After the passing of 100-year-old former President Jimmy Carter, many are recalling the ‘killer rabbit’ incident in which Carter had to fight off a berserk swamp creature while fishing in his hometown of Plains, Georgia.
The bizarre incident occurred in April 1979 but was not known to the public until months later when, according to an account by then White House Press Secretary Jody Powell, the press official shared the story with reporter Brooks Jackson. After the story broke, it captured the American imagination and came to be seen as emblematic of the Carter presidency, which many perceived as ineffective and flailing.
Sensationalized headlines ran across the country such as the Washington Post’s ‘Bunny Goes Bugs. Rabbit Attacks President’ and the New York Times’s ‘A Tale of Carter and the ‘Killer Rabbit.’’
The story, which is backed by a photograph taken by a White House staffer, goes that Carter, while fishing near Plains, suddenly noticed a large swamp rabbit swimming quickly toward him. Powell said that ‘this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.’ Carter used a paddle to splash water at the creature, causing it to change course and swim away.
The New York Times reported in August 1979 that the rabbit had ‘penetrated Secret Service security and attacked President Carter,’ forcing him to ‘beat back the animal with a canoe paddle.’ The outlet reported one White House staffer saying, ‘the President was swinging for his life.’
The picture, which was not released by the White House until after Carter lost his re-election effort to Ronald Reagan in 1980, shows the now-deceased president splashing water as a large rabbit, its ears poking out of the water, swims away.
Carter’s account of the incident is somewhat less dramatic. The deceased president said: ‘A rabbit was being chased by hounds and he jumped in the water and swam toward my boat. When he got almost there, I splashed some water with a paddle and the rabbit turned and went on and crawled out on the other side.’
However, that did not stop national and local media outlets from running the story about the ‘killer rabbit’ far and wide.
In 1979, Carter was in the middle of his one-term presidency. He was facing several difficulties both at home and abroad, including an energy crisis and economic issues and the Iran hostage crisis. Amid these troubles, Carter’s approval ratings took a dramatic dip, and he reached some of the highest disapproval numbers of his entire presidency.
While newspaper accounts of the ‘banzai bunny’ and cartoons of giant, bucktoothed rabbits were clearly fanciful, many came to see the whole story as a sort of metaphor for Carter’s struggling presidency.
Powell, who originally thought of the incident as an innocent, comical story, later said he had come to regret his decision to share it with the press because of the way it was used to portray the president as so weak and inept that he was even afraid of a bunny.
Powell described the events as a ‘nightmare’ in his 1985 memoir ‘The Other Side of the Story.’
‘It still makes my flesh crawl to think I could have been so foolish, I thought it was funny,’ he wrote. ‘Had I been doing my job, I would have stopped the President at that moment, pointed out the dangers to him and his administration if such a story ever got out. . . . Sadly, I did nothing of the kind.’
Carter, a Democrat, served as the nation’s 39th president from 1977 to 1981. He was the longest-living president in U.S. history, passing away at the age of 100 in his home in Plains on Dec. 29 at 3:45 p.m. An outspoken Christian, Carter was known for his significant humanitarian efforts after his presidency and was awarded a Nobel Peace Prize in 2002.