Bart Crum: Prophet

“The overall question is finally whether the western democracies have moral integrity; if we do we will win out; if we don’t the Middle East will be the breeding ground for many wars.”
 
Bart Crum, 1946 Diary Entry, Anything Your Little Heart Desires

[Spoiler Alert: The Middle East became the breeding ground for many wars.]

"Anything Your Little Heart Desires"

Bart Crum in 1940

In 1940, Bart Crum was Republican presidential nominee Wendell Willkie's West Coast campaign chairman. By the 1948 election, he was alarmed by the sharp right turn the Republican Party had taken. In a 1948 entry in his wife's journal, she records him predicting, "Richard Nixon is going to come to power ... so are George Murphy and maybe even Ronald Reagan.” Two years later Richard Nixon was elected to the U.S. Senate, from which he began his ascent to the presidency. Ronald Reagan, then still an actor, also made it to the White House. George Murphy never became president, but he did serve as a U.S. Senator in the 1960s. 

When it came to his personal life, his predictions were not always as accurate. In Anything Your Little Desires, his daughter Patrica Bosworth recalls the time he read her palm and pronounced, "[Y]ou're going to live to be a hundred. And you’re gonna be married three times and have one kid.” Though Bosworth was married three times, she never carried a child to term and died earlier this year of COVID-19, fourteen years shy of reaching the centenary mark. 

Image Credit: Anything Your Little Heart Desires