Former Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour talks with Mississippi Today's Bobby Harrison, Geoff Pender and Taylor Vance about the ...
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0:39I think we're going to be doing a lot of listening because we're very pleased to have as our guest today, former Governor Haley Barber. Governor, how you doing?
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But we all three of us are here, but I don't think we're going to be doing much talking. I think we're going to be doing a lot of listening because we're very pleased to have as our guest today, former Governor Haley Barber. Governor, how you doing?
You know, Jeff and I used to spend a lot of time listening to you. So it'd be like old days for us, but we decided it'd be appropriate to have you on for a number of reasons. We started talking about it leading up to what we thought was going to be a very chaotic Democratic convention this year with talk about President Biden stepping down, which he did. We thought there might be chaos as different candidates tried to get the Democratic nomination. But the scripted stuff we see nowadays, we thought was going to go by the wayside, but it looks like it's not. Still, we thought you'd be appropriate because you were involved in what was one of the last party conventions that was not scripted in a sense, the 76 convention with Ronald Reagan challenging President Ford, and the Mississippi delegation was right in the middle of it, and you were in the middle of that. We're just gonna turn it over to you right now to tell that story.
Well, it is a great story. It's one of the few times in modern history that there was a truly contested convention. When we went to Kansas City, that's where the convention was. When we got there, neither Ford nor Reagan had a majority. It was the rare case of getting to a convention where you don't know who's going to win. And so it was very intense. The Mississippi delegation was the largest group of uncommitted delegates in the convention because we had a policy back in the old days from when we had virtually no Republicans in the state to go to the convention undecided, to be unpledged. So we were unpledged. We had 30 votes. I was executive director of the state party, the chief of staff of the delegation. We had a great delegation headed by Clark Reed, our state chairman. Billy Munger was the Reagan chairman for the state. There was a lot of pressure and press surrounding the delegation. Reagan sent out actors to our hotel, like Jimmy Stewart and Pete Kors. The delegates felt under pressure, but most look back at it as quite an experience.
No, I was executive director of the state party. So I was the chief of staff of the delegation.
We had a great delegation headed by Clark Reed, our state chairman. Billy Munger was the Reagan chairman. Wart Jüger had served as kind of the original party chairman when we reorganized after World War II. It was a great experience, high pressure, with so much press surrounding the delegation. Members were doing interviews with the New York Times. Reagan sent out actors to our hotel, including Jimmy Stewart and Pete Kors. John Connley came for Ford. The delegates felt under pressure, but most look back at it as quite an experience.
But the Ford people were not as close to the Mississippians as the Reagan people, just because Reagan had come here a couple of times while he was governor. Ford was quieter and of course he had not been elected president. He became president like Kamala Harris is trying to do. But our delegation took seriously that we were going to stay uncommitted. We got there over the weekend. The convention started on Monday. We didn't vote then. Reagan announced he was going to ask Senator Schwiker from Pennsylvania to be his running mate. Some of our delegation didn't like that because they were conservative. That may have made the difference. The final vote on the nomination was 31 to 29 for Ford. Then we voted on whether to stay under the unit rule. A motion got made to come out from under the unit rule so we wouldn't give all 30 delegates to Ford. But by that point, Ford had gone over the top. There was a lot of tension and hard feelings. Clark Reed and Billy Munger, who had been like allies, I don't know if they ever spoke to each other again.
I always heard a story about when at a key moment the delegation was meeting and they couldn't find a conference room, they had the meetings in the hotel lobby or someplace.
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Barbour, H. (2025, July 16). Haley Barbour recalls chaotic 1976 RNC Convention and Mississippi's crucial role in it [Interview transcript]. Mississippi Today. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1066069/
MLA
Haley Barbour. "Haley Barbour recalls chaotic 1976 RNC Convention and Mississippi's crucial role in it." Mississippi Today, 16 Jul. 2025. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1066069/.
BibTeX
@misc{barbour2025_1066069,
author = {Haley Barbour},
title = {Haley Barbour recalls chaotic 1976 RNC Convention and Mississippi's crucial role in it},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, Mississippi Today. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2025},
month = {jul},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/1066069/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
