Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor
by Michael Taylor
On November 18, 1978, gunmen from the Peoples Temple opened fire at a jungle airstrip in Guyana. Five people, including Rep. Leo Ryan, were killed. Within hours, another 914 people had been murdered or committed suicide at Jonestown, including temple founder Jim Jones. Jones had built his ministry into a force in San Francisco with a program of helping the young, elderly and destitute. Supporters, including powerful officials, defended him against allegations that he was abusing followers. The probes drove Jones to Guyana. When a visiting delegation led by Ryan tried to leave with defectors, Jones turned to murder and ``revolutionary suicide.''
Before he became infamous for leading 913 people to their deaths in the Guyanese jungle, the Rev. Jim Jones was the darling of San Francisco's liberal establishment -- a man who could spread the wealth to all the fashionable charities and, at a moment's notice, marshal thousands of followers for a good cause. Jones was a minister of the Disciples of Christ, but in San Francisco he was best known as the suave if slightly sinister leader of Peoples Temple, a flock of perhaps 8,000 people, mostly poor and mostly black, who appeared to do everything Jones told them to do. With these willing workers, Jones made himself the perfect gift for the liberal machine of U.S. Representatives Phillip and John Burton, Assemblyman Willie Brown and Mayor George Moscone, which was trying to consolidate its hold on San Francisco politics. After Jonestown, the politicians were left to explain how they had become so taken by Jones -- some of them pedaling away from their close relationship to the sect leader, while others simply admitted that they had been led astray. ``There wasn't anything magical about Jim's power,'' Timothy Stoen, who spent nearly seven years in Peoples Temple as Jones' attorney, said the other day. ``It was raw politics. He was able to deliver what politicians want, which is power. And how do you get power? By votes. And how do you get votes? With people. Jim Jones could produce 3,000 people at a political event.'' Jones first came to notice in San Francisco in September 1970, when he started a fund to help the families of slain police officers. It was the kind of generous and, at the same time, politically astute gesture Jones would make. In the beginning, he seemed almost to abjure any attention -- he would make a contribution, then melt into the background. But Stoen and other Peoples Temple observers said spreading the money around was part of a plan Jones had to curry favor. ``They worked at it day and night,'' said the Rev. Cecil Williams, pastor of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church and, at the time, a friend of Jones'. ``They sat around talking about ways to get things done. They had all kinds of schemes that they had worked out.'' In 1972, the first warning signals about Jones went up when the San Francisco Examiner profiled him in unflattering terms as an influential rural preacher who called himself the Prophet and claimed to be raising the dead. But ensuing official investigations of Jones went nowhere. A year later, Jones handed out grants to 12 newspapers, saying, ``We feel a responsibility to defend the free speech clause of the First Amendment.'' He also bused members of his church to Fresno to demonstrate on behalf of four Fresno Bee reporters who had been jailed for refusing to reveal the names of their confidential sources. It was about the last time Jones would be so friendly with the press. The turning point in Jones' drive for power came in 1975, according to Tim Reiterman's and John Jacobs' exhaustive study, ``Raven: The Untold Story of the Rev. Jim Jones and his People.'' Jones' army of volunteers saturated San Francisco neighborhoods, distributing slate cards for Moscone (running for mayor), Joseph Freitas (district attorney) and Richard Hongisto (sheriff). All three won. ``What you had here was a ready-made volunteer workforce,'' said Agar Jaicks, who was chairman of the county Democratic Central Committee, the governing body of the Democratic Party in San Francisco. ``And you also had in Jones a man who touched a component of the consensus power forces in the city, such as labor and ethnicity groups, and he was very strong in the Western Addition. So here was a guy who could provide workers for causes progressives cared about.'' By March 1976, Herb Caen was writing items about tete-a-tetes between Jones and then-Assemblyman Brown in political watering holes like the old Bardelli's. ``Many a San Franciscan and many a project have received sizable checks from Peoples Temple, accompanied by only a short note from Jim Jones, saying, `We appreciate what you are doing,' '' Caen wrote. Jones spread his largesse widely. He gave money to the NAACP, the Ecumenical Peace Institute and a senior citizens escort service. Willie Brown and then-Governor Jerry Brown were seen at temple services. In September 1976, the Burtons, Willie Brown, Williams, Moscone, radical academic Angela Davis, lawyer Vincent Hallinan, Lieutenant Governor Mervyn Dymally and publisher Carlton Goodlett toasted Jones at a big testimonial dinner. A month later, Moscone named him to a seat on the San Francisco Housing Authority Commission. ``And it wasn't just the politicians,'' said Corey Busch, who was Moscone's press secretary in 1975 and 1976. ``It was also the media. He had books of positive press clippings.'' In fact, the San Francisco media appeared cowed. Aside from a short, innocuous profile that ran in The Chronicle in April 1976, little had been written about Jones' operation. In late 1976, things began to change. Chronicle reporter Marshall Kilduff (now a Chronicle editorial writer) decided to do his own profile of Jones -- more a profile of a colorful San Francisco character than anything else. When he visited the temple during a service in January 1977, Kilduff said in an interview the other day, he found his boss, then- city editor Steve Gavin, sitting in the row reserved for visitors. Kilduff said that when he later proposed a story on Jones, Gavin ``said we had done a profile and that was sufficient. I went at him several times, and said I thought we should do more. He didn't see it that way.'' Kilduff, however, persevered and soon won the confidence of 10 temple defectors, who poured out their story to him. He eventually collaborated with writer Phil Tracy, and they sold their story to New West magazine, which published the piece in August 1977. The article detailed beatings and fake ``cancer healings'' and reported that the temple had forced members to turn over millions from savings accounts and the sale of their homes. The piece became the catalyst for Jones' flight to Guyana. Other publications began to join the fray, notably the San Francisco Examiner, which assigned Reiterman, Jacobs, Nancy Dooley and other reporters to investigate Jones' operations. Tough-minded reporting dogged Jones during the winter. In June 1978, one month after escaping from Jonestown, temple defector Deborah Layton went public in a Chronicle interview with Kilduff and gave a stark description of life at the temple's Guyana stronghold. After the mass murder-suicide, Gavin, who by then had left The Chronicle, said in an interview, ``I was always wary of being manipulated by them and conscious of the possibility, but I don't think I was. I think all my decisions about Peoples Temple stories were made on a professional basis.'' Reached earlier this week, Gavin said, ``That was a long time ago,'' and declined to talk about it. In the wake of Jonestown, Willie Brown said, ``If we knew then he was mad, clearly we wouldn't have appeared with him. But it's not fair to say what you would have done if you knew the kind of madness that would take place years later.'' The mayor released a statement two weeks ago through his press spokeswoman, Kandace Bender, that said, ``Jonestown was a tragedy of the first order, and it remains a painful and sorrowful event in our history. Not a year has gone by that I have not stopped to remember San Francisco's terrible loss.'' Moscone was assassinated nine days after the Jonestown deaths. After the deaths were revealed, he said, ``It's clear that if there was a sinister plan, then we were taken in. But I'm not taking any responsibility. It's not mine to shoulder.''
CHRONOLOGY OF PEOPLES TEMPLE 1953: Jim Jones, a minister who had not been ordained by any church, opens a small church of his own in Indianapolis. 1964: Jones is finally ordained a minister in the Disciples of Christ. 1965-71: Jones, convinced a nuclear holocaust is imminent, moves his congregation to town of Redwood Valley, just north of Ukiah. His church prospers and he is named foreman of the Mendocino County grand jury. 1971: Peoples Temple buys a building at Geary Boulevard and Fillmore Street in San Francisco and a second church in Los Angeles. Headquarters of the sect moves to San Francisco. 1971-73: Temple congregation grows, and the church offers social programs, jobs and health care. 1974: The temple negotiates a lease with the government of Guyana for a remote parcel of land near the Venezuelan border. 1975: The temple supplies crowds for rallies and turns out platoons of disciplined campaign workers for liberal political candidates in San Francisco. 1976: Mayor George Moscone appoints Jones to the city's Housing Authority Commission. Jones attracts favorable media attention and is wooed by national politicians. But he also displays signs of megalomania and paranoia, never leaving the temple without bodyguards and packing public meetings with temple members, who applaud his every word. Summer 1977: New West magazine prints charges of temple defectors who tell of beatings, fake healings and secret piles of cash and property holdings. August 1977: Jones moves to his temple outpost in Guyana, now called Jonestown. 1977-78: Many temple members emigrate to Jonestown for a new life Jones has promised them. Eventually, the settlement's population exceeds 1,000. June 1978: Temple defector Deborah Layton, in interview with The Chronicle, describes Jonestown as a place with armed guards, public beatings and mass suicide drills. Fall 1978: Relatives of Jonestown residents ask for an investigation. November 7, 1978: Representative Leo Ryan of San Mateo announces he will visit Jonestown to see what is going on. November 17: Ryan and his group arrive in Jonestown and are treated to a cultural festival. November 18: Some residents pass notes to Ryan's party, asking to be taken out of Jonestown. Ryan decides to leave, but as he and his party wait at the airstrip, they are shot by temple gunmen. Dead are Ryan, NBC staffers Robert Brown and Don Harris, San Francisco Examiner photographer Greg Robinson, and Patricia Parks, a temple member who was trying to leave. The rest of the delegation hides in the jungle. November 18: Jones orders his flock to kill themselves by taking cyanide. Those who refuse are forced to take the poison. Children are killed with injections. Eventually, 914 bodies are found in Jonestown, including that of Jones himself. There are no pictures of Fred Lewis' wife or seven children on the walls of his tidy San Francisco duplex. He wants no such reminders of the horror. Twenty years ago next Wednesday, Lewis' entire immediate family and 19 other relatives died in the mass murder-suicide at the Rev. Jim Jones' cult compound in Guyana. He lost more family than anyone else in Jonestown that day. The bitterness and grief, the memories of the poisonings and shootings that left him so totally alone, are never more than the blink of an eye away. ``It is always with me, always,'' said Lewis, 69, sitting at his kitchen table and leafing through clippings he usually pulls out only on the Jonestown anniversary day. ``That . . .'' he struggled with his words, ``that . . . man Jones took my family.'' Lewis does have photos -- hundreds of them in two white vinyl albums, showing smiling sons, daughters, cousins and more, at birthdays, in school group shots or playing around the house. The albums stay in a cupboard downstairs with the news clippings. He got the entire pile out recently and began to smile through the sadness writ deep in his eyes. ``These are my two oldest sons. They could kick a football almost goal to goal,'' he said, jabbing a finger on an album page at two strapping teenagers grinning widely. He flipped to a portrait of a little girl, around 10, beaming under billowing black curls tied back with a pink ribbon. ``This was Lisia, as cute as anything in this world, so full of fun,'' Lewis said. Others flicked by as the pages turned: ``This was a birthday cake I made for them one year. . . . This is the whole bunch at Halloween -- look at them laughing. . . . This was us hanging around.'' The memories of the cousins and uncles and nieces come slower, layered over by pain and decades. ``The names are hard to bring to mind after all these years, and there were so many,'' Lewis said, the smile leaving his lips. He snapped the album shut. ``Anyway, most everyone in these albums is gone, all gone,'' he said, voice dropping to a whisper. There is a separate stone marker for Lewis' family at the mass grave at Evergreen Cemetery in Oakland, where 406 of the 913 Jonestown victims are buried. The names of the secondary relatives may be fuzzy for Lewis, but he can call off the eight in his immediate circle: wife, Doris, 46 when she died; and children Lisia, 16; Karen, 15; Freddie Jr., 13; Barry, 11; Adrian, 9; Cassandra, 8; and Alisa, 7. ``I miss them,'' he said quietly. ``I have a fine life now. But I miss them.'' A big man with smile crinkles on his cheeks, Lewis does not come off as a sad fellow. He is quiet, polite, and the house he keeps with his girlfriend is pin-neat down to the shiny plastic on the living room furniture. If the subject of Jonestown does not come up, he is fine. That's why he usually doesn't mention it. Except at anniversary times. The long nightmare began one Saturday night in August 1978, when Lewis came home from his job as a butcher at Petrini's grocery to find the family apartment in the Fillmore District cleaned out and everyone gone. Lewis learned much later that Doris had taken the kids and, with the help of Peoples Temple members, carried off all the furniture, bound for Guyana. But at the time, all he knew was they had vanished. ``She left me one mattress and no note,'' he said. ``I thought they'd been kidnapped.'' The family had been doing just fine until then, Lewis said -- except for Doris' two-year association with Jones' temple. The two had been married 17 years and were devout Baptists when Doris learned of the temple from friends. Once Jones' siren call took hold of her, she ditched mainstream religion for good. The temple had taken their kids on swimming and horse-riding field trips, a rare treat for the inner-city youngsters. The temple made Doris feel strong and welcome. It promised her a racism-free spiritual Utopia. To this day, Lewis said, ``I don't know why she got so involved,'' but it became quickly clear that ``she thought it was better than what we already had.'' She initially tried to get him to join, too. `But I never did believe in this man (Jones),'' said Lewis. ``Any time a man starts talking about where he is God, and where you should throw away the Bible . . . I don't want anything to do with him.'' Still, the cult didn't spring straight to mind as an explanation for the family's disappearance. ``Our marriage was good and that temple stuff didn't really get in our way,'' he said. ``Doris was working at the post office, I had a good job and the kids were going to school. What more could you ask for?'' The police sent him to the district attorney's office, which sent him a letter saying it would keep a report file open. He checked at the Peoples Temple on Geary Boulevard, but nobody would let him in the door or answer his questions. ``I went to work and told them my family was gone and they all said, `Fred, you're kidding,' '' Lewis said. ``I was crying, but everybody told me it's not true, they'll be back.'' Lewis opened the photo album and stared at a photo of Doris, lying on their bed just before that summer and grinning under her huge Afro. ``But it was true,'' he said, chuckling ruefully. Months went by before rumors filtered in that the family had gone somewhere with temple members. Then he got the first of six letters from Lisia. ``She said she missed me, and then she talked about what they were doing there,'' Lewis said. ``The other kids would put little notes on the letters, but they didn't really say much. I tried to call Jonestown, but they wouldn't let any of my family come to the phone.'' He remembers only fragmented details of what they wrote, and has not read the letters since the massacre. He said he still can't. Then on November 18 came the hammer blow. ``I was at work when a man came running in and said Congressman Leo Ryan was killed,'' Lewis remembered. ``I dropped my tools, ran home, and there on the TV they were showing those awful pictures of the people lying on the ground, and rolling those names of the dead. My family was on it. I knew that was it then.'' The next few years are a blur of memory: fury, court dates as survivors sought reparations and return of the bodies of loved ones. Sorrow. Interviews with police. ``I had too many times with the bottle, and it was like that off and on for years until my girlfriend made me give up smoking and drinking,'' Lewis said. ``I went to their grave every day for eight years, but she made me stop that, too. ``She told me I was going to wreck myself, and she was right. So now I just go once a year and sometimes on one of the kids' birthdays,'' Lewis said. ``I take them flowers.'' Lewis has managed, in the past two decades, to carry on with a second life after so many deaths. He got an undisclosed settlement as part of a class-action claim against the temple of more than $8 million, and retired from his butcher job in 1982. ``We are just fine now and try not to think of those days,'' said Francis Revere, his loving partner for the past 15 years. She doesn't talk about Jonestown much, anytime, anywhere. As the years wore by, Lewis learned to channel his displaced love and became a sort of grandfather figure to those around him -- his Bayview district house is the one the neighborhood kids all come to after school to play with the bicycles, skates and games he keeps for them in the garage. ``He's a real nice man, lets the kids all play with his stuff,'' said Marquise Bishop, 8, bouncing a ball on the sidewalk outside one day. ``He smiles a lot.'' The ugly memories only really crop up once a year. Lewis organizes an anniversary service at Evergreen, and he and his niece Jynona Norwood talk each time of wanting a memorial erected to all the victims. But it's hard to push the idea when what you really want to do is leave the past behind. Lewis does not keep in touch with other survivors or family. ``Everyone from this city is dead, and the other survivors don't want to be reminded,'' he said. ``I don't either.'' The only picture he displays from those happy days before the end is a shot of himself at Petrini's, trim and jaunty in his white apron and a red carnation. ``Those were the days before everything happened,'' he said, holding the frame for a moment and smiling distantly. He put it back on the dresser carefully. ``That's all I need to see,'' he said. 
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