Background
A son of Fitzhugh Lee Bethea (1889–1971) and the former Bonnie Keen, Bethea graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938 from Clemson University in Clemson in northwestern South Carolina.
A son of Fitzhugh Lee Bethea (1889–1971) and the former Bonnie Keen, Bethea graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in 1938 from Clemson University in Clemson in northwestern South Carolina.
In 1945, after service as a Lieutenant Colonel in the United States Army Air Corps in the North African and the European Theater of Operations during World World War II, he earned a Master of Science degree from Colorado State University in Fort Collins, then known as Colorado Agricultural and Mechanical. Bethea was an active member the Veterans of Foreign Wars.
In 1970, he left his party to run unsuccessfully as the nominee of the American Independent Party for governor of South Carolina. He served as well on the Dillon County Farm Bureau. In 1968, Bethea supported former Governor George Wallace of Alabama for United States. President in the three-way campaign against Republican Richard M. Nixon and Democrat Hubert Humphrey, the outgoing vice president, who sought to succeed United States. President Lyndon B. Johnson.
Whereas Wallace returned to the Democratic Party to run against Albert Brewer for governor in 1970, Bethea became the standard-bearer of Wallace"s former American Independent Party in his own run for governor against the Democrat John C. West, the departing lieutenant governor, and the Republican choice, outgoing United States. Representative Albert Watson of South Carolina"s 2nd congressional district.
Bethea claimed that Wallace was sympathetic his campaign, but with his own race in Alabama Wallace took no part in the South Carolina campaign. Frank B. Best, Senior, of Orangeburg, the 1968 Wallace campaign manager in South Carolina, endorsed Watson, on the basis of his conservative congressional record, rather than West, who had backed Humphrey in the previous presidential race.
West had called Humphrey "a real friend of the South though he has had no cr for lieutenant" Other Wallace leaders backed the Democrat West, who led in ten of the twelve counties that Wallace had carried in 1968. Bethea finished the race with 9,758 (2 percent), a margin too small to have denied victory to Watson.
West prevailed with 251,151 (521 percent).
Watson trailed with 221,236 (459 percent). Bethea died at the age of eighty-three. He is interred with other family members at the Dothan Methodist Church Cemetery in Dillon County.
From 1959 to 1960, he was a member of the United States Chamber of Commerce. He was a lifetime member of the booster group IPTAY ("I Pay Ten a Year") to support Clemson athletics.