratic Senator Jim Eastland. The irony is that they succeeded, but Mississippi has now reverted to one-party state—and that party is the Republicans.”
Born in Alliance, Ohio, on August 4, 1928, Clarke Thomas Reed was the son of Lyman and Kathryn Reynolds Reed. Raised in Caruthersville, Missouri, from the age of six months, Reed was educated in local public schools before attending the Columbia Military Academy in Middle Tennessee, graduating in 1946. Fascinated by flight—one of his great regrets was being too young to fly combat missions in World War II—he joined the Air Force ROTC at the University of Missouri, where he earned a degree in economics in 1950.
Reed moved to Greenville, in the Mississippi Delta, where he became, in the words of The New York Times, “one of the ablest businessmen in the South.” With a boarding-school classmate, Barthell Joseph, he founded the firm of Reed-Joseph International, an innovative agricultural equipment business that also pioneered the American use of Belgian deterrence technology to keep predatory and dangerous birds away from farms and airports—an enterprise Reed brought to the United States after reading about the business in Belgium and then flying to Europe to buy the company.
In 1957 he married Julia Brooks, known as Judy, a native of Nashville and the child of a prominent Belle Meade family. Judy had been “pinned,” or “pre-engaged,” in the manner of the time, to another man (a fellow student at Vanderbilt University) when she met Reed on a visit to Greenville. She was interested, as was he, but he did not move with dispatch until, during a phone call with Judy, he heard a dog barking in the background. When he learned that the Vanderbilt boyfriend had given Judy the puppy, he hung up. “A dog,” Reed thought, “is a serious thing.” And so Reed drove to Nashville and proposed.
The couple would have three children: the writer Julia Evans Reed (1960-2020); Reynolds Crews Reed (1968-2019); and Clarke Thomas Reed, Jr., who, with Mrs. Reed, survives him. Reed is also survived by granddaughters Brooks Henke (Bryan) and Evans Reed; nephew Brooks Corzine (Frannie); and two great grandchildren. The family wishes to acknowledge with deep gratitude Frank Liger, a faithful employee of forty years, and also Tara Stewart for the past four years.
Though he came from a Democratic family, Reed cast his first presidential vote, in 1952, for Dwight D. Eisenhower, and he fought for a politics that projected strength abroad and preserved individual initiative at home.
It was a decades-long campaign that was at once deeply serious and a lot of fun. The Reeds’ house on Bayou Road in Greenville became a kind of conservative salon, a stopping-off point for visiting politicians and journalists, many of whom were brought over to be feted with little to no notice; Judy Reed became expert at whipping up scalloped oysters made with Ritz crackers when her husband called from the airport to announce that, say, Bill Buckley or Dick Cheney was coming over in a few minutes. Explaining his own absences on political chores to his children—Reed long piloted his own small plane—he would say, “Off saving the Free World.”
Reed loved history, politics, the Presbyterian Church, Doe’s steaks, the telephone, lunches at Greenville’s Jim’s Café, good whiskey, National Review, Mississippi wildlife—he was an ardent conservationist—a well-cut suit, and the market philosophy of Adam Smith.
In many ways he willed the Mississippi GOP into being, helping to deliver a unified Southern vote for Richard Nixon over Nelson Rockefeller of New York in 1968—an achievement Nixon rewarded by reportedly directing aides to “clear it with Clarke” when matters of Southern politics and patronage came up.
In 1976, The New York Times wrote that Reed wanted the Republican Party “to be fiscally and socially conservative, but not racist. ‘It would be disastrous if the party split along lines of black and white,’ Reed said. ‘It’s important for us to go the extra mile and extend the long hand to blacks who are seriously interested in participating in the party.’” In a 2014 interview with Ellen B. Meacham of the University of Mississippi, Reed addressed the role of race in the rise of the Southern GOP. The white reaction to President Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil- and voting-rights legislation was, Reed said, “as bad, as you know, as bad as it gets.” Of newly enfranchised Black voters, Reed observed: “We would have liked to see them in the G.O.P., but they gravitated to the left because the left was on the right side of the race issue.”
Reed’s most notable hour upon the national stage came in 1976, the year Ronald Reagan challenged the incumbent President Gerald R. Ford for the Republican presidential nomination. It was a closely fought contest, and the Mississippi delegation, led by Reed, was in the balance as the GOP convention met in Kansas City. Heavily courted by the White House—the Reeds were among the guests at the Fords’ state dinner for Queen Elizabeth II in the bicentennial celebrations leading up to the convention—Reed chose to support the president rather than the more conservative Reagan, a move that was among the factors that enabled Ford to prevail. “By blocking Reagan’s momentum at that convention, Clarke earned the lasting hatred of the far-right leaders of his own party,” recalled Curtis Wilkie.
Yet Reed endured. Into his nineties he would be working the phones, weighing in with Republicans and journalists across the country on issues grand (the tsarism of Vladimir Putin) and granular (he endorsed his first Democrat, in a Mississippi Public Service Commission race). With brown bags of bourbon and wine, Reed hosted a flow of visitors at Doe’s Eat Place in Greenville, a legendary joint accessed through a kitchen that produces memorable steaks and tamales. He could hold forth—at some length—on subjects ranging from the agrarian thought of Andrew Lytle and Robert Penn Warren to the virtues of the large plastic clips that sealed opened but unfinished bags of potato chips to the details of the Alger Hiss perjury trial.
“President, senators, congressmen, and governors depended on this political pioneer for counsel and leadership,” Karl Rove said. “He had a broad smile, a twinkle in his eye and a talent for friendship. He made politics not only consequential but interesting and fun. The light that brightened many a political backroom and convention hall is gone.”
The family will gather for a private burial. Memorial services will be held on Monday, December 16, 2024, at First Presbyterian Church, 1 John Calvin Circle, Greenville, Mississippi, with visitation 10:30 to noon, and services immediately following.
Memorial gifts may be made to a charity of your choice.
