The Road to Jonestown

by Jeff Guinn

  Joyce Shaw left, too. She’d made herself practically irreplaceable as a foster parent for dozens of numerous waifs and teens taken in by the Temple. Shaw resented being questioned by the Temple Planning Commission. It felt especially offensive because, besides her constant responsibilities as a foster parent, she had a day job as well, contributing her entire salary to the Temple. In July 1976, less than two weeks after Grace Stoen and Walter Jones defected, Shaw did as well. Afterward she talked to her husband, Bob Houston, a few times, and also to Jones, but despite their pleas she chose not to return to Peoples Temple. Bob Houston worked two jobs and also served on the Planning Commission. He was seriously overworked, and then on October 4 Houston was found crushed to death in the Southern Pacific railroad yard, apparently having been lying on the track as a train passed. It was thought that he had fallen asleep or passed out there. The possibility that he’d fallen asleep and fallen onto the tracks at precisely the moment a train passed troubled some Temple members. In his sermons, Jones always warned anyone considering defection that something terrible would happen to those who left his protection, and he had always picked on Bob: Could he have used him in a final, terrible way, as an example of what might happen immediately to anyone leaving the Temple?

  Bob Houston’s father, Sam, worked as a photographer for the Associated Press. He was friendly with U.S. congressman Leo Ryan, whose 11th District encompassed a wide swath of the Bay Area above Oakland and Berkeley. Ryan, a Democrat, was highly popular among constituents but somewhat less so among colleagues in the House of Representatives. Most of the other members liked Ryan personally, but considered him a relentless seeker of publicity. To investigate prison corruption, Ryan had had himself anonymously incarcerated in Folsom Prison for a short time. He had also traveled to Newfoundland, where he placed himself dramatically in the path of hunters he claimed were about to kill baby seals. Each time, he reveled in the widespread media attention. Some fellow congressmen—“undoubtedly jealous of their peer’s prowess in achieving positive headlines on a consistent basis,” according to former speaker of the house Jim Wright—joked among themselves about what outrageous publicity stunt Ryan might pull next.

  When Sam Houston poured out his concerns to Ryan, the congressman was intrigued. There were other pressing matters that needed Ryan’s immediate attention, but he promised Houston that, when time permitted, he and his staff would look into the matter. Many members of Peoples Temple lived in or at least originally hailed from the 11th. Ryan felt this made it appropriate for him to investigate allegations about the church.

  * * *

  Jim Jones already felt certain that he and his church were under constant government surveillance, but he was simultaneously convinced of his invincibility. He was too smart, too special, to be brought down by enemies. Jones encouraged the planning of grandiose schemes that would allow the Temple either to strike back at powerful governmental foes or, if sufficiently threatened, make some grand revolutionary statement that might intimidate enemies or at least stand as a historic, defiant gesture. The concept of mass suicide, a Masada, had already been raised within the Planning Commission and in closed Temple meetings. Jones had additional ideas.

  Terri Buford’s Diversions operation was originally designed to spread false rumors about competing evangelists and their followers. Now she was given darker assignments. “Jim wanted me to go to Libya and make contact with [Muammar al-] Qaddafi there,” she says. “He wanted us linked up with the right revolutionaries, that kind of connection. I never went, but that was just one thing that was talked about. There was talk about, if we had to retaliate after someone did something to us, poisoning some city’s water supply. We did research about that.”

  Neva Sly adds that “we all thought he had that atomic bomb. It was supposed to be down in Mexico, right there if we needed it. [Jones] talked about it sometimes.”

  One plot was perhaps the most horrific of all. “[Jones wanted] Maria Katsaris to go to flight school in San Francisco and learn to fly,” Terri Buford says. “She’d get a plane and put a couple hundred Temple members on it and crash the plane, as a symbol we would rather die than corrupt ourselves by submitting to the American government. She said that she’d do it, she just didn’t want to go to flight school. This was never going to be like 9/11, crashing into a building and killing innocent people. We were always going to be the only ones who died. [Jones] was always ready to kill us. That whole group suicide [idea] didn’t start in Guyana.”

  Jones was indulging himself with fantasy. But he insisted that his followers, Planning Commission members in particular, fantasize right along with him. Just as so many of them had signed over personal property, they were required to put in writing, then sign, their intention to commit terrible acts (assassinating the president was perhaps the most popular), or else confess to having already committed them.

  Jones’s rambling sermons grew more bizarre. He challenged God (“I’m a liberator, he’s a fucker-upper”), and claimed that, in another life, he personally witnessed a drugged, still living Jesus taken down off the cross by loyal followers (“He went to India and he did a lot of teaching over there. . . . I don’t care whether you believe it or not”). A few times Jones even described himself as an extraterrestrial: “I was the greatest on [another] planet, [and] only I could get down here.” His followers would endure endless earthly reincarnations until “you become sensitive, then you will be released from your earth-boundedness and you’ll move on to an advanced field of teachers in another planet. . . . That’s why I’m trying so hard.”

  Read decades later, such declarations seem nothing more than obvious, grandiose self-delusion. But many among Jones’s followers didn’t regard them that way. There were few brand-new members now. Jones already had sufficient numbers to impress politicians and plenty of people to send out on buses to march in support of freedom of the press or in protest of some bureaucratic act. Additional recruits, at least in San Francisco and Los Angeles, weren’t worth the trouble of weeding through to find potential true believers. Among those who were already part of the Temple fellowship, only a handful remembered the days in Indianapolis, when Jim Jones wasn’t declaring himself to be God. Followers who joined from the first Ukiah days onward had become conditioned to his claims as they gradually escalated. Tim Carter says, “It was like the frog in the pot of water. If you drop him in water that’s already boiling, he’ll try to hop right out. But put him first in a pot of lukewarm water and then turn up the heat little by little, and he’ll stay in the pot even though he’s finally being boiled to death.” Some didn’t believe any of it but followed Jones to help bring about the advancement of socialism.

  And there were plenty somewhere in the middle, who believed in socialism and stopped short of considering Jones to be God, but still felt that he had some sort of power, whether to read minds or to see the future or to heal. To almost all Temple members, Jones was clearly special even if only in some undefinable way, and, thanks to him, great things were being accomplished. Despite occasional defections, the vast majority remained loyal.

  Jones himself spent much of 1976 feeling more satisfied than concerned. In his mind, key defections had been dealt with. He controlled Grace Stoen because he had young John safely in Georgetown. Neva Sly and Joyce Shaw were sufficiently intimidated. By year’s end, even with the defections and Mayor Moscone’s tardiness with an appropriate city appointment, so many good things had happened for Jim Jones and Peoples Temple during the past months that it seemed impossible to regard 1976 so far as anything other than a magnificent success.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  “OUR YEAR OF ASCENDENCY”

  Marceline Jones received an emotional blow during the first few weeks of 1976. Her husband informed her that sometime in the future he planned to move to Guyana, taking their children with him. Marceline would stay behind to oversee the Temple in California. Jones didn’t offer her any opportunity to discuss it or the option of going to Guyana with her
family while someone else took over Temple operations back in the States. She would do as she was told.

  It crushed Marceline. She asked Jones if she could see a psychiatrist. He granted permission, but apparently the one chosen didn’t adhere to any semblance of doctor-patient confidentiality, sharing with Jones what Marceline talked about in their sessions. This allowed Jones to put his own spin on the state of his wife’s mental health. He told Charlotte Baldwin, his mother-in-law, that the psychiatrist had concluded that Marceline was so troubled it might be better to immediately separate her from the children. Jones said that out of compassion for his wife he’d let her remain with them, at least for the time being. But now he had an additional threat to hold over Marceline.

  There was good news from Guyana. Things in Jonestown seemed to be going well. The Temple Pioneers were making steady, if slow, construction progress and, based on their letters and phone calls home, a strong camaraderie had developed among them. Jones still had concerns, mostly involving escalating costs. He dispatched Maria Katsaris to investigate, and she reported that “there is no way to follow where all the money goes once it comes from the U.S.” More stringent accounting practices needed to be put in place. Jones was confident that all the kinks could be worked out. Perhaps the settlement wasn’t yet the tropical paradise Jones described to followers in sermons, but it could become one. If—when—it did, and became a showcase of socialism, it would serve as an appropriate stage for Jones, a socialist kingdom of his personal design.

  In February, at Jones’s behest, the Temple board voted that the Guyana mission would be “fully and completely” independent from the U.S. office. Everything sent to Jonestown—equipment, supplies—would be at the mission’s “total and unfettered control.” So, eventually, would all the settlement’s funds. When Jones relocated there, he would be immune from potential interference by anyone back in the United States.

  That accomplished, Jones reveled in his current stateside success. None was sweeter than the day in March when San Francisco Chronicle columnist Herb Caen wrote about Jones for the first time. Caen’s column was widely accepted as the barometer of city celebrity. He never wasted ink on nonentities. Anyone he mentioned was understood to be among the San Francisco elite, and Caen’s initial mention of Jones could not have been more glowing. He described the Temple leader relaxing at a prominent restaurant with two ex-mayors and Willie Brown, and lauded how Jones and the Temple supported many outstanding local causes. Those few who knew the real Jim Jones must have laughed at Caen’s description of his personality, “soft-spoken, modest, publicity shy, and will not be pleased to see his name in the paper,” but the vast majority of Caen’s readers believed every word. With that, Jim Jones became not just a city leader, but a San Francisco celebrity.

  Caen began mentioning Jones and the Temple on a regular basis. There was ample opportunity. Jones seemed to be everywhere at once, and not just in San Francisco. Though he had no real chance to become nearly as prominent in Los Angeles, he still did enough in that city to build, then maintain, a degree of political and civic influence. In May 1976, Peoples Temple and the Los Angeles Black Muslims co-hosted a “Spiritual Jubilee” at the city convention center. It was an epic event, and a who’s who of California politics attended, including Lieutenant Governor Dymally, Carlton Goodlett, Angela Davis, and Los Angeles mayor Tom Bradley. Jones’s relationship with Goodlett had grown especially warm. They became partners in an import-export company and co-investors in a Norfolk, Virginia, black newspaper.

  In the summer, Jones led another cross-country bus tour. This one featured a stop in Lynn and had about it the air of a farewell visit. Six hundred followers piled out of the buses, and Jones made a special point of gathering them outside Myrtle Kennedy’s home, introducing the gawky old lady as his “second mother.” The Temple members were highly amused when Mrs. Kennedy described young Jim Jones as “a real active boy and a mischief-maker.” Afterward, she and Jones talked privately. Mrs. Kennedy told her family that Jones asked her to move to Jonestown, where everything was perfect and she would be well cared for. She declined. The invitation was evidence that Jones had not forgotten an old friend who’d helped him along the way. To Jones, the opportunity to live in Jonestown was the most generous form of thanks possible. At least to some extent, he believed his own exaggerations.

  After stops in Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago, the Temple’s Greyhound caravan returned to California just in time for the July 4th Bicentennial celebrations. They were unaffected by Grace Stoen’s defection, which Jones managed to keep quiet. Though their leader continued preaching about solemn subjects—Jones promised, “If you give yourself to socialism, you will not die by accident or in a sick bed, but you will determine your destiny and die where and when it can best serve socialism”—the congregation felt a growing sense of accomplishment. Praise in the newspapers for Jones was, followers believed, praise for the Temple and for them. The reverse would also be true. Any attack on him was taken personally by his followers. But in 1976 there was no negative media coverage. Most often, rank-and-file Temple members saw Jones at his best, charismatic in the most positive ways, joking, caring. They didn’t experience the rantings in Planning Commission meetings or witness Jones’s constant, almost casual, cruelty to his wife. For years, he’d done all he could to keep the Temple in a defensive, crisis mode, citing local rednecks or government agencies out to get them, a dangerous world where only Jim Jones’s protection kept his followers safe. Now, it was obvious that the Temple and its leader were gaining the influence that they’d always sought. This became increasingly evident in the fall.

  Temple members were thrilled to learn that on Saturday, September 25, there would be a gala testimonial dinner honoring Jim Jones. The location was to be the San Francisco temple, and Jones’s followers were assured that a glittering array of political notables would attend to pay tribute to the Temple leader. So that none of the luminaries would become upset or misunderstand, Jones explained, for that evening only his followers must address him as “Jim” and not “Father.” Less pleasing was Jones’s announcement that Temple members would be expected to each pay $20 admission, and also hit the streets to sell tickets to the general public. Jones expected a full house. Initially, advance sales were slow. Marceline, conducting a Sunday service in her husband’s absence, chided the congregation for slipshod effort—it would be disrespectful to Father if there was even one vacant seat. The pep talk worked. By the evening of the dinner, all seats were spoken for.

  Before that, Jones had another exciting announcement. The 1976 presidential campaign was well under way with Republican incumbent Gerald Ford challenged by Democrat Jimmy Carter. Carter’s wife, Rosalynn, was coming to San Francisco for an event at the city’s Carter campaign headquarters, and she had requested a private meeting with Jones. Although Jones warned his followers that “she wouldn’t hesitate to place us all in concentration camps,” he was going to take the meeting. In fact, Jones had been contacted by local Democratic leaders asking that he bring some Temple members to fill seats at the program. He agreed, so long as he was seated onstage near Mrs. Carter and allowed to make some remarks of his own. The Carter program organizers were happy to agree—in an era when many white Americans feared the Black Panthers and other slogan-shouting revolutionaries of color, it would be reassuring for the media covering Mrs. Carter’s appearance to see seats filled with members of a prominent black church.

  On September 14, Jones and several buses of Temple members arrived as planned. For a change, Jones was dressed in a well-tailored business suit. His son Jimmy had dragged him to the clothing store to make the purchase, and paid for it without letting Jones know that the suit cost $150. “He wouldn’t have stood for it,” Jim Jones Jr. remembers.

  The event went well. Mrs. Carter was greeted with enthusiastic applause, which almost but not quite equaled the ovation Temple members gave their leader when he was introduced. Jones and Mrs. Car
ter had a few moments of private conversation, which, for her, was simply one more campaign courtesy rather than a discussion of any consequence. A few days later, Mrs. Carter made a follow-up phone call, intended as another gesture of thanks. Jones told her that he had considerable influence among Disciples of Christ churches, and would help the Carter campaign in any way she asked. Mrs. Carter said she hoped Jones would one day meet her sister-in-law, evangelist Ruth Carter Stapleton. The soon-to-be first lady would have been astonished to hear Jones, in one of his next sermons, announce that Jimmy Carter was considering appointing him U.S. ambassador to Guyana.

  After Carter’s election in November, Jones wrote to the first lady, telling her about a trip he’d just made to Cuba and suggesting possible new American policies toward that country. He received a brief, handwritten reply from Mrs. Carter. She thanked him for the letter, said she’d enjoyed meeting him during the campaign, and repeated that he and Ruth Carter Stapleton ought to meet. On the Carter end, that concluded business with Jones. For Jones, the short meeting and shorter note constituted a relationship that he bragged about to Guyanese officials on his next visit—surely they would want to cooperate fully with a personal friend and valued advisor of America’s president and first lady. “We couldn’t help but feel impressed,” Kit Nascimento recalls.

  Then came Jones’s testimonial dinner. In front of a packed house, political heavyweights from Mayor Moscone to black militant Eldridge Cleaver paid Jones tribute by their presence. During his introduction of the guest of honor, Willie Brown described Jones as “a combination of Martin Luther King, Angela Davis, Albert Einstein, and chairman Mao.” The highlight came when Jones was presented with “a certificate of honor,” which read: “On the occasion of a dinner in his honor, in recognition of his guidance and inspiration in establishing the many humanitarian programs in Peoples Temple, and in deep appreciation for his tireless and invaluable contributions to all the people of the Bay Area.”