In August 1979, Brooks Jackson, a reporter for The Associated Press, broke the news that a “killer rabbit” had attacked President Jimmy Carter.
It was a “throwaway story,” he said, but one that took on a life of its own and, in a strange way, became emblematic of Mr. Carter’s problems at home and abroad.
According to the story told by White House staff members, Mr. Carter had been fishing on a pond near his home in Plains, Ga., in April 1979, when he spotted an animal swimming toward his boat.
That animal, it turned out, was a rabbit — an enraged swamp rabbit, according to the White House press secretary, Jody Powell — that was “making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth,” and was intent on climbing into the president’s boat.
But Mr. Carter, the commander in chief, repelled the attack. As confirmed by Mr. Carter himself in subsequent interviews, he dipped a paddle into the water and splashed the oncoming rabbit, driving it to the opposite end of the pond.
The tale did not come to light until months later, when the story was leaked to Mr. Jackson. The Washington Post put the A.P. story on the front page on Aug. 30, 1979, under the headline: “Bunny Goes Bugs. Rabbit Attacks President.” It was accompanied by a cartoon showing a large bucktoothed rabbit emerging from the water like a shark. “Paws,” read the caption.
“What was really just a throwaway story, in my view, suddenly became this viral sensation,” Mr. Jackson said in an interview in 2023, even though, he added: “I don’t think we had the concept of a viral story at the time.”
Mr. Powell too had misjudged the story’s appeal. “It still makes my flesh crawl to think I could have been so foolish,” he wrote in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution in 1984, recalling Mr. Carter’s description of the encounter. “I thought it was funny. Can you imagine such a thing? Faced with a mortal threat to the Carter presidency, I laughed.” (Mr. Powell claimed he was the one who leaked the news months later, but Mr. Jackson has said he got the tip elsewhere.)
The account of the “killer rabbit” ran in newspapers across the country, from The Los Angeles Times to The Tulsa World to The New York Times. One reason, Mr. Jackson said, was its timing, in late August, a slow season for the Washington press corps.
“The idea that he would be attacked by a rodent was just too much for reporters and editors to resist,” Mr. Jackson said. (Rabbits are actually lagomorphs, not rodents.)
The story also played into the perception that Mr. Carter was overwhelmed by economic problems at home and a hostage crisis in Iran. “It was a perfect metaphor for a president who was not being seen as strong or forceful at the time,” Mr. Jackson said.
Mr. Carter had ordered an enlargement of a White House photographer’s picture of him splashing the rabbit. The president wanted to show it to his aides, who were skeptical about his story that a swimming rabbit had menaced him, Mr. Jackson reported.
That photo wasn’t released to the public until after Mr. Carter lost the 1980 presidential election.
Mr. Carter, for his part, seemed to take the whole episode in stride, and he recounted his brush with the rabbit in various interviews over many decades.
Speaking in 2011 at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum in Austin, Texas, he laughed and said: “It wasn’t funny for me. But it’s funny to everyone else.”
“This became the No. 1 story in the whole world,” Mr. Carter said, “that President Carter, who’s already beleaguered, he can’t get everything he wants — he’s even afraid of rabbits.”
The post That Time President Carter Was Menaced by a ‘Killer Rabbit’ appeared first on New York Times.
