Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PREFACE TO THE TARCHER/PENGUIN EDITION
Acknowledgements
PART ONE - HELLBENT
ONE - A Scruffy Start
TWO - Breaking Away
THREE - Marceline
FOUR - The Calling
FIVE - New Directions
SIX - The Crusader Collapses
SEVEN - Asylum
PART TWO - THE CHOSEN PEOPLE
EIGHT - The Prophet
NINE - Rural Eden
TEN - A Dream of Love
ELEVEN - Children of the Sixties
TWELVE - Family Affair
THIRTEEN - Golden Boy
FOURTEEN - On the Road
PART THREE - THE HEAVENLY EMPIRE
FIFTEEN - The Hair of the Raven
SIXTEEN - Wiring the Town
SEVENTEEN - The System at Work
EIGHTEEN - Lourdes on Wheels
NINETEEN - Sex in the Temple
TWENTY - Training Young Minds
TWENTY-ONE - Her Father’s Daughter
TWENTY-TWO - The Arms of God
PART FOUR - A DELICATE BALANCE
TWENTY-THREE - First Cracks
TWENTY-FOUR - The Eight Revolutionaries
TWENTY-FIVE - Playing with Fire
TWENTY-SIX - Escape Valve
PART FIVE - PARADISE, GAINED AND LOST
TWENTY-SEVEN - Communalists
TWENTY-EIGHT - San Francisco in Thrall
TWENTY-NINE - Backwater
THIRTY - Radicals
THIRTY-ONE - Flight of the Princess
THIRTY-TWO - One Gallant, Glorious End?
THIRTY-THREE - Presidential Embrace
THIRTY-FOUR - The Writing on the Wall
THIRTY-FIVE - Scandal
THIRTY-SIX - Exodus
PART SIX - THE EMPEROR JONES
THIRTY-SEVEN - Heaven on Earth?
THIRTY-EIGHT - Close Encounters
THIRTY-NINE - Siege
FORTY - On the Defensive
FORTY-ONE - Sins of the Father
FORTY-TWO - White Nights
FORTY-THREE - Secessions and Skirmishes
FORTY-FOUR - 41 Lamaha Gardens
FORTY-FIVE - No News Is Good News
FORTY-SIX - The Downward Spiral
FORTY-SEVEN - Con Games and Hijinks
PART SEVEN - NIGHTMARE
FORTY-EIGHT - In the Hands of a Madman
FORTY-NINE - The Congressman, and Others
FIFTY - The Eye of the Storm
FIFTY-ONE - En Route
FIFTY-TWO - Port Kaituma
FIFTY-THREE - Last Chance
FIFTY-FOUR - Holocaust
Epilogue
Notes
Sources
INDEX
About the Author
JEREMY P. TARCHER/PENGUIN
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group
(Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R ORL, England
Originally published in 1982 by E. P. Dutton, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2008 by Tim Reiterman
Copyright © 1982 by Tim Reiterman
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed
or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted
materials in violation of the author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Most Tarcher/Penguin books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchase for sales
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Reiterman, Tim.
Raven : the untold story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his people /
Tim Reiterman with John Jacobs.
p. cm.
Originally published : New York : Dutton, © 1982. With new pref. by the author.
eISBN : 978-1-585-42678-2
1. Peoples Temple. 2. Jones, Jim, 1931-1978. I. Jacobs, John, 1950-2000. II. Title.
BP605.P46R
289.9—dc22
While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers and Internet addresses at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.
http://us.penguingroup.com
The cover and title page photo of Jim Jones was taken
by San Francisco Examiner photographer
Greg Robinson
a few hours before he was shot and killed,
by Peoples Temple gunmen.
This book is dedicated to Greg,
our colleague and friend, and to the memory of
NBC newsmen Don Harris and Bob Brown,
Representative Leo Ryan,
and the hundreds of other victims in Guyana.
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—Prophet still, if bird or devil!”
EDGAR ALLAN POE
“I come with the black hair of a raven. I come as God Socialist!”
JIM JONES
PREFACE TO THE TARCHER/PENGUIN EDITION
Three decades have passed since more than nine hundred Americans suffered horrible deaths in the jungle of the impoverished South American country of Guyana. The events in Jonestown on November 18, 1978, orchestrated by a charismatic preacher named Jim Jones and triggered by the slaying of a United States congressman on a nearby airstrip, have long ago moved from worldwide headlines to the pages of history. Yet fascination with the final days of Jonestown and the life of Jones has persisted over the years.
One of the most shocking and baffling events of the last century, the demise of Peoples Temple has been chronicled in books, movies, documentaries, plays, scholarly studies, and countless television retrospectives. The images of an American tragedy on foreign soil—poisoned punch squirted down the throats of infants, families locked in final embrace, mounds of bodies bloated in the tropical heat—have endured in print, photos, video footage, and memory.
Jonestown has come to symbolize unfathomable depravity, the outermost limits of what human beings can visit on each other and themselves, the ultimate power of a leader over his followers. Although complex and elusive, the reasons for the collapse of the Temple’s utopian dream into a hellish nightmare have been reduced again and again to a simplistic interpretation: A Svengali led his compliant, even robotic, flo
ck to mass suicide. But Peoples Temple was more than a creation of one man’s vision. The Temple was a product of its time and the search for alternative religions and social relevance in the post-civil rights and post-Vietnam eras. Its story also speaks to the timeless yearnings of the human spirit for a sense of belonging, to be part of something larger than ourselves.
Above the wooden, thronelike chair from which Jones lorded over his people hung a sign that said: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” However, remembering the past is one thing, understanding it quite another. And this volume endeavors to do both, while piercing the many myths that have shrouded the truth about Jones, his followers, and the remote agricultural settlement that bore his name.
It is particularly important to put to rest enduring misconceptions and to grasp the forces that drove the temple inexorably toward its end:• Jones was not a good man gone bad, as many believed. The seeds of madness, violence, and cruelty had grown in him since his childhood in Indiana. And he later filled his followers with his own paranoia and built psychological walls that kept them from the outside world and within his control.
• Although Jones borrowed ideas from unconventional religious groups, the Temple did not spring from New Age or Eastern religions but from Christianity in America’s heart-land. It was sanctioned by a mainstream denomination, and his major religious inspiration was Pentecostal hucksterism, with its tradition of faked healings and other “miracles.”
• Jones, who called himself a socialist God, was not a pure ideologue but also was a pragmatic chameleon driven by his weaknesses and his personal needs for family, acceptance, and power.
• Rather than social misfits, Jones’s followers generally were decent, hardworking, socially conscious people, some highly educated, who were drawn to the interracial church. Many wanted to help their fellow man and serve God, not embrace a self-proclaimed deity on earth.
• When the poor and troubled came together at the Temple with those who wanted to help such people, they formed a family-like bond that for many was as strong as their loyalty to Jones.
• Peoples Temple was not merely a cultlike organization that stripped away individuality; it also was a church, a social movement, and a political organization that energized its members, did some good works and won Jones public appointments in Indiana and later California. But Jones perverted his church’s social goals by aggrandizing himself and preaching that the ends justified the means.
• Good and evil coexisted in Jones, and he hid the sickness within him from most of his members. The trusted ones who knew at least part of the truth were so committed or compromised that they rationalized whatever he did.
• Jones did not act alone in seizing the psyches, belongings, and lives of his followers. He had accomplices among elected officials who looked the other way rather than look more deeply into an organization that provided troops to further their political agendas. Meanwhile, government agencies and some news media were unwilling or unable to take on Jones despite telltale signs that he was exploiting and abusing followers and breaking laws.
• On one level, Jonestown was justifiably a source of pride, a community carved out of the jungle by mostly urban people. But this place they called the Promised Land began its ominous decline and ultimately imploded after Jones settled there for good.
• Finally, although many share responsibility for the death spiral of the Temple, Jones’s own actions dictated the catastrophic outcome. What happened in Jonestown amounted to mass murder, not mass suicide. Jones put all the pieces in place for a last act of self-destruction, then gave the order to kill the children first, sealing everyone’s fate.
Today the scene of the carnage is but a haunting memory. By the tenth anniversary of the tragedy, the sprawling settlement had been reduced to a yellowish green scar on the dark forest landscape and to pieces of rusted machinery. The jungle had reclaimed land where fruit trees and rows of cassava and vegetables once were tended by young and old alike. Rain, rot, and wildfire had wiped out what was not already looted from the metal-roofed buildings. But what remains is one abiding and cautionary truth: People who surrender their worldly resources, their offspring, and the most basic decisions in their lives to a man, a cause, and an organization do so at their peril.
This new edition of Raven is completed without the presence of my coauthor, John Jacobs, a dear friend and widely respected journalist who died in 2000 and whose talents and contributions made this book possible.
—Tim Reiterman 2008
Preface and Acknowledgments
The narrative that follows is a work of fact. Given the often-erroneous accounts that have proliferated since the demise of Peoples Temple, it seemed to us of utmost importance to ensure the veracity of the only complete history of Jim Jones and his movement. The task became more compelling because events following the November 18, 1978, tragedy indicated there never would be a comprehensive impartial official investigation into its roots and causes, nor a study of Jim Jones’s personality. In some ways, we present this book as that missing investigation.
In order to penetrate the myths and misconceptions surrounding the Temple and Jones, we have adopted two methodologies. In most cases, the two-source rule was applied; indeed in most cases more than two sources provided confirmation, or the information was corroborated by Temple documentation. In cases when by necessity only a single source existed and the information seemed important, we relied upon documentation, other sources and/or our own accumulated knowledge to weigh our source’s words and confirm or dismiss them. Cross-checking became somewhat easier as we came to know the real Jim Jones. And we believe the reader, too, will find the threads of his personality running consistently through the book.
In several cases, we have relied heavily on one person’s perspective to provide personal motivation or atmosphere. This vehicle is used even-handedly, and the perspective is clearly indicated, if not in the text, then in the “Notes and Sources” at the back of the book. This section provides a record of sources and documentation, and also clarifies peripheral questions or addresses directly some of the misinformation published about Jones. The notes are not all-inclusive; this book is the distillation of hundreds of voices, thousands of documents and years of work—so exhaustive documentation was prohibitive.
No matter how thorough our research, re-creating dialogue presented us with a tricky problem. It was necessary, particularly in the early Indiana period, to rely on memories of events years earlier. Our rules have been the following: all short dialogues in the text are quoted verbatim from interviews with identified firsthand witnesses or from their writings and recorded recollections; all protracted monologues and dialogues come from tapes and reliable transcripts. Still, we have not simply accepted tapes and written documents at their face value but have confirmed their contents, where possible, and have evaluated them critically in light of other research.
The research spanned not just the three years since the tragic end, but also the previous year and a half of Tim Reiterman’s investigation. Reiterman is the primary author and the only first-person narrator, yet the book essentially has been a collaboration between two writers, each with his own strengths. Reiterman, having worked longer on the Temple story, was closer to many of the defectors, politicians, Concerned Relatives and others who figured prominently in the Temple’s last years. In addition to filling out the California period, he did the basic research on the Indiana and Brazil periods. John Jacobs went to Guyana immediately after the holocaust and established contacts within the government, the diplomatic community, the religious community and opposition party. He also became acquainted with Jones’s son, Stephan, and with many Temple loyalists and defectors. The authors’ stateside interviews with these sources, Jacobs’s own return trips to Guyana and his trip to Washington to review nine hundred tape recordings recovered at Jonestown provided a solid basis for writing about the church’s South American period. The entire text has gone t
hrough numerous revisions, and the final interpretation /presentation of events represents our consensus.
This book would not have been possible without the contributions of others. First there are Peoples Temple loyalists and defectors, friends and family of Jim Jones, members of the Concerned Relatives, elected officials and law enforcement investigators, and others who gave so much of their time. By allowing themselves to be interviewed, in some cases for dozens of hours, they helped us understand Jones, his church and its people. In addition to the numerous sources listed in the chapter notes, the authors wish to extend special thanks to the San Francisco Examiner, Jones’s son Stephan and Jones’s boyhood friend Donald Foreman for making available photographs that complete this work.
Only with the support and assistance of the staff and management of the San Francisco Examiner did this book become possible. We want to convey our appreciation especially to Assistant Managing Editor Jim Willse, Managing Editor Dave Halvorsen, former publisher Reg Murphy, former Assistant Managing Editor Ed Orloff, photo editor Eric Meskauskas and to photographer Paul Glines who beautifully reprinted photos, and to writers Nancy Dooley, James A. Finefrock and Peter H. King whose reporting proved invaluable.
In a sense, this book belongs not only to us but also to our editor Paul De Angelis, who helped shape it from conception to completion and constantly provoked new ideas. His talents and encouragement helped maintain the momentum of the project for the many long months, and his critical judgment challenged us to keep improving and honing down a massive manuscript. Our thanks also go to others at Dutton, including Roxanne Henderson, Bill Whitehead, and Leslie Wells, who took the time to read the manuscript and offer suggestions.
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