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 a Democratic member of the California state legislature for 18 years and now as a member of Congress, she said she has been willing to take on controversial issues and special interests that other politicians hesitate to tackle. She also remains fiercely loyal to her mentor, Ryan. She freely admits she told him she thought the Jonestown trip was "premature" and was so concerned about the danger that she prepared new wills for both of them. She even insisted on putting a "null and void" clause in the contract for a condominium unit she was buying in Arlington if she didn't return from the trip alive. But she says Ryan was convinced he had a congressional "shield," that no one would dare kill a U.S. congressman. She went along despite her misgivings because she believed Ryan was right to go: People in Jonestown were being held against their will.

Today, Speier views Ryan as a hero who gave his life for his constituents and "shaped how I view public service. What I've learned from the experience is that when you see something that's wrong, you have to act on it."

But she knows that some Jonestown survivors blame Ryan for triggering the mass murder-suicide. Others say that Ryan's insistence on bringing journalists is evidence that he was more interested in publicity and a future run for the Senate than in saving lives.

Ryan's daughter, Patricia, says the publicity-seeking charge is a "cheap shot. He didn't need the publicity. He had just won reelection. He was tired, and he really didn't want to go. But he felt very obligated to his constituents," especially one good friend whose son had joined the Temple in San Francisco, then defected, only to die in a suspicious accident several months later.

There's no question in her mind, Pat Ryan says, that Jonestown was a cult -- not the progressive church or revolutionary movement Jones painted it as. The testimonies detailing manipulation, sexual and physical abuse of those who disagreed with Jones, and the threats against those who tried to leave are all evidence of that, she says.

Over the years, her anger toward the Temple survivors and their families has tempered. She has attended memorials and other meetings with former Temple members, though she remains a bit resentful that most of the attention has been directed toward them -- not the man who tried to save them.

With Speier's move to Congress in a special election in April, Pat Ryan says her father's sacrifice is finally beginning to be recognized. To mark the 30th anniversary of his death, Speier introduced legislation in Washington to rename the historic post office building in San Mateo, where Ryan had his office, in his honor. On Monday, Speier, Pat Ryan and other members of the Ryan family attended the naming ceremony.

Former representative Stephen J. Solarz (D-N.Y.), who served with Ryan on the old House International Relations Committee, and who declined Ryan's invitation to accompany him on the Jonestown trip, says the recognition is well deserved. "I think it was a tribute to Leo that he was willing to go," Solarz said recently. "Jonestown was a source of legitimate concern, and I'm sure he was going there to protect the interests of his constituents."

Casting a Long Shadow

Fielding McGehee III and his wife, Rebecca Moore, whose two sisters died in Jonestown, are Jonestown's unofficial archivist-historians. They publish a yearly newsletter and maintain a Web site that has vast quantities of information about the Peoples Temple before and after its catastrophic end.

McGehee says there were seven known survivors of Jonestown itself, 15 who left Jonestown with Ryan and survived the airport massacre, and approximately 50 more who were at the Peoples Temple headquarters in Georgetown, Guyana's capital, who did not commit suicide on Nov. 18, 1978, as they were instructed to do. Several hundred other active members of the Temple were in the United States.

There were also hundreds of former Temple members who had defected, before or after Jones moved himself and many of his most loyal followers to Guyana in 1977. A number of them had organized a group called the Concerned Relatives, which was instrumental in convincing Ryan that Jones was increasingly psychotic and erratic, and was threatening to kill everyone in Jonestown if the Relatives, the media, the CIA and Jones's other perceived enemies did not leave him alone.

Jones had even gone so far as to hire Mark Lane, the largely discredited Kennedy conspiracy theorist, to mount a legal and public relations counteroffensive, detailed in a memo found in Jonestown by the FBI after Ryan's assassination. The document, dated Sept. 28, 1978, obtained this week by The Post, sets out Lane's proposal for "the filing of a multi-million dollar action in the appropriate federal court against each of the individuals, organizations and agencies of government which have participated in the campaign against the People's Temple."