Dixon, Jeane

(1918–1997)



A U.S. journalist who claimed prophetic powers and, over a period of forty years, convinced many readers that she possessed them. Living in the national capital, she was sometimes dubbed “the Washington Seeress.”
As a child, the daughter of German immigrants, she was told by a gypsy fortune-teller that she had a psychic gift. However, her public fame stemmed from an experience much later, in 1952. While standing before a statue of the Virgin Mary in a Washington church, she had a vision of the White House with the digits 1 9 6 0 above it and a man with blue eyes and brown hair near the door. Prompted by an inner voice, she announced that a young Democrat would be elected in 1960 and would die in office. She repeated the prediction to an interviewer and developed it. Her president would be in danger of assassination.
The election of John F. Kennedy seemed to confirm her vision, though, as a matter of fact, she had second thoughts during the campaign and expected Richard Nixon, the Republican candidate, to win. She explained this mistake by another vision, which she connected with charges of electoral fraud that followed the election: Nixon had “really” won.
During Kennedy’s term of office, she reverted to her talk of assassination and spoke of it to various people—this at least is well attested. According to her, she had a dim “sighting” of the name of a possible assassin. It had two syllables and five or six letters, of which the first looked like o or q and the second was s. Since s could not follow q, she had got sufficiently close to “Oswald,” the name of the official suspect. On November 22, 1963, she spoke of a profound foreboding, which was borne out by events in Dallas.
Jeane Dixon’s reputation was based largely on this feat. Her admirers credited her with foretelling the deaths of other prominent persons, including Gandhi, Marilyn Monroe, and Martin Luther King Jr. But the proven and documented successes are few, and the errors numerous. Her journalistic forecasts about celebrities did not score often enough to be remarkable. On the world stage, she predicted that the Soviet Union would be the first to put an astronaut on the moon; that Nixon would be one of America’s greatest presidents, indeed, “our last hope”; that germ warfare would soon cause enormous loss of life. She attached immense importance to a male child born on February 5, 1962, but seemed unable to decide whether he would be a sort of Messiah or an Antichrist figure.
Occasionally, one may suspect sources other than those alleged. Robert Ripley, the author of a popular “Believe It or Not” newspaper feature, pointed out that presidents elected every twenty years from 1840 on had died in office, so 1960 was ominous anyway for its winning candidate; and that was in print long before Jeane Dixon’s prognostications. She predicted the end of the papacy in its present form, but she could have taken a hint from some account of Joachim of Fiore or from “Malachy.” She predicted world war in 1999, but she could have taken a hint from Nostradamus, or rather, a much publicized misreading of him.
In her book My Life and Prophecies, which can now be largely checked and is not impressive, her religious and moral interests are evident and sometimes raise obvious questions of bias. Many of her pronouncements were based, like the one about Kennedy, on symbolic visions, which, she assured the public, were always right—she used phrases like the talent the Lord has given me.” Errors were due to her own misinterpretations.