With today’s news about Hunter Biden’s legal troubles, I thought I’d drop a quick note about the all-time champion in the category of First Family Fuckups — the legendary Billy Carter.
When his older brother ran for president, Billy Carter found himself thrust into the national spotlight and he was determined to make the absolute most of it.
He hired a talent agent out of Nashville, popped up on some talk shows and cashed a few checks on the lecture circuit. Most famously, he promoted "Billy Beer” and other products, cashing in on his name however he could. This was the ‘70s, though, and most people took Billy as a folksy, funny little curiosity, and little more.
That all changed in the fall of 1978, though, when Billy Carter joined a junket to Libya with some Georgia politicians hoping to make some business deals. The regime of Muammar Gaddafi was widely regarded as an anti-American source of terrorism, but most media outlets still regarded this as just another colorful adventure for the First Brother.
But when Carter returned the favor by hosting a Libyan “friendship delegation” in Atlanta the following January, all hell broke loose. Reporters asked Billy why he was getting so cozy with the Libyans given their reputation, which he waved away by charging that the “Jewish media tears up the Arab countries full time.”
Beyond the anti-Semitism, the media also relayed that, while he was waiting for the Libyan flight to land at the Atlanta airport, Billy Carter staggered out of his limousine, unzipped his fly and relieved himself on the tarmac as a horrified UN ambassador looked on.
The Carter administration tried to ignore it all, but in July 1980 news broke that Billy had been traveling often to Libya and had received hundreds of thousands of dollars from interests there, acts which should have required him to register as a foreign agent.
Republicans hoped the scandal would tank the president, who had made his ethics stance so central to his image. (Former Nixon speechwriter and syndicated columnist William Safire called the new allegations “Billygate” and the name stuck.) Jimmy Carter rushed to clear the air, releasing diplomatic cables, issuing a lengthy report to a Senate inquiry, and holding an hour-long press conference in which he addressed the scandal directly. In the end, the inquiries came up fairly empty and the scandal was laid to rest.
Carter would lose his re-election campaign, but largely due to larger issues of foreign policy and domestic economic troubles. Despite his best efforts, baby brother Billy wasn’t the reason he fell.