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From
Chapter Ten: Recent Hauntings
Richard Nixon and
Lincoln's Ghost
Publicly, Richard Nixon professed no interest in
the paranormal or supernatural. Privately, he had
more contact with the subject than people ever
realized. We said earlier that when Nixon was
besieged by the Watergate scandal he roamed White
House corridors at night talking to portraits of
late Presidents, perhaps hoping for advice from
their spirits. Nixon, a man with an enigmatic and
complex personality, had, since the 1950s, been in
analysis with psychotherapist, Dr. Arnold
Hutschnecker, a relationship that remained even
during the Watergate crisis, although by then Nixon
was no longer in therapy. Hutschnecker, who
practiced in New York, embraced the psychic beliefs
of Jeane Dixon, and Nixon was open to Dixon's
psychic and astrological prophecies, according to
Anthony Summers in The Arrogance of Power: The
Secret World of Richard Nixon.
If Nixon was aware of any of several predictions
made about his political downfall, he ignored them,
including the prognostications of British psychic
Malcolm Bessent and astrologers Noel Tye and Joan
Quigley. Still, he considered supernatural
intervention a cause of his political demise. On
his final day in the Oval Office, Nixon told Rabbi
Baruch Korff that he felt he was being punished by
God.
When Nixon was just nine years old, his Sunday
school teacher in Yorba Linda made an unusual
prediction. According to Anthony Summers, she said
that someday he would be President. Following
graduation from college, Nixon had his palm read.
Summers quoted the palmist, a teenager named
Dorothy Welch: "I got quite a shock. What I saw was
a path of incredibly brilliant success ... then the
most terrible black cloud like a disaster or
accident... I told him what I read, but in a
toned-down version ... he was such a serious sort
of guy ... the full version would have made him
distraught. He wouldn't have known how to cope."
Always a man of contradictions, as President he
was badly frightened when a well-known astrologer
predicted an assassination attempt. Yet, after John
F. Kennedy was murdered in 1963, Nixon said, "I
think it would not have happened to me."
Shortly before his resignation, in the summer of
1974, Nixon's son-in-law Edward Cox revealed the
Presidents state of mind in his final weeks in the
White House. He'd been walking the halls ...
talking to pictures of former Presidents
[and] giving speeches. Did he turn to the
spirits of Presidents past for advice? Should he
fight on or resign from office? An emotional
meltdown, which Nixon certainly suffered, did not
negate his psychic experiences. In other words, a
fragile mental state does not imply that ones
paranormal encounters are hallucinatory.
U.S. News & World Report called Nixon
a strangely solitary man, and that secretive
personality would never have allowed him to reveal
something so open to disparagement as a psychic
experience. However there is circumstantial
evidence to connect Nixon with the ghost of Lincoln
in the White House. Nixon had a strong affinity for
Lincoln which dated back to age twelve when he was
given a picture of the Great Emancipator which he
placed above his bed.
Later in his life Nixon believed he was the
contemporary Lincoln, according to Richard Nixon
a Psychobiography. One night in 1970, Nixon,
besieged by a storm of anti-Vietnam War protests,
couldn't sleep. He wandered instead through the
White House to Lincoln's Sitting Room where he
listened to classical music. When his valet
inquired whether the President needed anything,
Nixon asked if he'd ever visited the Lincoln
Memorial after dark. When the man said no, Nixon
asked the valet to accompany him to the magnificent
monument. What motivated late night journeys to the
Lincoln Memorial? Were they inspired by Nixon's
affinity for the Great Emancipator or contact he'd
had with Lincoln's ghost?
The Lincoln Sitting Room was often a refuge for
Nixon during times of crisis. First Lady Jacqueline
Kennedy often reported sensing Lincoln's presence
in that same room. Did Nixon also sense Lincoln's
spirit there? During the Watergate crisis, Nixon
prayed at the table upon which Lincoln signed the
Emancipation Proclamation. He also instructed that
when he died he was to lie in state beneath the
dome of the Capitol, as had Presidents since
Lincoln. Taken together, these and other incidents
form a pattern that suggests Nixon, as had many
White House predecessors, experienced some form of
psychic communication with Lincoln.
Nixon had an aversion to admitting defeat and
intensely disliked quitting in the face of
adversity or disappointment, so he agonized about
whether to fight on or resign the presidency. Only
a short while after his conversations with the
portraits of former Presidents, Nixon made the
difficult and unprecedented decision to leave
office on August 9, 1974. There are those who argue
that Nixon's resolution been arrived at through
supernatural intervention, convincing him that for
the good of the country and the sanctity of the
Constitution it was time for him to go.
Lincoln's ghost has long had a reputation for
materializing during times of national difficulty
or distress. What more appropriate time for the
Great Emancipator to resolve the crisis caused by
Watergate? When Nixon finally made his decision he
said he was acting for the good of the nation. He
had been advised by Lincoln's spirit which
psychically connected with him at that moment.
Paranormal research suggests that powerful emotion
will often draw a spirit close in time of need.
Lincoln would have strongly disapproved of Nixon's
behavior and dishonesty. Why then might his spirit
help Nixon? Considering Honest Abes integrity, his
goal would be to help the nation rather than the
discredited and dishonored Richard Nixon. The
evidence is circumstantial, but considering Nixon's
behavior and the history of Lincoln's ghostly
appearances in the White House, the scenario is
plausible. Nixon may have been his own worst enemy,
and responsible for his own ruin, but it appears
his downfall was karmically predestined although
moderated, to a degree, by the benevolent spirit of
Abraham Lincoln who hovered over Nixon during
Nixon's days in the White House.
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