Mrs. Wakeman vs. the Antichrist

by Robert Damon Schneck

  The Washington Seeress

  Washington was full of servicemen during the war, and Jeane volunteered to help entertain them with fortune-telling. She acquired a reputation for accuracy, which led to her doing readings for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944–1945. Dixon visited the White House twice, discreetly tucking the crystal ball inside the sleeve of her mink, and told the ailing FDR how long he would live, and that America should be fighting with Germany against the Soviet Union. There is no official record of the visits, and staff members did not remember her being there, but Elliott Roosevelt said his father was interested in extrasensory perception (ESP) and had discussed Dixon.10

  After the war, Jeane lived the life of a Washington matron; she shopped, had her hair done, and attended embassy cocktail parties. James placed a rose on her pillow every morning (an artificial rose is there now), but he was “a stern taskmaster who expected her to be at his beck and call.”11 Despite that, she chose a four-story Victorian row house, which he did not want, as their home, and became secretary-treasurer of James L. Dixon Realtors. Jeane claimed that working in the office was James’s way of protecting her from never-ending requests for psychic help, but there were practical reasons for being there.12

  She had been hired by the San Francisco bank for her “genius at figures and accounting,” and presumably continued working in a financial capacity for James’s company in California.13 When it came to business, she was reputedly “tougher than hell, much tougher than her husband really.”14 Despite being employed, Dixon still gave readings at parties, and the 1950s and 1960s would prove to be her most productive period.15

  During this time she foretold the launching of Sputnik, UN secretary-general Dag Hammarskjöld’s plane crash, the deaths of three Apollo astronauts, and much else. She will always be remembered, however, as “the woman who predicted Kennedy’s assassination.”16 Space does not permit a fair evaluation of her accuracy, but the JFK prophecy is a good example of how she claimed to experience seeing into the future.

  Dixon’s countdown to Dallas began in 1952, in Washington, D.C., as she knelt before a statue of the Virgin Mary in the Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle. A radiant image of the White House appeared and the number “1960” above it; dark clouds spread from the numerals and dripped down onto the building like “chocolate frosting on a cake” and a man stood there, “young, tall, and blue-eyed, with a shock of thick brown hair.17 An inner voice told her that he was a Democrat, and that the President [elected in 1960] would meet with a violent death while in office.”18 Then the vision vanished.

  Four years later, Parade reported that “for the 1960 election, Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. But he will be assassinated or die in office, ‘though not necessarily in his first term.’”19 When Kennedy was elected in 1960, she saw gloomy clouds and caskets over the White House.

  In January 1963, Dixon said Kennedy would be dead before the end of the year.20 By April, she predicted that he’d be shot, and, in October, that he would probably die in his first term. On November 13, Dixon tried warning Kennedy that he would be assassinated if he traveled “down South.”21 She told radio host Long John Nebel, “Something is going to happen to Jack this week,” and, on the twenty-second, allegedly announced, “[T]his is the day it will happen.”22 A shroud she saw over the White House had darkened, and she phoned Nebel to say that the president should not take part in any “political thing” in Dallas; one and a half hours later, Kennedy was dead.23

  The funeral was held in the cathedral where Jeane first had the fatal vision. She watched on television as the president’s casket was placed on a caisson and saw

  John Fitzgerald Kennedy dancing an Irish jig on top of it. He was happy and gay and free! The funeral procession moved slowly down the avenue with the President continuing his merry twirling . . . I saw Uncle Sam raise both his hands, as if pronouncing a benediction, and when I glanced back at the caisson only a fleecy trail of smoke remained where the President had danced.24

  (Her visions resemble nothing so much as political cartoons and were sometimes criticized for “vulgarity.”)25 Kennedy’s death made Dixon’s reputation, but other visions augured change for the whole human race.

  Jeane was lying in bed in July 1952 when a giant snake coiled itself around her and wordlessly communicated that she must look to the east for “God’s wisdom and guidance.”26 Ten years later, another vision explained why.

  On the morning of February 5, 1962, she looked out her bedroom window and saw “a bright blue sky over a barren desert.” There was a pyramid, and the sun contained the patriarch Joseph, who apparently directed the actions of Queen Nefertiti and her “Pharaoh husband,” presumably Akhenaten. They approached carrying a baby wrapped in rags, and the scene changed; the infant had become a man with a cross in the air above him that “dripped over the earth.” People of every race and religion surrounded him “in worshipful adoration” and Jeane joined them till the vision ended, whereupon she presumably went downstairs and ate breakfast.27

  Dixon believed that a descendant of the Egyptian royal couple was born that day to poor parents in the Middle East and that the “Child of the East” would unite humankind under a new form of Christianity before the end of the century. Several Christian writers saw the snake as Satan and the child as the Antichrist and concluded that “the devil is using her [Dixon] to deceive the multitudes and to prepare them to receive the great delusion which is to come . . .”28 By 1969, she had taken up this interpretation, possibly to deflect criticism, or having concluded that the Child of the East was not a “revelation.”

  The Divining Mrs. D

  Jeane Dixon’s revelations were her most important psychic experiences. They communicated the will of God and were distinguished by the clarity of their meaning, an accompanying sense of euphoria, and the inevitability of their outcome. Ordinary visions, such as those she experienced spontaneously, or while meditating or crystal gazing, were more ambiguous. Once, while attending a wedding, Dixon saw coffins behind the bride and groom and assumed the worst, yet it was the best man and groom’s brother who died.

  Visions could be misinterpreted, but she claimed the predictions were correct when they were made, “because she got [them] . . . through mental telepathy. ‘This is the way people feel right now,’ she said. But, if they should change their minds, then that would change the answer.”29 Presumably, if a general was planning an invasion, Dixon would correctly predict that war was imminent; if he changed his mind and there was no war, that didn’t make her wrong.

  In addition to visions and crystal gazing, Jeane would become a famous astrologer, casting horoscopes psychically rather than by doing calculations. She disapproved of mediumistic practices and does not mention Tarot, but Dixon sometimes asked people to shuffle a pack of ordinary playing cards (another gift from the gypsy fortune-teller) before doing a reading; it helped her tune in to their vibration. One witness reported that Jeane correctly diagnosed an illness by looking at a photograph; another said she cured his warts.

  Though Dixon does not seem to have been particularly interested in numerology, her calendar was marked with good and bad days; five, seven, and nine were the best numbers, four and eight the worst. She might have done this for Nancy Reagan as well; chief of staff Donald Regan reported that the First Lady prepared a calendar for the president in which “[n]umerals were highlighted in green ink for good days, red ink for bad days and yellow ink for ‘iffy’ days . . .”30 And Dixon never stopped making predictions.

  Journalist Martha Rountree was told that she would not live in her new house, and it burned down before she could move in. Jeane saw Marilyn Monroe committing suicide, Red China invading the Soviet Union, and giant squid becoming “an inexpensive and very healthy food source.”31 One vision showed Negroes “being pushed by an underground force [Communists]” to seek “equal powers and jobs before they have the intellectua
l capacity and understanding to accept equal responsibility,” which makes uncomfortable reading for several reasons.32

  Making a Prophet

  Newspaper columnist Ruth Montgomery worked with Dixon to write a book about her life and predictions called A Gift of Prophecy: The Phenomenal Jeane Dixon (1965), which sold a remarkable three million copies and made Jeane a national figure.

  Dixon became a regular on television and radio as well as a popular lecturer; at one point a Gallup poll named her the eleventh most admired woman in America. Supermarket tabloids carried annual New Year’s predictions, Jeane’s astrology column was syndicated, and she hired ghostwriters to produce books on everything from Jesus to cooking based on horoscope; (“I’m a Capricorn, my astrological foods . . . are beets, saffron, quince, and barley”); Ruth Montgomery was dropped.33

  Apart from writing, Jeane also read excerpts from A Gift of Prophecy on a forty-five-rpm record and supplied predictions for the world’s first “Horoscopes by Phone.” In 1968, Milton Bradley put out Jeane Dixon’s Game of Destiny: A Card Game of Numerology and Astrology with a message on the box informing purchasers that: “All royalties received by Jeane Dixon from this game will go to the Children to Children Foundation—a medical hospital for children all over the world.”

  This wasn’t quite accurate. Dixon created Children to Children so that money from her psychic ventures would go to charity, yet the foundation’s mission was vague and its ultimate goal was creating the Jeane Dixon Medical Center. Plans called for a gigantic, wheel-shaped complex with an airstrip, petting zoo, and eternal flame, but a scale model was all that was built, and the organization was run in an inept, self-serving way that produced the one real scandal of Dixon’s career.34

  Two articles in the March 1970 issue of the Washingtonian reported that $5,000 was collected between June 1967 and May 1972, of which 19 percent went to charitable causes, and the rest to pay salaries and publicize Dixon. She tried intimidating the Washingtonian’s editor with her connections (“I know people who control billions, not millions”), threatened them with a $5,000,000 libel suit, and brought one for $1,000,000 that was dismissed.35 The bad publicity soon faded, though, and she remained synonymous with precognition, not misappropriation.

  As the country’s best-known psychic, Dixon also became the subject of numerous urban legends. She repeatedly had to deny predicting massacres on college campuses, earthquakes, and that all women with pierced ears would die on June 4, 1968. Her name was also a shorthand way of referring to psychic predictions in general or, in one case, how people respond to alleged predictions.

  Mathematics professor John Allen Paulos described a phenomenon that he christened “the Jeane Dixon Effect,” arguing that belief in prophecy occurs when “relatively few correct predictions are heralded and therefore widely remembered, while the much more numerous incorrect predictions are conveniently forgotten or de-emphasized.”36 The lady herself, however, was not concerned with mathematicians but subversives.

  Jeane and the G-Men

  The Dixons’ FBI file chronicles their long relationship with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and reveals an eagerness on her part to act as a propagandist.

  James and Jeane knew J. Edgar Hoover socially, and the Bureau’s Washington field office “had liaison with the James L Dixon Company, which . . . rented property to Soviet-bloc personnel.” In 1966, Jeane asked to be “furnished material by the Bureau on an extremely confidential basis, which she might utilize in her speeches,” presenting it “in such a manner that it cannot be attributed to the FBI.”37 Hoover approved the request and provided “public source background information” about groups involved in campus disturbances.38 Four years later, she wrote to the FBI that one of her tenants was operating “some sort of Communistic Press,” then phoned a few days after that, fearing for her safety.39 This became a pattern.

  Jeane was scheduled to speak in Greenwood, Mississippi, on January 22, 1970, when a telegram arrived from the “Greenwood movement” informing her that the audience would be segregated and asking for “verification of delivery” of the message. She interpreted this as a threat and once again asked the FBI for protection. They suggested she contact the Greenwood police department.40

  The file also contains information about an attempt at blackmailing Dixon, newspaper clippings about her predictions with discussions and comments by agents, material from the Children to Children Foundation, and suggestions from concerned citizens who believed “this gal [Dixon] should be checked on.”41 (There is also a letter to Louisiana’s Senator Hale Boggs that explains how the Gideon Bible’s “daily Bible reading calendar” links the assassinations of John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, the Rosicrucians, the Ku Klux Klan, the Masons, the Mafia, and Charlie Brown (Snoopy’s owner). Dixon is mentioned repeatedly since she has “marked all of our Democrat Leaders [sic] for murder or bodily harm.” There are also references to a manuscript titled “PREMEDITATED MURDER BY PROPHECY, and [sic] Jeane L. Dixon, an alleged ‘divine’ prophetess plays a major role.”42 The document is not included, but a year later, Senator Boggs’s plane vanished over Alaska. Coincidence?)

  Senior Seer

  James died in 1984, but Dixon kept working, supporting conservative causes, and advising the rich and powerful. In 1988, it was learned that Nancy Reagan had often consulted her, but by then the First Lady had switched to astrologer Joan Quigley, possibly because Dixon’s powers seemed to diminish with age.43

  Jeane Dixon died of heart failure in 1997 and her ashes were scattered over Mt. Rainier—but the story was not over.

  After the 9/11 attacks, government terrorism archives were reviewed and it was discovered that President Richard M. Nixon had met with Dixon following the massacre of Israeli athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. She predicted that Palestinian radicals would soon be murdering prominent American Jews, and Nixon set up a short-lived “counterterrorism committee.”44 It was an odd episode, even by the standards of the Nixon administration.

  An American Prophet

  Radio host Barry Farber once said: “Keeping up with Jeane Dixon is like trying to nail a custard pie to the wall!”45 Summarizing her life is no less difficult.

  Of the countless predictions she made, some were accurate, detailed, and corroborated by witnesses.46 Parapsychologists never tested her abilities—God’s messenger doesn’t fool around with Zener cards—but describing her power in religious terms meant Dixon had to be saintly, so she invented, and maintained, an appropriate biography. As the unthreatening and “very reputable” face of phenomena that many regard with suspicion, Dixon was the Billy Graham of ESP, providing supernatural help to the elite while being admired by the general public.47

  At a time when values were under attack, she defended patriotism, self-reliance, and religion, identifying the source of social upheavals in the “organizational geniuses of Russia” rather than failures of civil rights or the war in Vietnam.48 Even the trauma of a presidential assassination was turned into a celebration and this spoke to a certain innate optimism, for while Dixon often predicted horrors, in the end humankind would transcend its differences and create a utopia.

  Whatever Jeane Dixon’s shortcomings as a person or prophet, she holds a unique place in American history as the country’s only national psychic.

  —

  The Jeane Dixon Museum and Library is gone. Like so many small museums, it did not survive its founder, Leo M. Bernstein, who died in August 2008. The contents were eventually packed into five hundred boxes, loaded into five moving vans, and transported to an auction house at Chevy Chase, Maryland, where they were put on display to potential buyers.

  Dixon’s estate went under the gavel on July 26, 2009, and though she had been dead twelve years, her appeal proved durable. It was standing room only on the auction house floor, with offers coming in via telephone and the Internet from across the country, as well as Russia, England, and Australia. Some lots
were bargains; Mike the MagiCat’s wardrobe “including tuxedo, overalls, kilt and beret” sold for only $60. The antique furniture, paintings, and décor brought predictably high prices, but the premier item was Jeane Dixon’s crystal ball.

  People came to see the sphere, just four inches in diameter, which stood on a “separate gilt-metal stand cast as four figural caryatids” and sold for $11,950. It was the third-highest price realized that day (a “secondary crystal ball” brought in a respectable $2,800), with the overall gross exceeding all expectations, reaching $312,349.49

  If the results happened to reach the Other Side, a petite spirit with a genius for accounting and an Adolfo hat no doubt smiled.

  Ku Klux Klowns

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  One morning in 1981, two little girls were walking down the street of a Midwestern city, so deep in conversation that they did not notice the yellow van following them. It picked up speed, got ahead of the pair, and pulled over to the curb, where the vehicle sat idling. Older boys called vans like that “shaggin’ wagons” and though the girls were vague on specifics (did “shaggin’” refer to shag carpeting?), the term provoked embarrassed giggles. Despite its bright color, they paid no attention to this one until the passenger-side window rolled down and a white-gloved hand beckoned to them.