The Country Slicker

He had all the success he craved--for a while

He was eating a lunch of his wife's renowned chile con carne. While he finished his meal, she proudly showed TIME Correspondent Philip Taubman around the elegant three-story house in fashionable Georgetown. She had made the draperies herself. Later that January day, the newcomers to Washington talked about how their lives had been magically transformed. They made no effort to conceal their excitement. "I can tell already," said LaBelle Lance, "we're going to like Washington." Bert Lance was quick to agree: "This is the biggest thrill of my life."

More thrills were to follow. Lance swiftly established himself as one of the most important figures in the Carter Administration, his powers extending far beyond his job as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. He was one of the President's top economic advisers, his affable and reassuring ambassador to the business community and his most effective emissary to Capitol Hill. A great, shambling, unassuming bear of a man (6 ft. 4 in., 235 Ibs.), Lance loved to swap jokes, slap backs and artfully cajole the powerbrokers to go along with Jimmy. More important, Lance was Carter's confidant. He was there to puff around the tennis court when the President summoned, or simply to sit down, kick off his shoes and talk on and on in his rumbling, resonant voice about whatever was on the President's mind.

At first they seemed to be an odd pair--the introspective President, a cold-minded engineer with a passion to get every detail right, and the Bunyanesque extravert (the front license plate of his limousine on Inauguration Day proclaimed BERT; the rear one, LANCE), who cheerfully mangled facts in his haste to paint the big picture. But there were deep bonds between the two opposites. At 46, Lance was closer in age to the President, who is 52, than most of the young Georgians who made up the White House's inner circle. Like the Baptist President, Lance--a Methodist--took his religion seriously. Both were workaholics who thought nothing of being at their desks at 6:30 a.m.--and at 6:30 p.m. as well. And both knew what it was like to fight their way from small-town Georgia to fame and power.

Like Carter, Lance came from a modest but not penurious background. He spent his early years in the small north Georgia town of Young Harris (pop. 310), where his father was president of a tiny Methodist college. Lance went to school in a four-room building. "Everybody liked him, even though his father was the president of the college " recalls Georgia's Lieut. Governor Zell Miller, who shared a double desk with Lance and has remained a good friend ever since. "It's really something to be that popular when the rest of the children in the class come to school in their one pair of overalls and only pair of brogan shoes."

The Lance family later moved to Calhoun, Ga. (pop. 5,000), 65 miles to the southwest, where one of his sixth-grade classmates was LaBelle David, granddaughter of the president of the Calhoun First National Bank. LaBelle and Bert were married when they were both 19. In 1951, just before graduation, Bert had to drop out of the University of Georgia to find a job. The first of his four sons was on his way. Lance never did get a degree; he never needed one.

Grandfather David gave Lance a $90-a-week job as a teller in the bank, and he helped make ends meet by refereeing high school football games. In 1963 Lance and a group of friends bought control of the bank and he became its president. At the age of 32 he was finally off and running. As one longtime Calhoun resident puts it, "He was the best damn energizer of people ever to shake your hand." To bolster the local economy, Lance gave high-risk loans to people willing to start small businesses making tufted carpets. Today the carpet factories are the area's leading employers. To upgrade the local cattle, Lance had his bank buy purebred bulls, then leased them to farmers. His jaunty claim: "We have the only full-service, bull-service bank in the country." As later became all too clear, Lance also regarded Calhoun National as the family cookie jar--a convenient source for no-interest loans.

In 1966 a state senator named Jimmy Carter asked Lance to help out in his long-shot campaign to win the Democratic nomination for Governor. The two men got along from the start. Lance rallied some businessmen to Carter's losing cause and helped out even more in 1970, when the audaciously ambitious man from Plains did reach the statehouse. Carter first made Lance head of the inefficient, patronage-ridden state highway department, which the banker cleaned up and streamlined. Then Carter put Lance in charge of his successful struggle to wheedle a stubborn legislature into passing his governmental reforms.

In 1974 Lance plunged into politics, starting at the top. With Carter barred by law from succeeding himself, Lance ran for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, using the financial razzle-dazzle that later was to become such a liability. His campaign committees obtained $228,000 in loans from his bank in the form of overdrafts. In all, Lance spent more than $1 million. He campaigned furiously, but his beguiling pose as an aw-shucks country boy backfired when opponents forced him to disclose that his net worth then was $3.1 million. Although he was Carter's choice, he finished third.

In 1975 Lance and two associates raised $7.4 million to buy a controlling interest in the National Bank of Georgia (Lance's share: 21%). As president, Lance kept a Bible on his desk and put his office right on the main floor, where people could easily get at him. He adopted a risky, go-go strategy financing agribusiness operations. One of Lance's safest deals: lending a total of $4.7 million to the Carter family's thriving peanut firm. Says King Cleveland, former chairman of NBG: "He got more new projects going in 24 months than we'd had in the previous 24 years."

Lance was fond of saying, "Folks are serious about three things. Their religion. Their family. And, most of all, their money." Quite a few trusted him to handle their money. The NBG's assets doubled to $400 million, making the bank Georgia's fifth largest.

Away from the office, Lance was at last leading the spectacularly good life he had wanted so badly for so long. The sleepy-eyed banker collected houses and property as though he were playing Monopoly: a 50-room Atlanta mansion, complete with tennis courts, swimming pool and a sauna now up for sale at $2 million; a $100,000 hideaway on Sea Island; and a $150,000 estate and 400 acres of farmland in Calhoun. Bert and LaBelle entertained lavishly; at one party, the guests had to come in shifts, since his dining room in Atlanta held only 50 people.

Then came 1976. It turned out that Lance had bet on the right man, and by January 1977 he was settling into Washington. He relished it all--for a while. But by last week, there were no casual callers or formal parties at the house in Georgetown. The press waited on the sidewalk to ask questions as Lance hurried in and out, his frame sagging and the circles under his eyes growing deeper and darker. Bert Lance's Washington adventure had been transformed from the biggest thrill into the greatest ordeal of his life.

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