Punditry: Seer in Washington

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World War III will break out in 1958. Red China will be admitted to the United Nations in 1959. Walter Reuther will be the Democratic candidate for President in 1964. Davis Strait [between Canada and Greenland] will become strategically crucial to the U.S. in 1963. Richard Nixon will be the Republican presidential candidate in 1964.

Ordinarily, the prophet responsible for such predictions would be without honor in any country. But self-styled Seer Jeane Dixon is a woman of some standing in the nation's capital. For three decades she has foretold catastrophes in Washington, and not too surprisingly one of her prophecies occasionally comes true. That seems enough to satisfy her fans, who welcome her to the local cocktail-party circuit. Her biggest fan, Hearst Columnist Ruth Montgomery, has now written a book about her, A Gift of Prophecy (Morrow; $4.50)—which generously omits most of the false prophecies.

Advice for F.D.R. In a political city, Mrs. Dixon deals largely in political predictions. Her most notorious triumph was the prediction of President Kennedy's death. As she recalls it, she was kneeling one day in 1952 before a statue of the Virgin Mary, when she saw the numerals 1960 form above a vision of the White House. Then a sinister cloud oozed out from the numbers, "dripped down like chocolate frosting on a cake," and spattered a ghostly, blue-eyed young man who had a shock of brown hair. Putting cake and cloud together, she told an interviewer from Parade magazine in 1956 that "a blue-eyed Democratic President elected in 1960 will be assassinated."

Mrs. Dixon apparently forgot this prophecy and in 1960 predicted a Nixon victory. But after Kennedy was elected, she says, she kept seeing a "black cloud over the White House getting bigger and bigger." In early November 1963, she told a friend that "the President has just made a decision to go some place in the South that will be fatal for him."

She was at lunch in the Mayflower Hotel on Nov. 22 when word came that the President had been shot in Dallas. "He's still alive," said a friend hopefully. "You will learn that he is dead," insisted Mrs. Dixon.

Though no historians seem to have recorded the event, Mrs. Dixon told Ruth Montgomery that Franklin Roosevelt invited her to the White House in the last year of his life. She donned a black suit with buttons shaped like crystal balls and took a full-size crystal ball with her. First, the President wanted to know how long he would live. The seer touched his fingertips for the vibrations and minced no words: "Six months or less." "Will we remain allies with Russia?" a concerned F.D.R. wanted to know. "The visions show otherwise," she replied. On a second visit, she offered some advice on domestic policy: "The White House must not pamper the colored people, but rather help them to help themselves." F.D.R. seemed reluctant to see her go. "Take good care of the ball," he said. "Auf Wiedersehen" said Mrs. Dixon.