Town Without Pity

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Remembering Jonestown

Thirty years after Rep. Leo J. Ryan was killed in 1978 by followers of the Rev. Jim Jones as he attempted to investigate abuses at Jonestown, Guyana, the congressman is memorialized in San Mateo, Calif.

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As Norwood and others who spoke at the memorial service said Tuesday, there is still much healing left to do and many questions unanswered. Was Jonestown a cult, a religious commune or a legitimate experiment in racial harmony and social justice gone bad? Should Ryan have insisted on going to personally investigate Jonestown, taking journalists with him, after having been warned that Jonestown was an armed camp and Jones himself increasingly unstable?

Was Jones a sadistic egomaniac who cynically abused his followers? Or was he a decent man who fell victim to the drugs, power and paranoia that finally devoured him and the 913 other men, women and children who died in Jonestown? Why didn't more people resist when they were ordered to die?

The raw emotion that still surrounds these questions flared into the open on the eve of Tuesday's commemoration when one group of survivors unveiled a plaque with the names of those who died, including Jones. Lela Howard, whose aunt died in Jonestown and who arranged for the plaque to be made and displayed at San Francisco's African American Historical and Cultural Society (80 percent of those who died were black), said she included Jones's name because "he, too, was a victim." Many Jonestown survivors seem to agree.

But Norwood, who has raised $30,000 for a memorial to be located at the mass grave site in Oakland, said she and many other relatives and survivors are outraged. Their families, she said, have spent the past 30 years trying to erase the stigma and guilt of having been "deceived" by Jones's appeal to racial equality, free health care and social welfare.

"Jones was not a victim," she said, fire in her eyes, vowing never to succumb to pressure from Jones's family and some others to include his name on the graveside monument that was partially unveiled Tuesday and will be completed next year. "To me, that's like putting Hitler's name on a memorial to the Holocaust."

A Tragedy That Resonates

For millions of Americans older than 40, the graphic images of hundreds of bloated bodies, piled two and three deep, rotting in the hot Guyanese sun 30 years ago and the unprecedented death of a congressman on a jungle airstrip made Jonestown the kind of tragic, gruesome event that even today is instantly recognizable.

But for those members of the Peoples Temple who survived Jonestown's bitter end, as well as for hundreds of relatives of those who died that day, for Ryan's family and those of us who were wounded in the airstrip attack, Jonestown is an indelible part of our lives that we have spent 30 years trying to recover from, hide from, understand or explain.

Thirty years ago, Jackie Speier was Rep. Leo J. Ryan's legislative assistant.

Today, she holds a congressional seat that encompasses much of Ryan's former district. When I interviewed her last week, it was the first time we had spoken since we were both nearly killed on the airstrip.

I was shot in the hip and survived by playing dead. She was shot five times by the Jonestown gunmen and barely pulled through. At one point, she said, her doctors thought an arm and a leg would have to be amputated. Later, they told her she might not be able to have children. She later had two. Even now, she has two bullets lodged in her body.

Yet, for all the nightmares and physical trauma she has suffered, she said she does not hold the Jonestown survivors responsible for what happened 30 years ago. They were, for the most part, "broken" people, she said, "intimidated and fearful of being exiled" by their leader.

On a personal level, she said, her near-death in Guyana had been "freeing" and made her "a little bit fearless." It was a sentiment I could understand. After being wounded in Jonestown, I spent the next 20 years as a war correspondent in Central America, the Middle East and the Persian Gulf.