Rogue Rabbit

 By Randy Dotinga

On a spring day in 1979, a waterborne rabbit approached the leader of the free world as he fished near his home in Georgia. President Jimmy Carter splashed it with an oar, seeing the creature was “clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk … making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth,” his press secretary Jody Powell later wrote. The rabbit swam away, its pair of bunny ears visible above the water line.

Four months later, news of the peculiar incident transformed it into an irresistible metaphor for a sinking presidency: How could Carter be trusted to vanquish inflation and gas lines when he couldn’t manage to keep the peace on a pond?

“I didn’t think Carter had a paddle,” jibed humorist Mark Russell. Both The Washington Post and the New York Times published cartoons depicting giant “Jaws”-like rabbits attacking Carter’s boat from below. There was even a novelty song by folk singer Tom Paxton called “I Don’t Want a Bunny Wunny,” with the lyrics “Think about the country, think about sin/Along swum a rabbit, and he tried to climb in.”

It was a “nightmare,” Powell recalled in his 1984 book “The Other Side of the Story.” And he blamed himself. 

According to Powell, Carter mentioned the rabbit encounter after he returned from an April trip home to Plains, Georgia, the same home where Carter died Sunday, at 100. “Faced with a mortal threat to the Carter presidency, I laughed,” Powell wrote. “Nor, as painful as it is to admit, was that the full extent of my culpability in this matter.”

Powell, who died in 2009, took responsibility for leaking the story to an Associated Press reporter in the summer doldrums of August 1979. In his 2020 book “His Very Best: Jimmy Carter, a Life,” biographer Jonathan Alter wrote that the information actually came from White House secretary Susan Clough. Whatever the case, the resulting lighthearted AP story landed on the front page of The Post (“Bunny Goes Bugs/Rabbit Attacks President”) and Page A-16 of the Times.

The Washington Post front page from Aug. 30, 1979, featuring an AP story on President Jimmy Carter’s unfortunate rabbit run-in. (The Washington Post)

“It was a killer rabbit,” an unnamed Carter staffer was quoted as saying, having a bit of fun. “The President was swinging for his life.” The AP reported that a White House photographer had captured a photo of president and rabbit but that the administration declined to release it.

Then the wisecracks started. It didn’t help that a bloodthirsty “Killer Rabbit” had appeared in 1975’s “Monty Python and the Holy Grail.” To make things worse, “the president was repeatedly asked to explain his behavior at town hall meetings, press conferences, and meetings with editors,” Powell wrote.

For Carter, the timing of the goofy story gone viral could hardly have been worse. The nation was grappling with high inflation and long gas lines, and the Iranian Revolution had begun.

Carter did manage to get praise for a summer 1979 speech calling for the nation to buck up and regain confidence, said Kai Bird, author of the 2021 biography “The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.” But that was followed by the shock of Carter’s entire Cabinet and senior staff offering to resign in an effort to revive his presidency.

The rabbit incident played into a perception that the members of the Carter administration were “over their heads,” “inept” and didn’t “know how to run Washington,” Bird said.

The story also, according to Alter, gave fresh ammunition to critics who mocked the Carters as uncouth Southern hicks. Never mind the fact that Carter was an expert outdoorsman, nor that swamp rabbits — familiar to native Southerners like Powell but a bizarre concept to others — are a real, distinct species from the smaller, better-known eastern cottontail. They’re found in much of the South and parts of the Midwest, and are about as long as a beagle and as heavy as a Chihuahua, according to biologist Hayley C. Lanier, of the University of Oklahoma.

This was “not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits,” Powell wrote.

Was something wrong with the rabbit that met Carter? Maybe not. Swamp rabbits are unlikely to get rabies, Lanier said, so that seems an unlikely explanation. Instead, it may simply have been trying to get away from trouble, she said, since the rabbits typically aren’t aggressive.

The Carter presidency ended in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan, whose administration later released the White House photograph showing Carter in his boat, a large splash from his oar, and a rabbit fleeing in the water. Even today, the story is “certainly something that people of a certain age all remember,” Bird said.

For his part, Alter laments that the rabbit tale has staying power while Carter’s accomplishments in areas like environmental protection are largely forgotten. “People in our business just have to do better than turning this kind of thing into a defining moment of somebody’s presidency,” he said in an interview.

But Carter didn’t seem bitter when his biographer asked him about the rabbit hoopla decades later.

“He smiled ruefully,” Alter said.