Eminentoes/Barbara Honegger's Great Days
Fund, John H.
EMINENTOES BARBARA HONEGGER'S GREAT DAYS Now that the cool weather has arrived and our more than 4,000 accredited media representatives are no longer so parched for those non-stories which figured...
...She had told the Washington Post "that media attention would get them [the White House] to fulfill their own promise...
...After more than a year at the Justice Department, Honegger saw her temporary position expiring on September 30...
...She sported necklaces in the shape of a "mystic beetle" and her office window featured a display of the fateful three stars mounted on sticks...
...Pale and nervous, she responded to even the simplest questions by telling viewers to "read my article in the Washington Post...
...Here the author of Omens pauses to catch her breath...
...As one Stanford student put it: "She was 180 degrees removed from a California Valley Girl...
...Later she confided The Dirty Secret of the Administration: "Reagan is planning coerced body-part donation...
...Although many of the proposed actions were admitted to be "trivial" (partly because many of the federal laws Honegger had found were of debatable importance), "Brave Babs" had cowed the President's staff into submission...
...But backed with a warm letter of praise from then White House liaison Elizabeth Dole, she clinched a temporary $37,000 a year job in the Department of Justice...
...After outlining her failure to make anyone take her computer printouts seriously, she ended with the following line: "Frankly, my dear, I don't think Ronald Reagan gives a damn...
...Some say that she was already applying for positions with liberal and feminist groups because she considered her job involving dreary word-searches through the Federal Code for gender-specific laws as "computer drudgery...
...EMINENTOES BARBARA HONEGGER'S GREAT DAYS Now that the cool weather has arrived and our more than 4,000 accredited media representatives are no longer so parched for those non-stories which figured so prominently in the languid days of August, it is a good time to sit back and take a deeper look into those summer news crazes, perhaps the most peculiar being the case of Barbara Honegger...
...She, of course, is the Reagan appointee who quit the Department of Justice and called the Administra-tion's policy on women's rights a "sham...
...They gave her a very fancy job title, but nothing to do in terms of making policy...
...It happens all the time but it frustrated her," says one co-worker...
...Then in 1976, Honegger became a research assistant for Dr...
...Martin Anderson at the Hoover Institution, a Reagan domestic policy adviser in the '76 presidential campaign...
...You're going to return to the Reagan campaign...
...The Honegger Hype ended suddenly when Sam Donaldson delivered the coup de grace on the August 26 "Nightline...
...A precocious child, she graduated first in her high school class before enrolling at Stanford University, receiving a B.A...
...But Honegger had the last laugh...
...When Anderson departed from the White House in early 1982, Honegger was quickly brushed aside...
...On January 7,1980 she returned to Hoover for a morning appointment with Anderson...
...in parapsychology but suddenly claimed only a master's...
...Hounded by reporters for an explanation, Honegger claimed she had been misquoted...
...When the piece appeared in the Sunday Washington Post on August 21, it proved to be a rambling, ultra-detailed account of her disillusionment with Reagan that took up almost an entire news page...
...At last word, she was planning to run for Congress...
...She was very liberal on crime and abortion," says a former roommate, Elisabeth Richards...
...For the next decade, she pursued her own educational odyssey, holding down research and secretarial jobs while immersing herself in parapsychology (the study of psychic phenomena, meaningful coincidence, and synchronicity...
...She's committed media suicide...
...White House press secretary Larry Speakes further inflamed the situation by saying that Honegger had "played an important role" at the White House by dressing up as the Easter Bunny in the yearly Easter egg roll...
...Yet Deaver's office denied this, saying only that a low-level aide would be speaking with her "on the telephone...
...One co-worker says, "I honestly believe she felt she would convince Reagan to support abortion and the ERA...
...It was humiliation by a thousand cuts...
...She would always complain about the 'reactionaries' on the White House staff...
...It was a very strong intuition...
...Phone calls pursued her across town and she claimed to feel "like a piece of public property...
...To anyone who evinced the slightest interest, she would give a copy of her magnum opus, The Omens of Power...
...After repeated attempts at communication, an exasperated Donaldson explained that many Americans weren't able to get copies of a week-old Post article...
...This, of course, had been foretold to her, as an increasing number of occurrences in her life seemed to be...
...As stage-managed media events go, the news conference arranged by NOW was less than smooth...
...Do that if you will, but you will miss the events which link the United States unquestionably to the ancient and secret Masonic tradition, and the coincidences which link Ronald Reagan to its source...
...Yet had it not been for Justice Department spokesman Thomas DeCair's characterization of Honegger as a "low-level munchkin," the story would have ended in a day or so...
...Honegger was then supposed to forward these lists to her superiors...
...She made no secret either of her interest in the occult and coincidences or of her profound disagreements with Reagan on social issues...
...And eventually coerced whole-body donations...
...In December 1979, Honegger was rehired by Martin Anderson to resume her old duties as a research assistant...
...She called a full-scale press conference where, flanked by a galaxy of feminist leaders, she pointed out that it had actually been Ursula Meese, the wife of presidential counselor Edwin Meese, in the bunny suit...
...Her resignation set off a ten-day extravaganza that began by threatening to create another canyon in the "gender gap" and ended as a surrealistic farce...
...What the media giveth they can and do taketh away...
...Honegger established a reputation of being "somewhat odd" among button-down Reaganites...
...She drafted the executive order creating a "gender discrimination agency review" to serve as a centerpiece of the Administration's ERA alternative, even serving as its project director until the ephemeral body was disbanded...
...Her appearance was a fiasco," reported People magazine...
...Totally exhausted" at the close of the conference, Honegger nonetheless closeted herself with two public relations consultants and prepared to travel to San Diego to confront the Wizard during a speech to a group of Republican women...
...Honegger resigned her position the same day and became an instant celebrity, appearing as Newsweek put it "on virtually every news show but the early morning farm report...
...During the 1980 campaign, Honegger had been the brainchild of the 50 States Project, an attempt to smooth over Reagan's opposition to the ERA by promising firm and swift action to aid individual states in ending discrimination in their own laws...
...As I did, I was suddenly moved to speak: " 'I want to tell you why I'm here...
...There was no voice," she told them...
...Calling it "channeled information...
...As it did, I felt another flood, more uncanny, which I can only describe as a sense of pure empowerment...
...Sitting in the restaurant of the Bahia Resort Hotel she commented, "You do, of course, see that my initials are all over this hotel, don't you...
...Instead, she was a bona-fide Space Cadet...
...She then proffered a photograph of herself and Reagan, saying: "This is the munchkin with the Wizard of Oz...
...She had told associates she had a Ph.D...
...Said one technician after the show, "Well she's sunk her own boat...
...in creative writing in 1969...
...DeCair and Speakes thus transformed Honegger from a disgruntled ex-employee into a crusading Joan of Arc, giving her a brand new lease on news space...
...I was afraid to be alone at home," she said...
...She portrayed herself as a loyal Reaganite trying to use her position to elevate the issue of women's rights inside the White House...
...This bombshell was followed the next day with a bubbly profile in the Post...
...USA Today reported that Honegger had told them that White House deputy chief-of-staff Michael Deaver had scheduled an appointment with her...
...And on September 8, the White House announced it would support changes in the gender designation of 47 federal statutes...
...But it was deli-ciously evocative of political public relations in the television age, especially in August when news is scarce and reporters are hungry...
...One reporter who sympathetically interviewed her at length nonetheless judged her in no uncertain terms...
...More and more pieces of the Honegger mosaic were vouchsafed by friends or unfriendly White House sources...
...Two years later, her coursework completed, she received the "first accredited degree in parapsychology in the nation," albeit from the rather obscure John F. Kennedy University of Orinda, California...
...I had the sense I was pregnant with a national baby...
...As the interview progressed it became less and less possible to distinguish between the two programs...
...I don't think she ever believed in Reagan and is now taking us all for a ride...
...At first she planned a simple letter to the editor of the Washington Post...
...She's a kook, and a publicity hound...
...At the Justice Department, Honegger pursued the same principle in examining federal statutes...
...Like sharks scenting blood, the press now played up Honegger's "erratic public behavior...
...It has been from that moment that I have known that Reagan can't lose.'' Anderson did in fact rejoin the Reagan campaign, which went on to score a landslide victory...
...In another interview she mentioned the prohibition against women serving in combat but continued her evasive maneuvers on the matter...
...That's what forced pregnancy is...
...According to colJohn H. Fund is a reporter for syndicated columnists Rowland Evans and Robert Novak...
...I wouldn't blame the reader if he threw down this record at this point convinced that it is utter nonsense," she informs the reader...
...We would be glad to have her input as we have all along," he said...
...Barbara Honegger is nothing less than Ronald Reagan's smoking gun on women's issues," claimed one feminist leader...
...as if it were from the future," Honegger boasted that she wanted to "redeem the soul of the Republican Party...
...But Stuart Taylor of the New York Times noted with bemusement that "Miss Honegger seemed to be loving the limelight in her rambling discourse at today's news conference...
...But what marred her media event in San Diego was a Los Angeles Times interview in which Honegger revealed that a supernatural "source" using her voice had told her she would be part of a Reagan Administration in order to defend women's rights...
...But others disagree...
...Two days after her Post article, it reached the point where the NBC-owned station in Washington preempted "Real People," that celebration of the American eccentric, to air a half-hour report on the gender gap featuring Miss Honegger...
...But, she gamely added, "I will be public property until the job is done...
...By this time, in her role as a "cosmic Sherlock Holmes," she had completed the link between the Dog Star Sinus and the Masonic goal to "establish a new world secular order, completely separate from the older sacred or religious order linked to God or gods...
...While sitting in the chair next to Anderson's desk, "I looked out the plate glass window to the gray sky and rolling foothills in the distance...
...If we can force whole bodies, why not body parts...
...Honegger reveals in her autobiographical manuscript, The Omens of Power (written under the pen name Damien Windsor), that during this time "a web of well-kept secrets about the origin of this nation" were revealed to her through parapsychology...
...After a year at Hoover she left to enroll in the country's first graduate program in by John H. Fund parapsychology...
...Among these secrets was how the symmetry of the three stars in the constellation Orion's belt were linked to George Washington's presidency and the "all-male secret society" of the Masons...
...But feminist friends, sensing the best cause celebre for the women's movement since Jimmy Carter fired Bella Ab-zug, convinced her to write an opinion piece instead...
...The deaths of Marines in Lebanon and the loss of the Korean airliner combined with her quirky personality to end her stay in the sun of publicity...
...Barbara Honegger is the product of a Republican family from California's sprawling San Joaquin Valley...
...When Honegger was almost begged to cite specific laws she had discovered that discriminated, she offered only one: the fact that federal law provides a pension for the widow of the President but makes no provision for a widower...
...I am going to be there with you.''' As she spoke these fateful words, "the sun broke through the clouds and flooded the room in which we sat with brilliant light...
...Honegger stayed at the house of her already acquired media consultant while writing the article...
...With no job prospects in sight, and in complete frustration at her inability to make anyone take her concerns seriously, she decided to blow the whistle...
...Two days after his bunny suit remark, Larry Speakes was contrite...
...Reagan is going to win by a landslide, and you're going to follow him to the White House...
...Honegger followed Anderson to Washington, where she became a special assistant and scheduler for him...
...By the time Honegger arrived in San Diego the limelight had proved so comfortable that she relaxed enough to tell a People magazine reporter some of her more unusual views...
...She had boasted of raising money to launch an expedition to survey Hal-ley's comet and of having lunched with noted Soviet parapsychologists while at the White House...
...lege acquaintances, if a subject was outre, bizarre, and not to be found in the normal college catalogue, she was immediately attracted...
Vol. 16 • December 1983 • No. 12
