Dixon and Nixon

As much as I dislike lumping psychics in with futurists, emerging technologists and trendwatchers, an item from the current issue of Newsweek piqued my interest nonetheless. Thus, as our weekly Friday diversion, we'll examine how psychic Jeanne Dixon reportedly advised President Richard Nixon in the early 1970's.

Dixon rose to fame by supposedly predicting the election and assassination of JFK, and throughout the 1960s, '70s and '80s, her predictions regularly appeared in supermarket tabloids. Now, tapes recently unearthed by the commission investigating 9/11 reveal that Dixon consulted with the President on what she believed to be terrorist threats and other matters.

She predicted terrorist attacks against Nixon, as well as against Washington Post publisher Katherine Graham and comedian Alan King. In general, Dixon was concerned about the safety of prominent Jews in America. Nixon responded by forming a counterterrorism commission in 1972... though this may also have been inspired by the terrorist attack at the Munich Olympics that year.

In other areas, Dixon's predictions were way off. For instance, she predicted that World War III would break out in 1958 in China, that the Soviets would be the first to put a man on the moon, and that a cure for cancer would be found by 1967. As for Nixon's difficulties in the Watergate scandal, Dixon assured the President that there would be a rough road ahead, but that "everything will turn out fine." By the 1980s, Dixon's predictions were so consistently off the mark that another one of her high-powered clients -- Nancy Reagan -- concluded that the psychic had lost her powers.

But Nixon remained loyal to his "soothsayer" -- perhaps in part because Dixon remained loyal to him, predicting that he would ultimately be regarded as one of America's greatest Presidents.

Source: MSNBC