Do you remember Billy Beer? The canned beer from 1977 was the pinnacle of Carter-mocking in the first year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency, a novelty brew named after Billy Carter, the president’s goofball younger brother, who ran a gas station near Plains, Ga., and was famous — probably the most famous presidential sibling in history — for being a bumbling, Pabst-swilling hick from the sticks.
Brother Billy wasn’t the only thing Jimmy Carter was relentlessly ridiculed for during his presidency. Those who weren’t alive in the Me Decade may look back on the 1970s as a time of misty innocence, when Americans picnicked in fields of daisies and believed, like children, in Sasquatch, but the 1970s were a deeply, and darkly, cynical time. The psychological hangover from the 1960s and that decade’s shattered dreams was profound. President Carter was, let’s be frank, a laughingstock: too naive, too earnest, too sincere, too square, too country. He grinned and talked about God far too much.
The beauty of Jimmy Carter was that he persisted.
He heard the laughter and just kept walking his walk.
He was a man of true convictions.
At his inauguration, President Carter quoted scripture: “He has showed you, O man, what is good. And what does the Lord require of you? To act justly and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God.”
You don’t need to be a Christian to admire a man who devoted his life, with unfashionable sincerity, to acting justly, loving mercy, and walking humbly. It is his purity of principle that we admire, and will miss, most.
In the wake of his death on Sunday, many have remembered him as “the greatest ex-president in history” for his efforts to help the poor, eradicate disease, and foster peace. He dedicated his many years on this earth to improving the lives of others through initiatives in this country and around the world.
Oh, and Billy? He may have been an alcoholic (he later became sober), but he was no fool. He was a veteran of the Marine Corps, a graduate of Emory University, and a canny businessman who managed the Carter family peanut farm, bringing in $5 million in the year of his brother’s election to the White House.