Ruth Montgomery
Spiritualist Medium, Journalist and Writer

An Excerpt from the "Ruth Montgomery: A Conversation in Naples, Florida on April 2, 2000"
by Tatiana Elmanovich

Ruth Montgomery opened the door. She looked very much the same as on the jacket of her latest book "The World To Come: The Guide's Long-Awaited Predictions for the Dawning Age"  (Harmony Books, New York). She had a flawless hairdo, barely noticeable makeup and smiling, young eyes trained during the decades of her journalist's practice to notice everything from the first glance and reach behind the masks.  At the same time, she was different in her beautiful condo apartment with a magnificent view on blue Gulf of Mexico (in Naples, Florida). This amazing woman, the best-selling author of fifteen books on New Age topics, a top White House correspondent who covered every administration from Roosevelt through Johnson, seemed small and fragile against the vastness of the ocean that she was showing me from her balcony. It reminded me of her 15 books that "very much exhausted the field," as she would say to me in one hour from now. How could this body of work possibly come from this tiny and fragile woman? Suddenly I felt a strong and inquiring glance on my face. Was it she or one of her Guides measuring me and deciding which questions I would ask and which ones I would 'forget?' 

There was such a contrast between the strength of her spirit and the fragility of her human form. It brought to my mind a story from one of her books. She wrote how she made the clouds of the nearing hurricane retreat back to the ocean. "She was probably standing here, on the same balcony at a time," I thought and doubted very much the conclusion of that story, in which Ruth Montgomery assured her readers that everyone who is willing to concentrate hard enough, can do the same. I couldn't. I threw away my prepared questions and decided to accept the guidance, offered by her invisible and famous Guides.        

T: Are you still receiving daily messages from your Guides? 

R: Yes, but I only do it at three o'clock in afternoon, and now I invariably forget three o'clock. I don't do at any other time, so they are not as prolific as they were when I was remembering it all the time. I am so unscheduled now due to my age. 

T: When did you start to receive the messages?

R: Must been about thirty years ago. 

T: Over time, did your Guides change? Are they the same entities?

R: Well, Lily and Arthur are the same? But I never have known who else was in the Group. Lily told me one time that there were twelve of them, but I did never ask who the others were.

T: You never asked? But were they angels, or they were people who were born and lived on earth?

R: I think they were people like us who lived a number of lives.

T: How long is your daily session with them?

R: Well, it used to be quite long, I mean, they would fill up the page, but now it is very brief, more like a paragraph. 

T: Do you change their text, of course, you edit…

R: (R.M. interrupts me): No, I do never edit what they write.

T: Your handwriting is weightless. It is probably easy to guide you.

R: Of course, I do them on a typewriter.

T: Do you think that your experience as a journalist with the need to keep the deadlines created the discipline needed for automatic writing?

R: Yes, but I wish they would give me some discipline now…  when I barely remember what I thought an instant ago.

T: But do you think if you try to sit behind the computer some other time they will not be there?

R: Do not mention the computer to me! I bought one a few years ago and just nearly lost my mind. I just couldn't do it. It was driving me crazy. It really was making me sick. So I got them to take it back. It did cost me five hundred dollars, but they did take it back. And I immediately got well again.  I tell you, it's beyond me.

T: Are you using a typewriter on a work processor?

R: I am using an electric typewriter. I've used it for a million years.     

T: What kind?

R: It is an IBM electric typewriter, 30 years the same typewriter. 

T: Are you somehow archiving/preserving the material that you receive? Or do you start a book on a certain theme, which you choose? For instance, "World Beyond" is about what happens to us after our death. Do you choose the theme, or do they tell you what to write about?

R:  No, we don't start with a book, it is a daily thing. I usually ask them a question, and then they respond. They don't volunteer material. I have to ask them a question.

T: I was amazed by the structure of your books. It seems to flow so easily and freely, but the structure comes through. The news come first, then the development and then beautiful conclusion as an elevating outcome of everything that was told before.

R: I think, that the newspaper background certainly helped me because I was getting so many letters from readers. When my books began coming out, people didn't discuss this subject. My books were pioneering and several people wrote me, "This is the first time I ever believed because I have been reading your column for years, and I know that you write truth not fiction."

T: It is such an amazing transition that you have been going through because you worked in the most conservative place on the earth. It really was the last place where a person could turn around and become a New Age person.

R: That's right! It certainly surprised me! I had no intention of getting into it. But this material that I was bringing through...  "Search for the Truth" was my first one. The philosophy that my Guides were dictating was so beautiful, and so alien to my own philosophy that I was quite transformed by it. Then they began telling me to write a book about it. My mother was saying to me, "Don't you dare!" She said, "The presidents call you by your first name and invite you to dinner in the White House. If this book came out, they would think that you were a cuckoo!" And it was probably true…

But anyway, the guides kept saying, "This is not meant just for you, it is for everybody. Now publish that book." So I finally did. They were more persistent than my mother.

T: I think, because you were a journalist, you made it available to people. Because out there were a lot of good New Age books that are too difficult to read, too complicated to follow…

R: Yes, because they were written in such highfaluting words that … Of course, Edgar Cayce wrote in biblical style… I mean, he spoke in biblical English, which is very hard to follow. At least, the Guides were speaking plain English.

T: May I ask you, how old you were, when you started out as a journalist?

R: I am 87 now.

T: Oh my God, you look 67.

R: Thank you. I am afraid, I don't, but… I must have been…  I think I was in my fifties when I began to receive messages.

T: Were you already retired from the White House, or you did start to receive messages in parallel to your daily work as a White House correspondent?  

R: I was still covering the White House in Washington, in the State Department, when this began.

T: You worked for six presidents…

R: I did not work for them, but I covered them.

T: Whom did you find the most sympathetic and trustable?

R: I was always very fond of Eisenhower. He had this cute little crooked smile, you know. He was very endearing…

T: He was very popular in the Soviet Union, because he was there at the time World War II came to its end, when Americans and Russians met on the Elba River. It symbolized the end of that hated, bloody war.

R: This was the time, when I was in Russia, when Eisenhower was president and Nixon was his vice-president.

T: That was the most disastrous time in Russia… But now, today, we are here, in America.

R: Come on… let's go in the next room. I'll show you my presidential collection.      

[We walk in the next room where the walls are covered with framed and glassed photos. Ruth Montgomery showed me around.]

R: Here is Eisenhower, Truman, again Truman, John Kennedy, Johnson on both sides. Lyndon Johnson wrote here, "To Bob's terrific wife, Ruth Montgomery."

T: Did your husband work also in the White House?

R: Not in the newspaper business, he was not a writer. This is his photo…

T: He was a nice man! Did he support your writing?

R: He was very loyal, but it worried him, he always backed me up on it. But he wasn't interested in it.

T: It is amazing that you had a wonderful relationship with him in spite of the fact that he thought differently.

R: Yes, well… He was a Methodist minister's son. His father was a Methodist minister, but I don't think that this had any bearing on Bob's beliefs. He was just a good Christian, but I don't think that he took to them much either.  (On the same wall) Here are First Ladies and Vice Presidents.

T: This was your destiny, I suppose, to find yourself working amid all of them! How long did it take to become a White House journalist?

R: Well, there were several steps in there. I worked my way through college out of newspaper in Waco, Texas...          

Read the complete interview at the Tanika's Books web site.