I needed a second to settle my nerves. I had known Carter before, certainly, but back then he was just a skinny kid with big teeth, your basic Young Baptist Next Door. Myself, I already had a deep voice. I got to second base with Patty Evans while he was still singing like Tweety Bird. But now he wore a mantle of sorts. I had a good career myself, of course, but his credentials were hard to beat. When I looked at his face, media images clicked through my memory like cards in a shuffling machine. The guy had walked the corridors of power like Caesar or Napoléon, for Chrissake. So I have to admit my legs took on a liquid quality. A great vaulted hallway held them all, these massive, looming figures of men, and here was one of the monoliths in my office. Coming to me for help.
Because no one knocks on a psychologist’s door to sell Girl Scout cookies. Carter wanted something.
There was denial there, of course. There always is.
Carter told me he considered talk therapy to be “for folks with real problems.” And he purported to be free of these. For Carter matters of the psyche were matters of the spirit, and matters of the spirit found their resolution in the teachings of Jesus. Even when we were boys, Jimmy took his churchgoing to heart. Back then, of course, Baptists were more easygoing and not overly interested in politics.
He eased into the confab with a casual narration of his life post-commander-in-chief. He’d published two memoirs and was looking forward to starting work on a novel. I waited patiently as he yapped about Rosalynn and the kids; I was fairly sure he hadn’t sat in the limousine for three hours to offer up the Carter family CV.
“Why I came to see you, Bobby,” he offered up when the small talk wound down, “was I’m trying to take a deep look at myself these days. Yesterday and tomorrow. I look back at my life so far and I try to make a moral reckoning. Where have I been, Bob? And where do I want to go?”
“Makes sense,” I said, encouraging.
I took the liberty of pouring myself another glass of the burgundy. It was an excellent Échézeaux—a ’74, if I recall correctly, which carried a price tag in the triple digits.
“I’m not just looking at recent events, Bob. I’m looking into my character all the way back. And when I remember what we put you through, I feel badly. I truly do.”
It was then that my bladder put me on notice. In the cloying bathroom, thick with the sandalwood incense visited upon me by the yoga women, I popped a few codeine-laced Tylenol. My head was aching. Was it the spooks in the waiting room? Or was it Carter himself? I have an action practice: Clients know that with me the past is a springboard, not a quagmire. We don’t dwell on the mommies who didn’t love us enough. My clients are strictly proactive. I don’t often toot my own horn, but I’ve molded Fortune 500 executives out of acne-pocked office drones.
Important to steer the conversation in a positive direction. Carter wasn’t a client, but the same tactics applied.
I left the bathroom with my temples throbbing and was quickly frisked by a Secret Service agent, apparently concerned I might have stowed a firearm in the toilet tank. Outside on the roof I sat down again and had barely picked up my glass when Carter leaned forward earnestly and clasped my arm.
“Keeping quiet and letting the blame fall on your head. Standing by while your family was hounded out of town and your daddy put you away in that place. It was wrong, Bobby. Sinful and wrong.”
“I go by Robert these days, Mr. President,” I said. I had no use for the rehashing of childhood squabbles; mine is a forward vector. Strength and velocity.
“Robert. Of course. Listen here, Robert. I want to apologize. I’ve always felt distressed by what happened. I can only imagine what you must feel.”
Then it came to me. The end stage of the Carter presidency had been a time of low points, like the hostage crisis and Billygate. Those were the landmarks that showed up in the history books, but there were also the small, linchpin moments that turned the tide and got swept under the rug. I’m talking about what happened with the swamp rabbit. The newspapers called it a killer.
The killer rabbit plowed through the water toward Carter’s boat in the spring of 1979. Carter was fishing alone on a pond at the time. Startled, he threatened the thing with his oar, splashing at the water to shoo it away. The vermin grudgingly changed its course. Not much of a story, but when it was leaked Carter was ridiculed for telling tall tales. People didn’t believe rabbits could swim, for one thing. But soon a White House photographer showed up with pictures of the scene that backed Carter up, showing a large, light-brown hare, red-eyed and dog-paddling, and Carter splashing the water’s surface a few feet from the animal in what looked like a feeble defensive posture.
The upshot: Carter was no longer a liar, but still a clown. Comic-strip spoofs of the episode appeared, one of them starring “Paws,” a sharklike rabbit menace.
The president had been unmanned.
It was then that I had an inkling of what was going on. The killer rabbit had brought Carter to me.
“ . . . Never thought of you as the town bully myself,” he was saying. “You could be, ah, insistent, and you didn’t always know your own
