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 Carter’s problems at home and abroad.

According to the story told by White House staff members, Carter had been fishing on a pond near his home in Plains, Georgia, 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 Carter, the commander in chief, repelled the attack. As confirmed by 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 Jackson. The Washington Post put the AP 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.

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, 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,” Jackson said. (Rabbits are actually lagomorphs, not rodents.)

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, Jackson reported.

That photo wasn’t released to the public until after Carter lost the 1980 presidential election.

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,” Carter said, “that President Carter, who’s already beleaguered, he can’t get everything he wants — he’s even afraid of rabbits.”