When I was growing up, my father’s most frequent mantra was, “We’re going to build a two-party system in the South.” It may not sound so exciting now, but it was a big deal then.

Click here to see some of my favorite photos of my dad.

Daddy was the chairman of the Republican Party in Mississippi (when he took over in the mid-’60s, that old thing about the entire membership being able to fit into a phone booth was true), and, over the years, a driving force in the party’s rise in the South. When I was born, there hadn’t been a two-party system in the South for almost 100 years. We were the “Solid South” and the bad guys were the one-party Dems. Its leaders included such racist demagogues as our governor Ross Barnett and our senator, Jim Eastland, who reassured the folks back home that the Civil Rights Act would never get past his suit pocket, which he then thumped loudly for effect. This kind of stuff had left the region isolated and ostracized and essentially another country economically and politically for my father’s entire life — most of the Democrats did not even attend their own convention since their values were so out of sync with the National Party. (Daddy’s friend Hodding Carter, then a newspaper publisher in our hometown, Greenville, was his counterpart on the Democratic side, leading a group called the Loyalist Democrats.)

Hodding once wrote that Daddy had managed to build the Republican party in the South with “smoke and mirrors,” making it seem more important than it really was for just long enough that the reality came to match the perception. When Nixon became president, he played a key role in desegregating the schools. (My main memory of that time is of a bunch of guys from the Justice Department holed up for months on end in an apartment Daddy kept downtown above his office for such purposes.) After Hurricane Camille ravaged the Mississippi Gulf Coast in 1969, Nixon planned a fly-over of the destruction. Daddy told Nixon aide Bryce Harlow that if the president did not stop and get off the plane, he shouldn’t bother to come at all — a lesson our current president would have done well to heed almost three decades later. Nixon did stop and became the first sitting president to do so since Teddy Roosevelt came on a hunting trip and famously refused to shoot a bear — that’s how long it had been since we mattered.

He took me to see Nixon that day — he took me, thank God, pretty much everywhere. It seems like half my childhood was spent in the bar at the Hay-Adams listening to guys from the OEO and HEW and the RNC and other such initials talk. (I also had a reading list — I’m pretty sure I was the only girl in the fourth grade to have written an essay on Whittaker Chambers, whose Witness Daddy had read to me aloud.) In 1976, he took me to my first convention, the one at which he was blamed for singlehandedly denying the nomination to Ronald Reagan in favor of Gerald Ford. To this day, he shuns notion that he had that much power (and I tell the ridiculous number of people who still harbor bad blood over his decision that they ought to thank him — Reagan would surely have lost to Carter and there might well have never been a subsequent Reagan Revolution.) It was a painful time for him, but he made his decision on principle — Reagan had personally assured him that he would never go for an ideologically split ticket and afterwards chose Sen. Schweiker from Pennsylvania, who boasted a higher ADA rating even than Mondale as his running mate. It was an entirely cynical — and miscalculated — choice on Reagan’s part, as Mississippi and Pennsylvania were the two remaining uncommitted delegations he was after.