Jeane Dixon: The Psychic Who 'Predicted' Kennedy — and Then Backed Nixon
In 1956 Jeane Dixon wrote that the winner of the 1960 election would 'be assassinated or die in office' — and became America's most famous psychic when Kennedy was shot. The catch: by election day 1960, Dixon was publicly backing Nixon.
On 13 May 1956, readers of Parade magazine — the Sunday supplement tucked inside millions of American newspapers — found a short item about a Washington astrologer named Jeane Dixon and the presidential election of 1960. Seven years later, after John F. Kennedy was shot in Dallas, that item was dug out and Dixon became, almost overnight, the most famous psychic in the world. It remains a classic case study in how prophetic reputations are made, because the famous sentence was real — but the story told around it leaves out the part where Dixon changed her mind.
The sentence that made her famous
What Dixon said in 1956, as preserved in The Skeptic's Dictionary, was that the 1960 election would be 'dominated by labor and won by a Democrat', who would then 'be assassinated or die in office though not necessarily in his first term.' Kennedy, a Democrat, won in 1960 and was assassinated in November 1963, in his first term. Ruth Montgomery's 1965 bestseller A Gift of Prophecy turned the apparent hit into a legend, and Dixon into an institution: a syndicated newspaper astrology column read by millions, bestselling books of her own, and a fixture's chair on the talk-show circuit. Presidents paid attention too. Richard Nixon followed her forecasts and received her in the Oval Office in 1971, and she was among the astrologers said to have advised Nancy Reagan.
Dixon, born Lydia Emma Pinckert in Medford, Wisconsin, in 1904 — she later preferred to give her birth year as 1918 — had built the reputation in the capital, where she and her husband ran a real-estate business alongside her crystal-ball readings for society clients. A devout Catholic, she insisted her gift came from God, and Washington treated her as its resident seeress. Every New Year brought a fresh crop of Dixon predictions into print.
The part the legend leaves out
Read closely, the 1956 item is a hedge with wide margins. It names no one. It allows assassination or death from natural causes, in a first term or a second — a window of up to eight years. Skeptics later noted that, on twentieth-century form, the odds against a president dying in office were never especially long. But the larger omission is Dixon's own conduct in 1960 itself. As that election approached, she reversed course completely. She later admitted: 'During the 1960 election, I saw Richard Nixon as the winner.' At the time she went further, predicting unequivocally that Kennedy would fail to win the presidency. The prophetess of Kennedy's death spent his campaign forecasting his defeat. After Dallas, the reversal was quietly dropped from the story, and the 1956 sentence was left to do all the work.
Her supporters counter with an episode from 1965, when Dixon, speaking at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, reportedly said that Robert Kennedy would never become president — because of a tragedy that would befall him in that very hotel. In June 1968 Kennedy was shot in the Ambassador's kitchen moments after winning the California primary. It is the strongest story in the Dixon canon after 1956. Skeptics note, however, that it survives mainly through Dixon's own retellings and her biographer's, rather than in print dated before the event — the same weakness, in miniature, as the Kennedy legend itself.
A name for the trick of memory
The mathematician John Allen Paulos gave the pattern a name: the Jeane Dixon effect — the tendency to trumpet a forecaster's few hits while forgetting the far larger pile of misses. Dixon's pile is large, dated and specific. She said a dispute over the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu would trigger the start of the Third World War in 1958. She said the Soviets would be the first to put a man on the Moon. She foresaw a cure for cancer by 1967, the labor leader Walter Reuther running for president in 1964, and a child born in the Middle East on 5 February 1962 who would grow up to unite the world's religions into a single faith. She foresaw peace on earth by the year 2000. None of it happened.
Dixon died in Washington on 25 January 1997, aged 93 — and the effect outlived her, as obituaries across America credited her, without qualification, with having predicted the Kennedy assassination. Her career is still the cleanest illustration in the prophecy business of an uncomfortable truth: a reputation for seeing the future usually says less about the future than about which predictions an audience chooses to remember.
