HILADELPHIA - When Clarke Reed of Mississippi attended his first Republican convention in 1964, there was a liberal Northeastern wing that exerted influence in the national party, the South was barren ground for the GOP, and the few registered black voters in his home state were deserting the party of Lincoln.
As delegates to the 2000 convention scattered to all parts of the country, the evolution of the party was obvious. ''The South became Republican, and there are no liberals left in the party,'' the 72-year-old GOP grandee said with some satisfaction. ''Barry Goldwater was the icebreaker, and Ronald Reagan put the icing on the cake.''
In the decades since Goldwater captured the Republican presidential nomination at San Francisco's Cow Palace and won Mississippi's electoral votes 36 years ago, Reed grew into a colorful figure.
His about-face at the 1976 convention helped ensure President Gerald R. Ford's victory over Reagan. He was cast into political purgatory by Reagan four years later only to bounce back to see his protege, Haley Barbour, become national GOP chairman and his fellow Mississippian, Trent Lott, ascend to the role of Senate majority leader.
''My goal was to get the South into the party,'' he said. ''I was focused on that all the time.''
Though he finds himself at home in the current conservative majority, Reed has occasionally raised a bit of hell at the Republican gatherings. On the eve of this year's convention, the 10th that Reed has attended, he was walking along Walnut Street in downtown Philadelphia, wearing slightly mismatched Palm Beach jacket and slacks and barking into a cell phone: ''Morton! Morton! Can you hear me?'' Reed was trying to rally one of his allies to fight a proposed rule change that would give members of the Republican National Committee delegate status. Despite his efforts, the measure was ratified by the convention.
''We're getting as bad as the damned Democrats,'' he said of the plan to swell the number of convention delegates in 2004.
Reed prefers smaller, more manageable conventions where Southerners, often voting as a bloc, have been able to wield inordinate power in a party where they once had none.
Like most Southerners his age, Reed was raised a Democrat. He was lured to the Republican Party during Richard Nixon's 1960 campaign after reading ''The Conservative Mind'' by Russell Kirk. ''It was very profound,'' Reed said. ''Kirk had never been to the South, but he understood the South.''
By 1966, Reed had been drafted as chairman of a growing state party. He got help from an unusual source. His friend, Hodding Carter 3d, an ardent Democrat and editor of the local newspaper, was so interested in encouraging a two-party system in a state controlled by reactionary Democrats ''that he played up anything I did,'' Reed said.
At the 1972 convention in Miami Beach, Reed said, he ''lost 8 pounds and was up all night without sleep'' fighting the Ripon Society, an organization of liberal Republicans, over its bid to impose proportional representation on the party.
Four years later, Reed gained national attention at the GOP convention in Kansas City, where Reagan was threatening to wrest the nomination from Ford. Reagan's strategists counted Reed in their camp, and they looked to him to deliver Mississippi's delegation. Reed was prepared to do so until Reagan chose a moderate Easterner, Pennsylvania senator Richard Schweiker, as his prospective running mate.
Playing a cat-and-mouse game, Reed engineered a Mississippi vote for Ford that broke the momentum of the Reagan challenge. In a recent column that recalled that fight, Al Hunt of the Wall Street Journal said Reed ''switched allegiances several times.''
''I didn't change but once and that was because of Schweiker,'' Reed said. ''The Reagan guys screwed up and they needed me as a scapegoat.''
The guys also remembered. During Reagan's administration, Reed was frozen out of patronage for eight years.
Restored to good graces, he epitomizes good-natured conservatism, and this year is solidly aligned with George W. Bush.
