COVER STORY
The Libyan caper has left the White House reeling
Once again, high drama in Washington. Television's glaring floodlights may switch back on as early as next week in a Senate hearing room. Nine solemn Senators will lean into microphones to direct pointed questions across a massive table at some of the nation's highest officials, including almost certainly the Attorney General, the President's counsel and the President's National Security Adviser. The select group of Senators may go off to the White House to grill the President himself, who has pledged to cooperate, and the questioning may also include his wife Rosalynn. But their most withering inquiries will be aimed at a babble-prone, 43-year-old country boy who would be unworthy of such lavish attention except for one fact over which he has no control: he is the President's brother.
Driven by the pressures of election-year politics, the case of Billy Carter's Libyan connections ballooned rapidly last week into a full-fledged Senate inquiry and a political cause célèbre. Operating under the most intense scrutiny by press and public since Watergate days, the Senators will try to find out why Carter accepted $220,000 from the Libyan government; what, if anything, he did in return for the money; and how he arranged a deal with an American oil company that could have —and still may—net him millions in broker's fees for delivering Libyan crude. The inquiry will also explore National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski's bizarre use of Billy as a secret intermediary to persuade Libya to pressure Iran into releasing the American hostages held in Tehran. And the hearings will dig for any evidence that Billy got improper help from the White House or lenient treatment from the Justice Department in avoiding criminal prosecution for failing to disclose details of his Libyan dealings earlier.
The tension—and the President's predicament—grew steadily through the week. Day by day, there were fresh disclosures of questionable actions by top White House and federal officials. Trying to explain away the matter once and for all, the White House issued a paper outlining its dealings with Billy and his Libyan friends and flatly denying that anyone in the White House had ever discussed Billy's failure to register as a foreign agent with anyone in the Justice Department. But that only made things worse—much worse. Three days later Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti had to recall publicly that he had, after all, discussed the subject briefly with the President himself on June 17. That statement touched off fresh Republican cries of a "coverup" and gave heart to the restless Democrats aiming at dumping Carter as their presidential candidate when the party convenees in Madison Square Garden on Aug. 11.
Whatever the Senators, and a hotly pursuing press, finally turn up, it is already clear that a vulnerable President, trailing Republican Presidential Candidate Ronald Reagan by 28 points in one national opinion poll last week, has suffered yet another blow to his re-election chances. Democrats who support Senator Edward Kennedy's challenge to Carter's renomination were hard at work using the Billy issue as a new wedge to pry Carter convention delegates loose from their commitment to vote for the President's