The phone call that changed the course of Bill Carter’s life wasn’t even to him. It was Nov. 22, 1963, and Carter was 27, a Secret Service agent enjoying lunch with fellow agents and their boss, James Rowley, at O’Donnell’s Seafood, about a block from the White House. The men were celebrating the completion of an advanced training course at the old Navy base when a waiter approached the table and said, “Chief Rowley, you’ve got a phone call.” Rowley excused himself and headed for the large black rotary phone at the bar. When he returned, the veteran couldn’t mask the shock on his face. The president had been shot. While Rowley attended to other matters, Carter was dispatched to the White House. Suddenly thrust into history, Carter soon found himself watching as Jackie Kennedy, her children and Bobby Kennedy privately paid their respects to the slain leader’s flag-draped casket in the East Room of the White House. He stood sentry after the body was moved to the Capitol Rotunda, and then was assigned to remain at the head of the grave in Arlington National Cemetery until Kennedy’s body was lowered into the ground. Like many who fervently believed in Kennedy’ promise, Carter was shattered by the assassination. But in that very instant, his own life was also catapulted to heights he wouldn’t have dared dream about as a poor farm boy in Rector, Ark. Like the fictional Forrest Gump, Bill Carter has crossed paths with a lot of famous and infamous Americans—from Jack Ruby, Jimmy Hoffa and Presidents Johnson and Nixon, to the Rolling Stones, Steve McQueen, Tanya Tucker, Reba McEntire, and even Christian music legends Bill and Gloria Gaither—and “didn’t plan any of it,” says his longtime friend, Judi Turner, a veteran music publicist. “It just happened. It’s a remarkable story of someone being in exactly the right place at the right time.” As a Secret Service agent, he investigated the Kennedy assassination for the Warren Commission; later, as an entertainment lawyer, he negotiated the deal that allowed the Stones to enter the United States in the 1970s, kept Keith Richards from going to jail on heroin charges in Toronto and bullied a Mexican funeral home director into releasing the body of actor Steve McQueen that he was holding for ransom. “I loved to sit and listen to his stories,” says singer Reba McEntire, who was once managed by Carter. “If I had to say there are five people that I’d like to go sit down and have dinner with, Bill would be one of them because he is so interesting, fascinating and I can always learn from him.” Carter, 70, has documented these stories in his new book, Get Carter: Backstage in History from JFK’s Assassination to The Rolling Stones (Fine’s Creek Publishing, 291 pp., $29.95). Co-written with Judi Turner and six years in the making, it chronicles the life of one of the most fascinating and feared men in Nashville. Carter wrote the book for his daughters Julia, 42, and Joanna, 40. “I was their hero because of my association with the Rolling Stones, and that was not the way I preferred to be remembered,” he says. He didn’t set out to publish the book, but friends insisted this eyewitness account of pop culture history had mainstream appeal as a rags-to-riches story of American enterprise. “I never set goals,” Carter says. “When I was a kid working in the fields of east Arkansas, of course I dreamed of going to Detroit and working in a car plant because everybody from the farm areas of Arkansas and Tennessee went to Detroit and came back driving new cars. To me, a job of any kind that would earn enough money to own something was the only thing I ever thought about.” The few hand-me-downs that he got from his older brothers embarrassed Carter, one of five children of Henry Carter, a laborer, and Essie Faye Richardson, a homemaker who picked cotton. After finishing high school at 17, Carter had to move out of the house because his parents couldn’t afford to keep supporting him. “I had to work,” he says simply. “I’ve worked all my life.” After high school, he served in the Air Force before enrolling in Arkansas State University, earning an economics degree in 1961. He attended the University of Arkansas Law School but dropped out when he ran out of money. Joining the Secret Service, he soon found himself in the White House saying, “Good morning, Mr. President.” After the assassination, Carter rushed to the White House, where he found himself operating on adrenaline and autopilot. He answered calls from world leaders and helped locate all senior government officials, in the event of a conspiracy. When the new President Johnson arrived on the White House lawn, “It was so solemn; there was no talking,” he recalls. “He went in the office and we stood outside. No one said anything about anything. It was deathly quiet.” He met President Kennedy’s body as it arrived in an ambulance at 4 the next morning. “They brought the body back and put it in the East Room,” he says. “Each member of the armed forces stood at each corner of the casket, decorated military veterans with medals hanging on their chests and tears streaming down their cheeks,” he says. “I have never forgotten that picture of that moment.… It was almost like the world stopped. There were no horns; everything was so quiet.... Jackie reached out and touched the casket.” By Thanksgiving Day, Carter was assigned to the Dallas office, where he began investigating the assassination for the Warren Commission. He spent a few days protecting Oswald’s family—including his widow, Marina, and his mother, Marguerite—and accompanied them to Washington for the Warren hearings. He interviewed witnesses at the Texas School Book Depository and examined Oswald’s room at a boarding house. By Christmas, Carter concluded that Oswald had acted alone. “If the authorities hadn’t screwed it up by having 17 people interrogate him, at a point he would have declared, ‘Yeah, I killed the S.O.B. and I’m proud of it.’ ” After the investigation ended in 1964, Carter returned to normal service detail, which included traveling with President Johnson and working out of the Little Rock office investigating counterfeiters and searching for fugitives. He learned the art of interrogation during Secret Service training, but it was an impromptu lesson from a federal postal inspector that forever changed the way he handled situations. As they approached a house of prostitution one day, federal agent Charlie Newton said, “Son, I’m going to teach you something here that I don’t want you ever to forget. When we go into this house, we’re going to take control of the situation. The FBI would walk up and knock on the door, show their credentials and say, ‘I’m Mr. Carter with the FBI.’ That is not the way I handle it.” Instead, he kicked down the door, pulled out his gun and yelled, “By God, I’m Charlie Newton, the postal inspector, and I want to know where so-and-so is.” One of the women stepped forward with the address, proving to Carter that the voice of authority will always be obeyed. During his Secret Service career, Carter never fired his weapon. “I think because of what Charlie taught me, I never used any force of any kind,” he says. Years later, Carter drew from that experience in his famous pit-bull negotiations on Music Row. His bark is so bad that he’s never had to go as far as biting anyone. Loved by some for his charm and loathed by others for his menacing intimidation, Carter has a confidence and aggressiveness driven by the belief that he’s always right. So he doesn’t hesitate to direct his wrath at anyone who disagrees with him. After all, this is a man who once fired his own daughter—a five-year employee—after she “popped off” during a disagreement. (“We worked through all that,” Joanna says.) “I have never heard anybody say anything bad about his character, honesty or integrity,” McEntire says. “They might say he’s a smart-ass, hard-ass or brassy, but never anything bad about his integrity…. The only weakness I could ever tell about Bill Carter was his temper.” “He is a passionate person,” says Joe Galante, chairman of RCA Label Group. “If you get on the side of the passion he agrees with, it’s great. If you are on the other side, it’s hell. He is not a gray person. He is either for you or ag’in you. If he’s ag’in you, he’s not out to hurt you. He just has a different opinion.” “Everybody is afraid of Bill, until you get to know him, because he’ll make that phone call and ruin your life. But I’ve never seen him make that phone call,” says Bill Zysblat, business manager of the Rolling Stones. Carter left the Secret Service in 1965 and returned to law school, earning his degree in 1967. He became a criminal trial lawyer in Little Rock and represented some of the city’s most violent offenders. But when he turned from trial law to entertainment, it was his Secret Service contacts that helped him land his first famous client, the Rolling Stones, in 1973. For political reasons, the State Department and Immigration and Naturalization had denied the band’s request to obtain work permits required for the Stones to tour America. (During this time, the federal government was also trying to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono.) Carter’s mentor, U.S. Rep. Wilbur Mills, had recommended him after several other attorneys’ efforts had failed. “He single-handedly got them into the U.S. to tour when they couldn’t get in,” says Chet Flippo, editorial director of C MT.com and former Rolling Stone editor. “It saved their careers. They were broke at the time and really needed to tour, and the U.S. was their market.” Carter got his wish—but with one caveat: he was required to join the Stones, to eliminate any possible problems that might derail the tour. “When I met Bill, his role seemed to be keeping local law enforcement happy from just before the band arrived in a city until after they left,” says Zysblat. “I don’t think a tour would have concluded if Bill wasn’t there. The tours just wouldn’t have been completed. Either one band member or a crew member would have been detained and shows would have been lost, or trucks wouldn’t have made it across borders.” In a time where many people considered rock ’n’ roll to be the devil’s music, Jagger was the devil incarnate. At many cities, local police were poised at stage’s edge, licking their lips in hope of arresting Jagger for exhibiting pornographic material when displaying a giant penis onstage, or violating a city’s obscenity code with song lyrics. But Carter wasn’t intimidated. “There were things that he did that were beyond anyone’s comprehension,” Zysblat says. “He would make a phone call and things would go away. It was just scary—good scary, but scary nonetheless.” “There was confrontation in nearly every city we went to,” says Carter, who was never arrested. “I said, ‘Come on, take me to jail, you S.O.B. It will enhance my reputation. You’re not going to come out here and mistreat this band.’ ” While it’s the screaming matches that were most often documented in the press, Carter was actually famous for diffusing tense situations, Zysblat says. “Bill would walk into a room and say, ‘Now everybody calm down.’ He was so disarming that everybody would calm down. It didn’t matter how crazed the police were or how much battle gear they had on.” In February 1977, Keith Richards was arrested at the Toronto International Airport for drug possession and trafficking. Richards, a heroin addict, faced seven years to life in prison. Incarceration would have likely meant the end of the Stones, if not Richards’ life. Rather than playing hardball, Carter told the judge the truth and pled for mercy. “I said, ‘Your honor, I’ve already acknowledged that you’re dealing with a man seriously addicted to heroin, but if you lock him up, he’ll die. There is no way he can withdraw from heroin cold turkey.’ ” The strategy worked: Richards was released on a bond of only $25,000. Carter located British physician Meg Patterson, who had cured rocker Eric Clapton of his addiction. Since she wasn’t allowed to practice in the United States, he found a doctor willing to sponsor her and got government approval and a waiver from the American Medical Association. Then he negotiated with the White House and State Department for a limited visa to allow Richards to enter the U.S. for drug treatment. Three weeks later, Richards was cured. In October 1978, trafficking charges were dropped, and Richards pled to a lesser charge of heroin possession and was placed on probation. Even Bill Carter couldn’t win them all. In 1974, Carter was hired by Jimmy Hoffa, the head of the powerful International Brotherhood of Teamsters who was sentenced to prison in the mid-1960s for jury tampering, among other crimes. President Nixon had commuted Hoffa’s sentence, but someone in the White House counsel’s office—unbeknownst to Hoffa—had later inserted a clause prohibiting Hoffa from resuming his union leadership position. Hoffa wanted to challenge the clause on grounds that it was unconstitutional. He and Carter met at New York’s Barkley Hotel, where Hoffa was surrounded by burly, armed bodyguards. “The first thing he said was, ‘Do you know how to skin a catfish?’ ” Carter recalls. “I said, ‘Absolutely. Drive a nail through it’s head on a post, cut the skin around his head, take some wire pliers and pull that skin off.’ He said, ‘Let’s go upstairs and talk.’ I never knew what that meant, other than the fact that he felt that if I could skin a catfish, I was trustworthy.” Carter believed that Nixon never should have paroled Hoffa in the first place. But he also believed that imposing limits on that parole after the fact was a violation of Hoffa’s rights. He accepted the case (and Hoffa’s retainer of $10,000 in cash) and began writing letters to the pardon attorney. Before long, Carter found himself facing the door to the Oval Office once more. His plan? “I was going to go in and threaten the president of the United States.” But the Nixon White House faced bigger threats at the moment: Watergate. Nothing came of Carter’s petition. He met with Hoffa and told him that his only recourse was to file a lawsuit with the team of attorneys he already had. In July 1974, Hoffa lost his district case in Washington D.C. He disappeared before his appeal could be heard. When not on the road with the Stones, Carter practiced law in Little Rock and, in the mid-1970s, began managing the career of Tanya Tucker and became friends with Hollywood notables like Steve McQueen. In 1980, McQueen was diagnosed with lung cancer and went to Mexico to undergo surgery away from the prying eyes of the American press. Although the surgery was a success, he died 12 hours later of a heart attack. McQueen’s manager, Bill Maher, learned the Mexican government was refusing to release the actor’s body. “There were people in the mortuary taking photos of McQueen, which did appear in print, just his face, lying there on a slab,” Maher says. “When the problem came up, I didn’t think of anybody else. It was just, ‘Get Carter.’ If you wanted to get something done and fast, he is just the man. I don’t think of him as a lawyer; I think of him as a problem solver.” Maher told Carter the Mexican authorities claimed to be holding the body for investigation, but Carter knew better. His first call was to the funeral home director in Juarez. “Look, I want to know what it will take to get the authorities to release the body right now. How much will it take?” The memories of those involved have grown fuzzy during the years, but the ransom was either $60,000 or $160,000. Actually freeing McQueen’s body involved more than the ransom, however; in typical Carter fashion, it also involved a certain amount of intimidation of Mexican officials. Eventually, though, he got his way. “When Carter called and said, ‘He’s in the air,’ I will never forget those words,” Maher says. “It was like a ton of bricks was pulled off me.” Carter moved to Nashville in 1981 and soon began managing Reba McEntire. She says his strength was recognizing her weaknesses and finding the right staging, lighting and choreography she needed. “The greatest thing Bill Carter did for my career was create a facade,” McEntire says. “He made me look bigger than I was at the time, and that’s show business.” She won CMA Female Vocalist of the Year in 1984. Still, McEntire was at times scared of Carter. “He would get so mad, and his veins would stand out on his head, and you would just see his teeth,” she says. “I’ll never forget when I wasn’t asked to be on the Grammys and Bill just said, ‘All right, she’ll never be on it again,’ and put his foot down.” Carter continued to manage country artists, including Rodney Crowell, Shenandoah, Lari White and Lonestar, until 2003, when he decided to devote his career to working with gospel giants Bill and Gloria Gaither. “I kind of chuckled,” McEntire recalls, when she heard of Carter’s conversion to the Christian realm. “I wonder if he still throws his tantrums and says some off-color words!” (No, says Bill Gaither. “I have never heard him use foul language,” he says. “I am serious.”) Carter, a Christian who believes in reincarnation, helped the Gaithers get their first show aired on The Nashville Network in the early 1990s. “From then on, he began knocking on a lot of doors that we wouldn’t have knocked on, including the Kennedy Center, Carnegie Hall and the Sydney Opera House. He does think big,” Gaither says. “His impact has been definitely taking us to the next level. It would be hard to put a number on that, but I think he has increased our crowd three- or four-fold. When he really believes in something, I don’t care what it is, he goes after it.” Today Carter serves as executive director of all the Gaithers’ television shows. Carter married his third wife, Marlow Herman, a Northwest Airlines flight attendant, in 2004 and they live in a 10,000-square-foot brick house that sits on 40 acres in Lebanon. Earlier this month, he returned from a nearly two-week river journey as he moved his 64-foot yacht from Old Hickory to Fort Lauderdale. “He relaxes now more than he used to,” says Ralph Emery. “I think Marlow has been very good for him. She’s made him a lot happier. She’s brought new joy to his life.” He’s found new joy in the workplace as well. Carter is the executive producer of a Billy Graham documentary that airs Easter Week on PBS and later on the Biography Channel. “I have been working on this for five years,” he says. “If you are going to finish off your life with something—and I’m not quitting—then I’d want to do it with a Billy Graham documentary. He’s led a model life; he’s not wealthy. I am ashamed when I go to his house; I live in a far better house than he does. All of his money goes into his ministry. “This has changed me a lot. Seldom am I out there in that other environment like I used to be all the time. It’s like going to a revival: the preacher comes to town and revives your spirit and you go out and you’re going to be a different person. I think that is what it does to you: it makes you feel like you need to be a better person. Enough of that and you become a better person.”