Jimmy Who? The Rise of a Peanut Farmer from Plains and the Fall of a Rabbit-Bitten President

By January 3, 1977, the morning that Jimmy Carter’s piercing blue eyes began peering out at the nation from Time magazine’s Man-of-the-Year cover, his transition staff, spearheaded by Atlanta-based lawyer and adviser Jack Watson, had been at work for nearly six months, planning the organization of Carter’s administration. Only weeks removed from masterminding the rise of the once unknown former Georgia governor, key members of his campaign staff, such as campaign director Hamilton Jordan and press secretary Jody Powell, were also engrained in devising an organizational schema for the next four years. When not involved in these endeavors, they were carefully scouring daily news coverage and nightly newscasts. They were consumed, much as they had been three years prior, with Carter’s image in the national press. This presentation will consider the evolution of Carter’s image in the American imagination—the rise of a peanut farmer from Plains, the birth of an enigmatic candidate, and the fall of a rabbit-bitten president. Along the way, it will explore the construction and negotiation of Carter’s image through the examination of hundreds of boxes of archival sources, thousands of mediated texts, and approximately fifty oral histories and will consider how the portrayal of Carter the candidate contributed to and helped determined perceptions surrounding his presidency.