Jeane Dixon (born Lydia Emma Pinckert; January 5, 1904 – January 25, 1997) was one of the best-known American psychics and astrologers of the 20th century, owing to her prediction of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, her syndicated newspaper astrology column, some well-publicized predictions, and a best-selling biography.
Early life
Dixon was born Lydia Emma Pinckert, one of 10 siblings born to Richard Franz Pinckert, a native of Gräfenhainichen, Wittenberg,
Saxony-Anhalt, and his wife, Luise Johanne Emma ( Graefe), both Roman Catholics. Dixon was born in Medford, Wisconsin, but raised in Missouri and California. at one point even producing a passport to this effect,
Dixon claimed that while growing up in California, a "Gypsy" gave her a crystal ball and read her palm, predicting she would become a famous seer and advise powerful people.
Family
She was married to James Dixon, a divorcé, from 1939 until his death. The couple had no children. James Dixon was a car dealer in California, who later ran a successful real estate company in Washington, D.C. Dixon worked with her husband in the business for many years and served as the company's president.
Dixon was the sister of football player Erny Pinckert.
Career
Dixon reportedly predicted the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. In the May 13, 1956, issue of Parade Magazine she wrote that the 1960 presidential election would be "dominated by labor and won by a Democrat" who would then go on to "be assassinated or die in office though not necessarily in his first term". In 1960, as the election neared, she changed her mind and incorrectly predicted that Richard Nixon would win. She later admitted she "saw Richard Nixon as the winner" and made unequivocal predictions that he would win. On June 5, 1968, Dixon was at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, California to give a speech. She was walking to the room she would be speaking at when she passed through the kitchen. That was when she suddenly stopped and blurted out loud, “This is the place where Robert Kennedy will be shot. I can see him being carried out with blood on his face.” Later that day, her prediction was right. In 1969, she was asked to find Dennis Lloyd Martin, a six-year-old boy who had gone missing in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park in Tennessee. She failed to do so.
Richard Nixon followed Dixon's writing through his secretary, Rose Mary Woods, and met with Dixon in the Oval Office in 1971. The following year, her prediction of terrorist attacks in the United States in the wake of the Munich massacre spurred Nixon to create a cabinet committee on counterterrorism. She was one of several astrologers who gave advice to Nancy Reagan.
Dixon predicted that before the end of the 20th century, a pope would suffer bodily harm while another would be assassinated. These would purportedly correspond with the attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II, and allegations of assassination of Pope John Paul I. She also stated that dissatisfied cardinals would replace a serving pope, which may have referred to John Paul I.
In her 1971 book, The Call to Glory, Dixon predicted that an apocalyptic "war of Armageddon" would occur about the year 2020. In her 1969 book My Life and Prophecies, she apparently predicted a war between China and Russia would occur between 2025 and 2037, initiated and won by China.
The Jeane Dixon effect
John Allen Paulos, a mathematician at Temple University, explored the tendency of Dixon and her fans to promote her few correct predictions while ignoring the larger number of incorrect predictions, naming this habit "the Jeane Dixon effect."
In his book The Mask of Nostradamus, James Randi also notes that it is a common strategy of prophets to make many predictions, hoping that some come true, and subsequently ignore all the incorrect predictions. Randi notes a series of incorrect predictions that Dixon made, also noting that these are only a few from a "very long" list. Among these include the predictions that US President Richard Nixon would survive the Watergate scandal and make a comeback, that Russia would be the first country to put a man on the moon, that China would start World War III in 1958, and that the Vietnam War would end in 1966. Before her death, she uttered the words "I knew this would happen." Many of her possessions ended up with Leo M. Bernstein, an investor and banker in Washington, D.C., whose clients included Dixon. In 2002, he opened the Jeane Dixon Museum and Library in Strasburg, Virginia. Bernstein died in 2008. In July 2009, the possessions of the museum, 500 boxes in all, were scheduled to be auctioned.