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Premonitions: A leap in to the future – Herbert Greenhouse [1971]

Jeanne Gardner's Voice tells her what is going to happen in America. The tone of the Voice depends upon the nature of the psychic message. Good news is told in calm tones. If the prediction is tragic, the Voice cries. The Voice knew a year before it happened that Robert Kennedy would be assassinated, but it only doled out small clues to Jeanne.

As the year wore on the Voice filled in more and more details until Jeanne was certain that Robert Kennedy would be killed. She didn't tell anyone because she thought that Kennedy would not listen. It was more or less accidental that many persons in the publishing business did hear Mrs. Gardner's prophecy of the assassination - told a matter of hours before it happened.

On Sunday, June 2, 1968, Jeanne left her home in Elkins, West Virginia, and boarded a bus for Washington, D.C. The knowledge of Robert Kennedy's imminent death weighed heavily upon her, and she literally felt a weight on her head. She tried to push the thought aside. Her purpose in going to Washington was to see Mrs. Bea Moore, of Simon and Schuster, who was there for the annual book-seller's convention. She wanted to persuade Mrs. Moore to do a book about her life and prophecies.

Sunday evening Mrs. Gardner registered in a hotel. The following day, June 3, she was getting ready to go to the convention, when the Voice spoke and told her to write down the message.

Kennedy would be assassinated in the early morning hours of June 5 and it would be in a "galley" (kitchen). The killer would be a short, swarthy man in his twenties. The Voice did not say where it would happen but mentioned the words "Tirhan Tirhan." But Jeanne did not associate the young, dark killer with "Tirhan Tirhan."

She thought the words referred to a geographical location, perhaps Iran.

Now highly excited, she ran down to the Shoreham Hotel, where the bookseller's convention was in process, and begged the skeptical Mrs. Moore to come back and see what she had written in her journal. Back at her hotel, she showed Mrs. Moore the entry. There would be a High Requiem Mass at St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and another later at Hyannisport.

Troubled, Mrs. Moore suddenly flew back to New York on Tuesday, June 4. In the evening, just hours before the shooting, Jeanne walked into the Shoreham Hotel and headed for the Simon and Schuster hospitality suite. It had to come out now. Tearfully she told the booksellers and salespeople in the suite that Robert Kennedy would be killed in a kitchen in the early morning hours of Wednesday, June 5. Then she went back to her hotel and retired. She woke up at 3:00 A.M., turned on the radio, and heard the news she had been dreading.

It is seldom that the prediction of an assassination can be corroborated by so many witnesses. Bea Moore was overwhelmed and now she felt that the book about Jeanne Gardner had to be written. In September, 1969, Simon and Schuster published A Grain of Mustard, and the story of Mrs. Gardner's prediction is told there in graphic detail.

I asked Jeanne if the murder of Kennedy could have been prevented. She said that if the killing had been inevitable, the Voice would not have left out one fact about it. Jeanne did not know where it would take place. "Tirhan Tirhan" kept ringing in her ears, but she only knew what the words meant when the news of the killing came in a radio broadcast.