After the services, the Houstons opened their home. Mourners from the Temple showed up with a half-dozen coffee cakes. Lines of tension immediately crackled between current and former members. Carolyn Layton and others stood around with folded arms and stern expressions. Many of the young blacks, obviously assigned to attend the funeral, fidgeted nervously.
Even the Houstons noticed the charged atmosphere. They thought it odd that Joyce never put down her purse, as though someone might lift it. In fact, she held it purposely so that Temple members would think it concealed a tape recorder and would not bother her. Nonetheless, Phyllis Houston privately tried to show her a letter in which Bob had supposedly tendered his resignation the day before he died. Joyce assumed the contents had been added later above Bob’s signature on a blank sheet of paper. “Bob never typed anything,” she noted. But the so-called resignation letter told her what the church line was: Bob had been a traitor who had suffered the consequences.45
In that climate of barely submerged hostility, Joyce Shaw attempted to speak with Judy and Patricia Houston. She believed that the girls were not being permitted to grieve openly for their father because his memory was being destroyed inside the church. Judy looked as though her stomach ached, from suppressing her feelings for her beloved father. On the way to the bathroom, Joyce managed to get a moment alone with Patricia, enough only to say, “You know, I love your father,” before the conversation was clipped short by a church member.
At the end of the reception, Joyce stood on the front walkway as Temple members piled into cars and drove away. As a car swung away from the curb with Phyllis and the girls, Patricia turned in her seat, smiled at Joyce and raised a clenched fist. To Joyce, it meant: we’re still together, you mean something to me.
The following day, Joyce and the Houstons drove to Bob’s Sutter Street quarters to pick up his personal effects. While Sam straightened out some matters with Phyllis, Carolyn Layton called Joyce into a bedroom. Tim Stoen and Harriet Tropp were already there waiting for the confrontation. The three wanted her to read some papers behind clear plastic in a black notebook. She refused, demanding that they state any message aloud. Apparently afraid she was taping them, they merely stared at her threateningly. She turned heel and walked out.
Moments later, in the kitchen, Carolyn Layton warned: “If you ever decide to start talking, there are certain things that you and Bob did to the children....”
“You let us have the children live with us. So if those things are true, why did you give us the children?” Shaw knew Layton was threatening to use the phony confessions she and Bob had signed, admitting physical or sexual abuse of the girls.
“We’ll let people know that you beat those children,” Layton shot back. “You admitted it in writing.” The threat was not complete without a seething oath of total commitment: “The Temple is my only reason for living. I’ll do anything to save it, if anyone tries to harm it.”
Not knowing what the Temple might do, Joyce wrote her cautionary letter to the Houstons, preparing them for possible allegations. This was the letter that first carried details of the Temple’s insidious blackmail-like practices to Sam Houston and, in turn, to me, an Associated Press reporter at the time.
The warning arrived fortuitously just after the Fresno Bee requested that our San Francisco AP bureau provide a profile of the Temple. In late August-early September, Jones’s group had picketed for days on behalf of the Fresno Four, four Bee newsmen and editors jailed for failure to divulge sources of published information about secret grand jury proceedings. The four, all white, had been heartened to look out the Fresno courthouse windows upon Jim Jones and strings of mostly black pickets supporting them. No other group had come over two hundred miles to defend freedom of the press—and no one else attracted national news media coverage, including space in the New York Times. It was natural enough that the Bee would like to run a feature on the Temple.
But after the bureau management talked to photographer Sam Houston, the routine story request had turned sticky. AP management could neither ignore the Bee’s request nor an employee’s negative experience with the church. A full-scale investigation at the time was ruled out, since other stories were already taxing bureau manpower. Instead it was decided that a bare-bones story, based on another reporter’s interview with Jones, would be written for the Bee. The resulting story, though it reflected caution, pleased the Temple a great deal. It provided the implicit imprimatur of the world’s biggest news agency, with no hint of scandal.
Meanwhile, Bee religion writer Ray Steele had been assigned to look more closely into the nasty rumors about the Temple. His investigations revealed allegations similar to those that had appeared a few years earlier in the San Francisco Examiner. The Bee did not publish them. Not only were they thought to be unprovable, they had been leveled at a preacher perceived widely as an advocate of press freedom.
THIRTY-THREE
Presidential Embrace
In the fall of 1976, as Walter Mondale’s private jet touched down at San Francisco International Airport, a party of Democratic dignitaries gathered on the runway to greet the vice-presidential candidate. Climbing the steps with Mayor Moscone for a private visit with Mondale was a man in a white leisure suit, black shirt and sunglasses. Looking more like a country-and-western singer than a minister, Jim Jones viewed his fleeting session with Mondale as a valuable steppingstone. No sooner had the vapor trail from Mondale’s jet faded again than the contact was being bandied about to increase Temple standing with the Guyanese government. The Temple told Guyanese officials that Jones had engaged Mondale in private talks about outside attempts to destabilize Guyana and other Caribbean nations.
But for Jones the political event of the fall session had come in an earlier visit from Rosalynn Carter. The San Francisco Democratic Central Committee had mailed out about a thousand invitations for the dedication of the local Carter-Mondale campaign headquarters. But even with Mrs. Carter as an attraction, officials still doubted that they could fill the new headquarters downtown on Market Street. At the suggestion of someone who recalled the Temple’s work in the previous mayoral campaign, Peoples Temple was called to the rescue. In return, the Temple asked that Jones be seated on the speakers’ platform with Mrs. Carter. The organizers agreed, since Jones was, after all, a bona fide civic figure on the Housing Commission.
Several hours before the rally, the Temple upped its demands: now it wanted four assistant ministers on stage, and Jones himself seated near Mrs. Carter—whom he claimed to have met previously. The head of the Democratic Central Committee agreed to rearrange the seating, to put Jones on one side of Mrs. Carter and Cecil Williams on the other side, a sort of ministerial buffer.
As rally time neared, Secret Service agents combed the building looking for bombs and checking exits, no doubt mindful of the attempt on President Gerald Ford’s life in San Francisco a year earlier. Curiously, a group of Temple security people soon arrived and followed many of the same procedures as the Secret Service. Then, as busloads of Temple members filed into the headquarters, an agent and a committee official both spotted an exposed pistol on one of the Temple assistant ministers. When the agent caught up with the Temple official at the corner, some questions were asked. There was no disarming, no hostility, no trouble. “It’s okay,” the agent said, returning to his post at the door.
The hall was jammed and stifling as the rally got under way. So many Temple members had piled into the building that some party regulars could not squeeze inside. As usual, remarks by Jones triggered waves of applause punctuated by whoops and foot stomping. The reception for Mrs. Carter was polite and restrained by comparison. During the rally, while sitting with Mrs. Carter, Jones consulted with his security chief Jim McElvane, who leaned over his shoulder. Scanning the audience for signs of danger, they spotted a suspicious-looking black man standing on something to elevate himself above the throng. They pointed at him, and the alarm went out. A moment later a Secret Service agent whisp
ered to the head organizer: “Don’t worry, but one of the Temple guards says he thinks this guy has a gun. We’ll check.”
Two agents closed in on the mysterious man who was wearing a sports coat and tie and writing on a note pad. The man smirked when agents said they wanted to frisk him. They found nothing. The mystery man turned out to be Lon Daniels, a reporter for the San Francisco Examiner.
For most luminaries, the rally was the end of the Rosalynn Carter visit, but for Jim Jones the finale came later. Jones requested a chance to chat privately with Mrs. Carter. Her advance team had heard that Jones’s grass-roots political organization had made the difference in Mayor Moscone’s victory, so they decided Jones would be worth ten minutes of Mrs. Carter’s time.
That evening the Jones motorcade crawled up Nob Hill and swung into the courtyard of the posh Stanford Court Hotel. In white suit and sunglasses, Jones stepped out of an older Cadillac limousine and, with a coterie of about fifteen bodyguards, swept into the lobby. When a member of Mrs. Carter’s advance team asked why so many guards were needed, he received the standard reply: “There was a threat on Rev. Jones’s life today.” The entire squad intended to accompany Jones downstairs to a restaurant for the meeting, but the advance men talked them out of it, averting the spectacle of twenty-five Temple guards and Secret Service agents hovering over Jones and Rosalynn Carter as they sipped coffee. The tête-à-tête lasted only about fifteen minutes, yet the Peoples Forum staff soon would ready photos of Jones and Mrs. Carter with the caption, “Rev. Jim Jones, by invitation, dines with Mrs. Jimmy Carter.”
A short time after her visit, Mrs. Carter phoned the minister as a sort of follow-through courtesy call. After all, San Francisco was a key area in the nation’s most populous state. While Jones fell all over himself in his attempts to charm Mrs. Carter, she was cordial and noncommittal, though she evidently did not know he was taping the conversation.
Jones expressed admiration for Mrs. Carter’s “Christian ethics” and “broad liberality,” then stumbled. “Is there anything in particular we can do for you?” he asked.
“No,” said Mrs. Carter. “... I just wanted to call because Jimmy had gotten this letter from [unintelligible]. He said you’ve been saying some nice things ... and told me to call you.”
“I don’t know whether you received my letter of encouragement,” Jones continued; “... not that you need it. We’re going to win! We’re going to win!”
“I appreciate that,” Mrs. Carter replied, explaining that Jones’s letter might have been lost in the stacks of mail piling up.
“Well, you call us [if you need anything],” Jones reiterated. “We have many, many thousands of members. And I have considerable influence in the Disciples of Christ denomination of which I am an official....”
Keeping the subject on religion, Mrs. Carter asked Jones whether he knew her sister-in-law, Ruth Carter Stapleton, an evangelist.
“I have heard ... uh ... read of her, with a great deal of admiration ...” Jones replied sweetly. Then he went after this plum with the enthusiasm of the boyish Indiana preacher who had once lined up the great William Branham. “I ... we would be more than honored to help her,” Jones said. “And if she’s having a meeting [we would be willing] to sponsor it or to advertise it. We have quite a number of radio broadcast outlets and television outlets. We also have the Peoples Forum that has six hundred thousand circulation in the Bay Area. So anything you’d like us to print, don’t hesitate to send us....”
That gross exaggeration of the Temple newspaper’s circulation was too much for the future First Lady to pass up. She asked Jones to repeat the address of Peoples Forum. Jones left her with: “Your slightest wish is our command. God’s blessing be with you.”
Despite such vows of loyalty, the Temple was covering its bets. Jones ordered an aide to offer financial contributions to the campaign of President Gerald Ford, in case Carter lost. Still, Jones was elated when Mrs. Carter took up residence in the White House. He cultivated the contact as well as he could, writing her a March 17, 1977 letter, which began:
“I regret I was out of town and missed meeting your sister-in-law Ruth Carter Stapleton when she was in San Francisco recently.” Evidently, the President’s sister could not reach Jones by phone. To avoid future communications problems Jones gave Mrs. Carter his private number.
Jones then wrote the First Lady suggesting that he and a group of prominent doctors and businessmen could arrange for Cuba to receive much-needed medical supplies and equipment. Such humanitarian aid, he declared, might well win that country away from the Soviet orbit!
In response, Jim Jones received one of the Temple’s most highly prized letters. It was on White House stationery, written in pen:
Dear Jim,
Thank you for your letter. I enjoyed being with you during the campaign and do hope you can meet Ruth soon.
Your comments about Cuba are helpful. I hope your suggestion can be acted on in the near future.
Sincerely,
Rosalynn Carter
The successes of 1976 and 1977 did not quench Jones’s often-denied ambitions for political recognition and power. It was not even enough that Governor Brown appointed church attorney Tim Stoen in April 1976 to serve on the California Advisory Council to the Legal Services Corporation—the body that handles federal legal aid programs. Jones wanted titles and authority beyond the chairmanship of the San Francisco Housing Commission. He wanted more than to host the January 15, 1977, citywide celebration in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., more than to share the podium that day with Governor Brown and the head of President Carter’s transition team. Jones exposed his ambitions by denying in Peoples Forum “rumors” that he was planning to run for mayor. He had talked with aides about running for the state legislature or Congress. With a former Brown cabinet member, he discussed his chances for appointment to the University of California Board of Regents, the state’s most prestigious nonsalaried appointment. And he made a bid for an appointment to the prison-related state Community Release Board. Yet the pinnacle of his Year of Ascendancy was undoubtedly the September 1976 testimonial dinner.
The printed invitations read like something prepared for an official visit of a head of state. Yet Jones knew he had to retain his “humble” image, so the Temple sent a silly follow-up letter to the invitations: “Dear Friends, Upon being informed that a testimonial dinner was planned in his honor, Rev. Jim Jones insisted that the occasion be changed to a benefit for various humanitarian causes....”
The several hundred people who pulled their cars into the Temple’s “patrolled” parking lot on the night of Saturday, September 25, 1976, had no illusions. They were paying tribute to Jim Jones. The Temple on Geary Boulevard had been rearranged into a formal dining room with linen tablecloths, proper place settings and an ample number of ferns. Well dressed Temple members ushered the guests to their places. The head table was filled with familiar faces—Lieutenant Governor and Mrs. Dymally, Assemblyman Willie Brown, Mayor George Moscone, District Attorney Joe Freitas and others. In fact, the guests were led to believe that it was an honor to be seated inside the main building at all, that the bulk of the “8,000” attendees were dining at various other auditoriums around the city and had to watch the festivities on closed-circuit television.
The guest list read like a register of the city’s luminaries—Democrats, Republicans and radicals, including Angela Davis. Also present were Chronicle city editor Steve Gavin, leftist lawyers Charles Garry and Vincent Hallinan, and Mendocino County Republican head Marge Boynton. Ukiah Bircher Walter Heady and his wife, startled to find Jones so immersed in the liberal-progressive San Francisco Establishment, survived meeting former Black Panther and Born Again clothing designer Eldridge Cleaver.
As Temple members waited on tables and the band provided music, the guest of honor, dressed in white, assumed his position at the head table. He was flanked by his wife Marceline, elegant with her golden hair heaped in curls and her satiny gown hanging li
ke a choir robe. They looked for all the world like the ideal husband-wife team, aglow with the adulation coming their way.
Some Temple leaders were delighted to see so many opponents of socialism assembled to clap for Jim Jones. Other members took tremendous pride in the event: the Temple was getting somewhere. Jim Jones was a great man—or so many bigwigs would not have coughed up $20 and their time to make homage.
All went smoothly. The dinner was edible, and Temple entertainers charmed their audience. At one point, a little black singer named Shaun Baker weaved through the audience like a polished nightclub star. “I’m just a soldier in the army of lu-uh-uv,” he sang. “Now hate is my enemy, I got to fight it day and night.” Although stage fright sometimes cracked his clear voice, he bravely marched through the song. The boy would be a few inches taller and his voice a little deeper and surer two years later when he performed for Jones’s last “testimonial” in the jungle of South America.
Witty and wordy Willie Brown served as master of ceremonies. He introduced his fellow politicians so that they could present their gifts: Republican State Senator Milton Marks handed Jones a plaque bearing a resolution passed by the entire State Senate: “This is an outstanding institution which has shown that hope and love still reside in this city.” Marks’s Democratic opponent in the race for his seat, San Francisco Supervisor Robert Mendelsohn, presented a certificate of honor on behalf of the Board of Supervisors.
Among church leaders present, the Reverend Cecil Williams gave Jones a plaque on behalf of Glide Memorial Church. And Gerald McHarg of the Disciples of Christ Southern California region said, “I am honored to be part of a denomination that includes Peoples Temple and its minister.”
Raven Page 45
