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Jimmy and the Rabbit

The US Navy is naming one it its new Attack-class submarines after President Carter. In all fairness, Carter did serve in the Navy on board a boomer but to put his name on an Attack-class vessel has been causing people to scratch heir heads a bit. As Chris Muir from Day by Day puts it: Click for full-size Image We should not forget the story of Jimmy and the Rabbit as told here: bq. President Jimmy Carter and the "killer rabbit" On a fishing trip in Plains, Georgia, President Carter had an encounter with a "swamp rabbit". This seemingly trivial event was seized upon by the press and became a sort of Rorschach test of the Carter presidency: reporters and commentators saw in this story whatever they wanted to see in Carter's administration. Jody Powell, Carter's press secretary, described the affair in his 1986 book The Other Side of the Story:

It began late one afternoon in the spring of 1979. The President was sitting with a few of us on the Truman Balcony. He had recently returned from a visit to Plains, and we were talking about homefolks and how the quail were nesting and similar matters of international import.

Suddenly, for no apparent reason -- he was drinking lemonade, as I recall -- the President volunteered the information that while fishing in a pond on his farm he had sighted a large animal swimming toward him. Upon closer inspection, the animal turned out to be a rabbit. Not one of your cutesy, Easter Bunny-type rabbits, but one of those big splay-footed things that we called swamp rabbits when I was growing up.

The animal was clearly in distress, or perhaps berserk. The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat.

bq. The President then evidently shooed the critter away from his boat with a paddle. The scene was captured on film by a White House photographer. Photographs courtesy of the Jimmy Carter Library Jimmy Carter.==Attack Submarine Boggles the mind doesn't it... WHOOPS I was wrong -- reader Patrick Lasswell left the following comment: bq. Minor correction: Jimmy Carter went through nuclear engineering training as one of Hyman Rickover's first group of officers, but he never served aboard a nuclear submarine. His father died in 1953, and Jimmy resigned his commission to take over the family business. The USS Nautilus was not commissioned until 1954. The US Navy did not have any ballistic missile submarines (boomers) until 1960. Thank you Patrick - I stand in your debt. Posted by DaveH at February 17, 2005 3:44 PM