Published Sept 26, 1988
Billy Carter, who emerged during his older brother’s presidency as a popular symbol of the common man, died of pancreatic cancer Sunday at his home in Plains. He was 51.
At his bedside when he died were his wife, Sybil; their six children; and his sister, Gloria Spann. Former President Jimmy Carter, who lives next door, had visited several times Saturday, and had been in to check on his brother again early Sunday, according to a daughter, Mandy Carter.
The death came "quietly and peacefully in his sleep," said a statement from the family issued by the Carter Presidential Center in Atlanta. "He had struggled courageously with his illness," the statement continued, "never losing his sense of humor and always concerned more about those who loved him than about himself."
For a year, since September 1987, Mr. Carter had suffered from inoperable pancreatic cancer. Fighting for his life, he received intravenous injections of liquid platinum as well as radiation and chemotherapy at Emory University Hospital. In May, he underwent experimental treatment at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Md., receiving the protein drug interleukin 2. He was back at the National Institutes of Health for a checkup last month.
But as the tumor in his pancreas continued to grow, he entered Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital in Albany Sept. 4. He went home to Plains for the last time a week before he died.
As his condition worsened Saturday, he "joked a little bit with us during the day," a daughter, Kim Fuller, said Sunday. "I don't know if you know my dad or not, he just joked about different things. Then he talked some last night until about 11:30 p.m."
The graveside service will be at 4 p.m. Monday at Lebanon Cemetery in Plains.
In the early days of Jimmy Carter's campaign and presidency, the public came to know Billy Carter, with his blue jeans, billed caps and cold beer, as a refreshing contrast to his brother's efficient technocratic manner. The fuller picture of the man - endowed with a restless intelligence and frustrated during much of his life by the conflict between his brother's ambitions and his own - did not come across in the broad-stroke characterizations of the day.
Belying the image of an uneducated redneck, Billy Carter was a voracious reader who, according to a friend, would rise to read a book at 4 a.m. and finish it by breakfast. Despite Jimmy Carter's career, the younger brother steered an independent course politically. He described himself once as a "George Wallace Democrat." In the 1988 primary campaign, he endorsed Jesse Jackson.
He often made headlines during Jimmy Carter's 1974-76 campaign, and while President Carter, 13 years his senior, was in the White House from January 1977 to January 1981. During that period, Billy Carter owned the Plains service station, where he dispensed beer and gasoline, and often leaned back in his cane-bottom chair to entertain customers with his homespun humor.
As his fame spread, a Kentucky brewer introduced Billy Beer. Bantam Books published "Redneck Power: The Wit and Wisdom of Billy Carter." A toy manufacturer came out with the "Billy Carter Redneck Power" toy pickup truck. He commanded a $5,000 personal appearance fee.
Jimmy Carter's election as president transformed the tiny southwest Georgia town of Plains into a world media center for a time, and of all its colorful elements, none intrigued reporters more than the wisecracking Billy. In one of his most famous off-the-cuff remarks, he said:
"I got a mother who went into the Peace Corps at the age of 68; I got a sister who's a Holy Roller preacher; I got another sister who rides motorcycles and wears helmets; I got a brother who thinks he's going to be president of the United States. I'm the only sane one in the family."
So great was media interest in Billy Carter that when he lost a 1976 bid for mayor of Plains, by 90 votes to 71 (an Albany airport air traffic controller won the race), it was covered by The Atlanta Journal, The Atlanta Constitution, The New York Times, The Washington Post, ABC, CBS, NBC, Reuters and Agence France Presse.
Exploiting his image, Billy Carter played a sheriff's deputy in a CBS movie, "Flatbed Annie and Sweetpie, Lady Truckers." He judged a belly- flop championship in British Columbia, concluding by taking a flop himself into the pool.
He denied that he ever was an embarrassment to his brother, saying he didn't cost Jimmy Carter any votes in the latter's disastrous 1980 re- election bid. "I think I helped Jimmy as much as I hurt him," he said. "Certainly I didn't hurt him enough to lose 44 states."
Jimmy Carter confessed an inability to rein in his freewheeling kid brother. "I have more influence over members of the U.S. Senate than I do over Billy," the president said.
While in the White House, Jimmy Carter placed his assets in a family peanut warehouse in Plains in a blind trust, and presidential aide Charles Kirbo dictated business decisions to Billy Carter. Running the family warehouse had been a lifelong ambition of the younger brother, according to his late sister Ruth Carter Stapleton in her 1978 book, "Brother Billy."
Billy Carter resigned as the family business's managing partner in September 1977. Having cut off his only source of income, he turned to making public appearances to exploit his new-found fame. "If Jimmy had just sold his share of the warehouse to Billy, Billy's troubles never would have happened," columnist Mary McCrory wrote.
But as suddenly as it had begun, the public's fascination with Billy Carter ended after he tried to take advantage of his fame in a most unexpected way; he became an agent in the United States for the interests of the nation of Libya. For 10 days in 1978, he visited the North African nation, ruled by Moammar Gadhafi, an Islamic fundamentalist. Billy Carter said he never met Mr. Gadhafi.
The next year, during a U.S. tour by a Libyan delegation, Billy Carter and other Georgians hosted a reception at an Atlanta hotel. Later during the tour, he was asked if he thought American Jews might criticize his association with Libyans. "There are a lot more Arabs than there are Jews," he replied.
The remark was interpreted as anti-Semitic, and created a storm of controversy. The U.S. government forced him to register as a foreign agent. The Senate investigated his Libyan ties. Public opinion turned against him, and his public appearances were canceled. IRS tax liens were filed against property he owned. A Nashville, Tenn., agent who represented him said, "Billy's show-biz days are over."
According to Jimmy Carter in his autobiography, "Keeping Faith," Billy Carter's income "dropped to zero." It was then, according to the former president, that Libyans tried to help their friend Billy Carter by hiring him as a broker for oil. The Libyans loaned him $220,000 as an advance on earnings. Later, the news that Mr. Gadhafi's regime had loaned Billy Carter $200,000 clouded Jimmy Carter's re-election chances in 1980.
At his service station, Billy Carter "drank beer all day long and finished off with a couple fifths at night," he once told a reporter. After the Libyan revelations, he "began to depend too much on alcohol to keep him going," according to Jimmy Carter.
In February 1979, Billy Carter was hospitalized in Americus for what was described as "bronchitis." In fact he was an alcoholic, he admitted, and began seven weeks of intensive rehabilitation at the Navy's alcohol treatment facility in Long Beach, Calif. During the last nine years of his life, he did not drink alcohol, friends said.
At a news conference during Billy Carter's hospitalization, the president was near tears. "Billy is my brother," he said. "He is seriously ill at this point. I love him. I have no intention of alleging to him any condemnation that I don't think is warranted, and I would say that I disassociate myself and my brother Billy from any allegations of remarks that might be anti-Semitic in nature."
(Jimmy Carter's loyalty to his brother was unlike other presidents whose siblings became liabilities. Lyndon B. Johnson housed a brother, Sam Houston Johnson, at the White House in order to keep an eye on him; the brother complained that he "felt like a prisoner."
It was reported that Richard Nixon tapped the phone of his brother, F. Donald Nixon, after it was revealed that, years earlier, the latter had received a $205,000 loan from Howard Hughes. The loan, never repaid, became a source of embarrassment for President Nixon.)
In August 1980, five days before the Democratic National Convention, Jimmy Carter devoted almost all of a televised presidential news conference to his brother's problems, rather than discuss other issues such as the economy and American hostages then held in Iran. Ronald Reagan won a landslide victory in 1980, 50.7 percent to 41 percent.
Billy Carter's troubles never caused a permanent rift between the brothers. They grew extremely close during the past year, according to friends.
Once while testifying before a Senate subcommittee that was investigating his Libyan ties, Billy Carter said:
"In January 1977 my older brother, whom I admire, respect, was and still am very proud of and love very much, became president of the United States. This election caused drastic change in my life and the lives of my family. We did not expect these changes and were not prepared for them."
Jimmy Carter once said: "The only one of our family who really suffered because of the experience [of my being president] was my brother Billy."
A Late Arrival in the Family
William Alton Carter II was born March 29, 1937, in the Plains Hospital. He was the youngest of four children of James Earl Carter Sr., a farmer, merchant and state legislator, and Mrs. Lillian Gordy Carter, a registered nurse.
His father was 43 and his mother was 38 when Billy was born. His mother was in poor health for months afterward, and her doctor prescribed three cans of beer a day to enrich her milk, according to Ruth Carter Stapleton. Billy's father, whom he idolized, called him "Buckshot."
The Carters lived on a farm a half-mile east of the unincorporated community of Archery, three miles west of Plains, in a wooden clapboard house on a dirt road. The Carter farm produced peanuts, watermelons, cotton, sweet potatoes and other crops, and homemade syrup under the label "Plains Maid." The elder Carter also operated a store next to his farmhouse, and in nearby Plains, a peanut warehouse.
When Billy was 3, Jimmy left home to go to Georgia Southwestern, and later Georgia Tech and the Naval Academy. In Billy's 10th year, the family moved into Plains. Billy "left his farm friends and neighbors." He had trouble in school, and stuttered when he became excited.
After school, Billy Carter worked at his father's peanut warehouse. While the elder Mr. Carter served a year as a state legislator, Billy Carter was a state Capitol page.
The elder Mr. Carter died of cancer at 59 in 1953. It devastated Billy, who was 16. On the day his father died, Billy was gone all day, returning that night. He had driven to Albany and bought a parakeet for his mother, "so you won't be lonely now that Daddy's gone," he said.
The sudden death of the elder Mr. Carter precluded Billy Carter's taking over the family warehouse. Jimmy Carter came home from the Navy, bought a 40 percent interest and went into business as a partner with his mother.
A high school friend, Sybil Spires, became Billy Carter's "mother, counselor and companion." He was sent to Gordon Military Academy in Barnesville but stayed only a few months, returning to re-enroll at Plains High School. An avid reader who hid novels behind his textbooks in class, he was not as bad a student as he later testified; it is a myth that Billy Carter graduated 25th in a Plains High class of 26, according to his wife.
At a time of global unrest, Billy was a member of the National Guard. The day after his high school graduation in 1955, he drove to Albany and joined the Marines. He completed boot camp at Parris Island, S.C., and on furlough, married Miss Spires, then still in high school. Billy was wearing his dress-blue Marine uniform with a private's stripe. Their friends soaped the windows of his car and tied tin cans to the rear bumper. But the levity ended when the newlyweds drove to the Plains Cemetery and put her wedding bouquet on his father's grave.
Wouldn't Be a 'Hired Hand'
The Marines posted him to a camp near Chicago, and his wife took a train to join him. However, Mr. Carter did not realize that Chicago had more than one station, and lacking taxi fare, he walked all night from station to station until he found her. Later, he was stationed in Okinawa and Japan, and got his discharge in 1959.
For a year, he worked for his brother in the Plains warehouse, but quit because he "couldn't stand to be a hired hand in a business he thought would be his," Mrs. Stapleton wrote. Billy Carter moved to Atlanta and attended Emory University for a year, dropping out and moving to Macon, where he was a construction worker and clerk in a paint store. Sybil Carter suffered two miscarriages. Billy Carter drank heavily and, for a time, belonged to an Alcoholics Anonymous group.
In 1963, Jimmy Carter was planning to enter political life. He prevailed upon his brother to become manager of the family warehouse, and sold him one-sixth of the company. After one of the first harvests while he was manager, Billy Carter drove to a beer joint, "Joe's," to join the local farmers in a celebration. He leapt onto the top of his car and shouted, "To heck with all the troubles of the world." That "became a tradition" after harvests, Mrs. Stapleton wrote.
In 1970, Billy Carter bought the Georgia Amoco Station in Plains for $10,000. Thereafter he worked at the peanut warehouse until about 6 p.m., then spent a couple hours at the service station, with his buddies around him. He bought the station "as a home for his fraternity of friends," Mrs. Stapleton wrote.
Billy Carter resented the media and tourists who came to Plains in great numbers, causing what he called the "Miami-ization" of Plains. He "decided to counterattack," according to Mrs. Stapleton. When he regaled the press with outlandish stories, he was "trying to defeat the enemy by feeding it great piles of baloney."
The wave of national publicity swept over him. On the night that Jimmy Carter won the nomination as the Democratic candidate for president, the Carter family was in a suite in New York's Americana Hotel. Jimmy Carter turned to his brother and said: "The person I feel most grateful to, the one I feel did the most to make it possible for me to wage this campaign and make this night of victory possible, who stayed home and kept everything going, is my brother, Billy."
Billy Carter took 100 of his friends to President Carter's 1977 inauguration. The group flew on a charter Delta jet Billy Carter named the "Redneck Special." Each paid $122 to share the cost.
During the first year of the Jimmy Carter's presidency, Billy Carter moved his family to a 14-room home near Buena Vista, about 19 miles north of Plains, to get away from noise and tourists and, he said, fearing his young children might be kidnapped.
His halcyon years of public appearances, and his fall due to Libya and alcoholism, followed. After that Billy was in the mobile home business as a public relations man and salesman for firms in Haleyville, Ala., and Waycross, and beginning in 1985, owned his own mobile home lots in three cities.
Although he had said he never would, he moved with his family back to Plains, to a home a few steps from that of the former president, in 1976.
A Man of Many Contrasts
Billy Carter had a fierce temper and once smashed his fist through a gym window after the principal refused to let his high school sweetheart, a member of the girl's basketball team, ride to an out-of-town game with Billy in his car. Years later, he fought a man who had asked Sybil Carter to dance at a New Year's Eve party; the fight resulted in "thousands of dollars" in damage. Once Billy Carter punched an Atlanta newspaper editorial page editor, Hal Gulliver, in the chest after he had misunderstood a remark Mr. Gulliver had made. But Billy Carter also was a compassionate man who once found an interstate traveler stranded near Plains; the driver's car was broken down. Mr. Carter swapped cars with him and sent him on his way.
On another occasion, Billy Carter sped to an auto wreck scene after hearing of it on his CB radio. At the scene, an injured baby needed immediate medical care. Mr. Carter was wearing a new suede jacket that his wife had given him. He wrapped the baby in the jacket and, as its blood ruined his coat, sped to the hospital. Sybil Carter never complained.
"I learn something new about him every day," his wife once said. "It's exciting. It's never boring. But he can wear you absolutely to a frazzle. He has so many emotions, so many thoughts. His mind clicks so fast. It's impossible to sta y up with him, much less get a step ahead. Sometimes I thank God I have no Carter blood in me, but I'm not sorry I married one."
Cancer claimed the lives of three other Carters - father James Earl Sr., at 59 in 1953; mother Lillian Gordy Carter, at 85 in 1983; and sister Ruth Carter Stapleton at 54 also in 1983.
Surviving in addition to his wife, Sybil, and the former president are two sons, William A. “Buddy” Carter IV of Franklin, Tenn., (Billy Carter’s grandfather, and an uncle of his, were William A. Carters I and III) and Earl G. Carter of Plains; four daughters, Marle Usry of Charlotte, N.C., and Kim Fuller, Mandy Carter and Jana Carter, all of Plains; a sister, Gloria Spann of Plains; and four grandchildren.
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