It’s fair to speculate that few people would have bought Billy Beer had Billy’s last name not been Carter.
In September of 1977, eight months after former Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter had been sworn in as President of the United States, his colorful younger brother Billy, known during the campaign mostly for his love up pickup trucks, colorful antics, and beer drinking for breakfast, teamed up with a Kentucky brewery to produce a brew that bore his name and endorsement.
The label for Billy Beer, which was brewed by Fall City Brewery Co. in Louisville, Kentucky, read: “Brewed expressly for and with the personal approval of one of America’s all time great beer drinkers – Billy Carter.”
His signature appeared at the bottom.
Jim Tate, the company president at the time, said, “By no means are we entering into this relationship with Billy Carter simply to capitalize on a fad or to exploit a currently popular personality.”
At the time, it was amusing. But then amusing turned dark.
The younger Carter, a Georgia gas station owner, kept pushing the bounds of his loose and fast exploitation of his brother’s position of power. Eventually, he went from beer endorsements to becoming the agent of the government of Libya.
Traveling there several times, the younger Carter accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Libyans and became the center of influence-peddling accusations.
Lloyd Cutler, then the 39th president’s counsel, said the president was concerned his brother had obligated himself to Libya’s radical regime by accepting $220,000 as part of a reported $500,000 loan from Libya.
Within three years, Billy Carter went from a harmless beer hustler to the center of Billygate, which resulted in a thirty-page FBI file, a Justice Department investigation, and congressional hearings, and played a role in Carter’s loss to Ronald Reagan in the 1980 presidential election.
Recently, Frank Biden, the younger brother of President Biden, dipped his toe into the sibling influence pond, but he was far less subtle than Billy was in 1977. He also didn’t even wait until his brother’s hand was on the Bible at his inauguration before doing it.
On the morning of his brother’s inauguration, Frank Biden appeared smiling broadly in an advertorial (an ad designed to look like a news article) for the Berman Law Group, the Florida law firm for which he works as a nonlawyer.
The advertorial bragged about Frank Biden’s relationship and shared values he has with his brother and focuses on the law firm’s role in a case against sugar cane growers and nonlawyer Frank Biden’s part in that litigation.
After a while, you give up counting the number of times Frank Biden’s connection with Joe Biden is mentioned, and the ad didn’t even try to be elusive in relating the firm’s work with the values of Biden’s agenda. As in: “For Biden it’s a question of judgement, not morals — a lesson his older brother, the president-elect Joseph Biden Jr., has ingrained in him.”
The Billy Beer ads never cited the president to raise the profile of a business that employed a close relative — but that loose and fast flirting on the edge of ethics eventually snowballed into circumstances that might have been avoided for both the then-president and his brother.
For Joe Biden, it should raise questions with the press on where the president stands on anything that involves his brother’s business dealings. If indeed the not-so-subtle implication is that both brothers share the same values, certainly the first thing to do as a reporter is to follow the money.
