Edmund Reggie

Background

Reggie was of Lebanese descent. In 1946, he received a bachelor's degree from the Southwestern Louisiana Institute in Lafayette, since the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. In 1949, he procured his law degree from the Tulane University Law School in New Orleans.

Reggie was married to the former Doris Ann Boustany (born July 18, 1930), the daughter of businessman Frem F. Boustany, Sr. (1903–1993), and the former Beatrice Joseph (1912–1988). Doris was born in Lafayette and graduated with honors from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette. Beatrice Boustany was a cousin of Amin Gemayel, a former president of Lebanon. Frem F. Boustany, Jr., a brother-in-law of Edmund Reggie, was a physician who died two months before the passing of his mother, Beatrice.

Doris Reggie is a second cousin of U.S. Representative Charles Boustany of Lafayette, a Republican who formerly represented Louisiana's 3rd congressional district. Charles Boustany is a nephew-by-marriage of former Governor Edwin Washington Edwards, a Reggie confidant who also began his long political career in Crowley though Edwards was a native of Avoyelles Parish.

Doris Reggie is a long-term Democratic Party figure, having been a delegate to the national party conventions from 1976 to 1996. She sat on the platform committees in 1980, 1984, and 1988. She was a member of the Louisiana Democratic State Central Committee from 1975 to 1992 and sat on the finance committee from 1977 to 1996. She was amember of the national party finance committee from 1980 to 1992. She was the Democratic national committeewoman for Louisiana from 1984 to 1988. In 1979, she was a member of the Governor's Committee for the International Year of the Child.

Political life

Reggie served as acting judge for the ailing Crowley City Judge Denis T. Canan, who was also Reggie's law partner. When Canan died in 1950, Reggie was appointed by Governor Earl Kemp Long to Canan's seat, a fulfillment of Canan's dying wish. Appointed at the age of twenty-four, Reggie was reputed to be America's youngest judge at that time. Reggie held the post for twenty-five years until 1976.

At the 1956 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, with the Louisiana and Massachusetts state delegations sitting across the aisle from each other, Reggie brokered the delegation's support for U.S. Senator John F. Kennedy for Vice President (on a ticket with Adlai Ewing Stevenson, II), rather than Senator Estes Kefauver, who was preferred by Louisiana Governor Earl Long.

In the 1960 presidential election, Reggie was a leader in John F. Kennedy's Louisiana campaign. In 1959, he invited Kennedy and his wife, Jackie, to attend the International Rice Festival in Crowley as honored guests. This afforded Kennedy the opportunity to address a crowd of 130,000 people. The Kennedys were greeted by enthusiastic crowds — the largest JFK addressed prior to his Democratic presidential nomination in July 1960. Working with Reggie in the campaign was the former Louisiana Agriculture Commissioner Sidney McCrory of Ascension Parish.

Reggie was nominated as a presidential elector in Louisiana for the Democratic ticket of John F. Kennedy-Lyndon B. Johnson and cast his vote when Kennedy handily prevailed in the statewide popular vote. Other national Democratic electors that year were Louisiana Attorney General Jack P.F. Gremillion, former U.S. Senator William C. Feazel, former State Senator Frank Burton Ellis of Covington, and Leon Gary of Houma, later director of the Louisiana Department of Public Works.

Following his inauguration, President Kennedy sent Reggie on a 1961 State Department cultural exchange to the Middle East; in Lebanon he was given a hero's welcome in his parents' hometown of Ihden. Reggie continued to serve the president as liaison with then Louisiana Governor Jimmie Davis from 1961 until Kennedy's assassination in 1963.

In 1963, Reggie introduced the young political consultant Gus Weill of Lafayette to Louisiana Public Service Commissioner John McKeithen, who retained Weill to manage his gubernatorial campaign. Weill previously managed the Davis campaign and later wrote a biography of Davis entitled Your Are My Sunshine.

In 1968, Judge Reggie spearheaded the Robert F. Kennedy presidential primary campaign in Louisiana. Reggie invited Kennedy to speak at the 1968 International Rice Festival in October of that year, just as Kennedy's brother, John, had done nine years earlier. As history unfolded, Robert Kennedy was assassinated in June 1968, four months prior to his planned appearance at the rice festival.

Later years

In the 1971 Democratic gubernatorial primary to choose a successor to John McKeithen, Reggie supported not his Crowley friend, Edwin Edwards, but former Governor Jimmie Davis, one of the more conservative candidates in the crowded field. At the time Reggie erroneously considered Edwards unelectable. The decision hampered their relationship, and the two did not speak for three years."

In 1992, his daughter, Vicki, married U.S. Senator Edward Kennedy. Reggie’s close relationship with son-in-law Ted Kennedy was evidenced occasionally in the press.

In 1993, Reggie was convicted of misapplication of funds (a felony) and was sentenced to 120 days of home confinement and a $30,000 fine.

In 2004, Reggie was inducted into the Louisiana Political Museum and Hall of Fame in Winnfield. Son-in-law Edward Kennedy paid a surprise visit on the occasion.

In May 2008, the Louisiana Department of Culture and Tourism declared the location where JFK delivered his 1959 International Rice Festival speech in Crowley an area of historical significance and erected an historical marker.

On the morning of November 19, 2013, Edmund Reggie died at the age of eighty-seven at his Lafayette home surrounded by his wife and family.Services were held on November 22, the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, at St. Michael the Archangel Catholic Church in Crowley. Interment followed in Woodlawn Mausoleum in Crowley.