Fraternal Rivals

One Sunday morning about 1940 when the Carter family was getting ready for church, Jimmy, then a high school senior, tried to smear down three-year-old Billy's unruly blond hair with brilliantine. When Billy squirmed, Jimmy threw him faceup across his lap and shook the bottle above his mouth. The top fell off and the hair oil poured over Billy's face.

It was a humiliating defeat for little Billy, one of many to come. As Billy once bitterly said: "I help make us an average family ... Jimmy is 100% and I'm 0%. So it comes out to 50% because of me." There was Jimmy near the top of his high school class; Billy, by his own account, next to the bottom. Jimmy the Navy officer; Billy the Marine sergeant. Jimmy the Governor; Billy the gas station owner. Jimmy the straitlaced, born-again Baptist; Billy the laid-back, foul-mouthed redneck. Jimmy the President; Billy the family embarrassment.

Billy's long and burning resentment of his older brother was the main reason he went his own way over the years, and the alienation made the President unnecessarily hesitant to direct his brother not to get entangled with the Libyans. According to family and friends, nothing hurt Billy more than what Jimmy did with the family's farm and peanut warehouse. Billy inherited a love for the soil from his father Earl, who used to tell him: "Someday you'll be in charge of things when you grow up. Jimmy's chosen the Navy, and you've chosen the land."

But when Earl died in 1953, Billy was 16, too young to manage the business. Jimmy resigned from the Navy and came home to take over. The day after Billy graduated from high school, he joined the Marine Corps. He came home in 1959 to work as a truck driver for Jimmy. Frustrated and unhappy, Billy enrolled 18 months later in Atlanta's Emory University but dropped out after two quarters.

Rather than return to Plains and work for Jimmy, Billy became a laborer and later a paint salesman in Macon, Ga. In May 1963 Jimmy asked Billy to run the family business while he entered politics. Under Billy, sales grew--to $6 million by his reckoning --but the warehouse's debt also rose.

After Jimmy was elected President, he turned management of the business over to Atlanta Lawyer Charles Kirbo. Says a friend of Billy's: "That really hurt Billy because the whole world was calling him incompetent. He's never forgiven Jimmy."

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