Jeane Dixon (
January 3, 1918-
January 25, 1997),
American astrologer and
psychic
Jeane L. Pinckert Dixon was a
Catholic who attributed her psychic abilities to
God and became the country’s most prominent psychic who moved freely in celebrity and
conservative political circles, most famous for supposedly predicting the assassination of President
John F. Kennedy
She was born in
Medford, WI to a rich family of
German immigrants in the lumber industry. She grew up in
California and in
1939 married James L. Dixon, an auto dealer who later worked in real estate. They were well off, so in later decades Dixon would donate her psychic earnings to a children’s charity she started, Children to Children Inc.
The Kennedy prophecy is what made her famous. On
March 11, 1956,
Parade magazine discussed the upcoming
1960 presidential election:
Mrs. Dixon thinks it will be dominated by labor and won by a Democrat. He will be assassinated or die in office "though not necessarily in his first term."
As we all know, Kennedy won the 1960 presidential race, though labor had relatively little to do with it, and the assassination was a pretty safe prediction considering
the Presidential Curse. But what they don’t tell you is that in 1960, she predicted that
Richard Nixon would win instead.
A
1965 book called "A Gift of Prophecy: the Phenomenal Jeane Dixon" by
Ruth Montgomery popularized the Kennedy assassination prediction and sold 3 million copies. This helped her get the astrology column and those annual predictions that were a staple of that
tabloid The Star for so many years.
Temple University math professor
John Allen Paulos coined the phrase the "Jeane Dixon effect" to describe the tendency of many to remember the ‘successful’ prophecies while quickly forgetting the failed ones. Over the decades, those failed ones include:
•
World War III would start in October
1958, sparked by a dispute over the islands of
Quemoy and
Matsu off of
China, and would involve
germ warfare.
• Labor leader
Walter Reuther (who?) would run for president as a
Democrat in
1964.
•
Russia will be the first to land a man on the moon.
• A woman would become president during the 1980s.
• The
Catholic Church would dissolve before
1990.
• President
George Bush would be reelected for a second term.
•
Ellen DeGeneres would be caught by the
Secret Service crashing a presidential inauguration.
Dixon was chummy with
FBI director
J. Edgar Hoover and he provided her with bits of right-wing propaganda about the
Soviet Union funding unrest and left-wing groups in the 1960s. In a plan approved personally by Hoover (his signature appears on a memo approving it in Dixon’s FBI file), she made innumerable speeches attacking the left with this disinformation.
During the presidency of
Ronald Reagan,
first lady Nancy Reagan employed the services of Dixon to plan her husband’s presidential schedule, until she decided that Dixon had lost her powers and unceremoniously dumped her for astrologer
Joan Quigley.