Politicians had wrongly assumed that any group which could turn out several hundred volunteers was huge; they failed to see how the Temple’s communal and authoritarian structure meant Jones could produce a high percentage of his members at Will.36
Through illusion, public relations, misrepresentations and exploitation of political greed, Jones expanded his influence. He invited politicians to the Temple and fed them punch and cookies, or a chicken dinner. He showed them partially staged services and “free” food and medical programs which actually were closed to outsiders. Most politicians came away with positive impressions. As honored guests, they were invited to address the congregation, unaware that Jones ridiculed them later or even literally behind their backs. For instance, Jones once flicked his middle finger behind Assemblyman Brown, whose personal style—Wilkes Bashford suits and Porsches—offended him.
Jones asked favors of his political “friends” with characteristic aggression. For instance, a few months after the 1975 election, Jones and Willie Brown met face to face for the first time, over lunch at Bardelli’s near Union Square. Jones, sitting erectly in dark glasses and a leisure suit, talked politics with a socialist flavor. After lunch, Jones’s ever-present companion, Mike Prokes, stopped by Brown’s law office and asked Brown to come to the Temple to be interviewed for a “documentary” about the church’s good works. When on the assigned day Brown was brought to the interview area, he was joined by newly elected District Attorney Joseph Freitas and Sheriff Richard Hongisto. Prokes amateurishly directed the camera crew while Jones asked leading questions designed to elicit praise. After each politician made a statement, they left, unaware that that film of their statements would be spliced into the middle of a film of Jones’s “miracles,” leaving the false impression that distinguished public figures, even law enforcement officials, condoned his healing.
On the color footage, hundreds of members clap and sway to spirited music, caught in the euphoria of a Los Angeles temple service. In rapid sequence, Jones cures a woman who ostensibly cannot see without her glasses, as well as a woman complaining of a chest pain. As the rejoicing breaks off, a narrator introduces the politicians and the film cuts to the interview setting in the San Francisco temple—and the politicians praise the church’s social work.
In fact a number of politicians and some journalists and radical figures did witness either healings or testimonies to healings. Rather than hide his hokum, Jones both compromised his visitors and delighted his followers with his shenanigans. His guests rationalized them as mind over matter, psychosomatic healings or as a mere aberration in an otherwise good organization, no more improper than what evangelists do on television.
Within days of the 1975 election, Mike Prokes was named to the forty-eight-member committee Moscone would use to screen names for one hundred commission appointments. Peoples Temple was hardly a household word, yet Prokes’s presence on that panel of community, labor and minority leaders affirmed the Temple’s political emergence. Still, it became clear, when the committee began selecting candidates, that the Temple would not be a mainstay in Moscone’s early administration. Not a single Temple member was recommended for an appointment, though Prokes persistently put forward lists of candidates for each post.
Jones could not accept defeat. With the patience of a water torturer, he kept dropping his people on officials. About a year after the 1975 election, Prokes and others complained that the Temple’s support had not been properly rewarded. The squeeze was put on a Moscone aide over lunch at the Copper Penny, and the Temple netted a handful of jobs.
Meanwhile, they pressured Moscone to come up with a suitable appointment for Jones himself. Seeing that the minister’s pride had been hurt, Moscone appointed him in March 1976 to the Human Rights Commission, an appropriate place for a liberal preacher. But to Jones, it was a lateral appointment—the same post he had held fifteen years earlier in Indianapolis. At least sixty members sent letters to Moscone telling him off, saying Jones’s talents were underutilized. The letter campaign was all the more outrageous since Moscone had stuck out his neck to appoint Jones in the first place. Moscone knew that Jones resided outside San Francisco, and thus was ineligible for appointment under the city charter.
On the official day, just minutes before Jones was to be sworn in as a human rights commissioner, he slipped into the mayor’s inner office through a side door. With Mike Prokes standing by for moral support, Jones announced, with great tension in his voice, that he would not accept the post after all. As the ticklish matter was discussed, Jones remained unsmiling. Moscone, always the gentleman, was solicitous. After some fifteen minutes, Jones came up with an explanation for the press waiting outside. Then the two reached an understanding that Jones would be appointed to something else, and parted on friendly terms.
Moscone kept his word. In a press release on October 18, 1976, his office announced that Jones had been named to the San Francisco Housing Authority, the agency which oversees operation of public housing. The appointment surprised Jones’s friends and supporters, partially because the minister always denied having political ambitions. Jones’s advisers, such as Tim Stoen, were concerned that a public appointment would expose him to scrutiny and attacks. “You’re treading on very dangerous ground,” Goodlett warned, “because you’re gonna have a lot of people who are enemies, and the few friends that you’ve helped will be friends during fair weather times.” The warnings proved all too correct.
Before Jones’s arrival, Housing Authority meetings had been dull, poorly attended affairs. After Jones, the meetings became spirited public rallies. Jones bused in his own cheering section. They applauded him wildly, no matter what he said, whether it was a call to end corruption, a promise to improve the living conditions of the inner city poor, a vow to tighten the expense accounts of agency staff. The meetings became so jammed by Jones’s entourage that the sessions were moved across town to larger quarters. Though the agency had its own police, Temple guards patrolled, watching doorways, roving through meetings. They even barred anyone from using the bathroom while Jones occupied it.
Commissioner Jones worked with the same dedication he displayed in Temple endeavors and soon became chairman of the body, thanks to lobbying by Moscone’s office. He came to his first meeting as chairman equipped with a parliamentary procedure reference book; the agenda and his own remarks were outlined with the meticulousness of a Tim Stoen. Jones became a public voice for the rights of minorities and the poor. He also built political and personal alliances, from the highest levels of administration to a tenants organization. A few hard-working Temple members were employed there too, one of them Carolyn Layton.
Though pleasant, Jones was wary of reporters. He knew he was being watched: the local press routinely covered Housing Authority meetings and always kept an eye open for a good story. Among the journalists was an Examiner newsman who remembered quite well the Kinsolving series and Jones’s response. Another was a young Chronicle reporter named Marshall Kilduff.
Jim Jones realized that he was flirting with the law—and could be stung at almost any time. So he consciously set out to establish good rapport with the chief law officers of San Francisco County, just as he had done in Mendocino County. Here he did not need to falsely present himself as a law-and-order Republican, because the liberal San Francisco trio shared the Temple’s progressive social views.
Although the Temple delivered slate cards endorsing Joseph Freitas for district attorney in 1975, Freitas first heard about the group from Willie Brown after the election. Then Tim Stoen came down from Ukiah looking for a job in Freitas’s administration. After interviewing him, Freitas wanted to place Stoen in his consumer fraud division, but the only available job was being held open for a minority appointee. Later, when newspapers pointed up a lack of progress in the office’s politically sensitive voter fraud investigation, the head of consumer fraud reminded Freitas about Stoen. The Temple attorney—who came highly recommended by an assortment of Mendocino o
fficials and by Jim Jones—got the job. Stoen was being hired as chief prosecutor in an investigation into allegations that large numbers of nonresidents had voted illegally in the 1975 election. Stoen would end up using volunteer clerical workers from the Temple in this sensitive investigation. Later, similar voter fraud allegations would be leveled against the Temple itself, though not proved.
The strategic importance of having a Temple member in the prosecutor’s office did not elude Carlton Goodlett. “You always got a man pretty close to a law enforcement agency in a town, don’t you?” he once remarked.
“You’re very perceptive,” Jones laughed.
As in Ukiah, Jones tried to get gun permits from law officials. Sheriff Richard Hongisto, nationally known for his antiwar views and jail reform views, was courted after receiving Temple assistance. During the 1975 election, Prokes, Chaikin and other church members had started to drop by the sheriff’s office offering favors, talking nebulously about providing refuge for jailed prostitutes and drug addicts, seeking advice about petty ordinances.
Then Jones called, alarmed over his personal safety. He asked for gun permits so that his people could defend themselves against harassment. When Hongisto checked into the alleged incidents, he became convinced that Jones had fabricated the story.37 Diplomatically, Hongisto suggested the Temple hire private security guards, or else contact Police Chief Charles Gain. But Gain, another controversial progressive, turned down the Temple requests for gun permits too. The setback, however, did not prevent Temple guards from illegally carrying guns or, reportedly, from getting permits by working with an existing security guard company.
Public concern over terrorism provided a marvelous opportunity for the Temple to ingratiate itself to others outside the church’s normal sphere, even to ideological enemies. In late 1975 and in 1976, while the New World Liberation Front waged a terrorist campaign against county supervisors over demands for upgrading county jail health care, conservative supervisors John Barbagelata and Quentin Kopp were mailed bombs disguised as candy boxes. They escaped unharmed because the boxes were not opened. After the incidents, Jones phoned Kopp at City Hall and offered Temple members as guards for him, Barbagelata or any other supervisors. Kopp declined the offer saying he and other officials already were given police protection.
Late in 1976, an attempted bombing at the home of supervisor and future mayor Dianne Feinstein caused Prokes to write a December 17, 1976, letter offering Temple protection. To imply that they faced common enemies, Prokes attached a two-page Nazi hate letter which he said was received by the Peoples Forum newspaper. Nonetheless, the offer of Temple protection was declined.
The Temple’s relations with the black establishment were mixed too. By the end of 1976, the Temple had purchased hundreds of memberships in the local NAACP branch, and Jim Jones, Johnny Brown Jones and another Temple member were elected to the board of directors. But some NAACP members felt that the Temple, with control of about a tenth of the board and with several hundred votes out of two thousand members, had grabbed the reins of the civil rights group. When the Temple tried to sign up thirty members, including Jones, at the Black Leadership Forum, a warning bell went off. Some feared that Jones was attempting another takeover, and they argued that as a white he had no right to belong to a black political endorsement group. Rather than barring someone on the basis of color, the membership voted to set up a membership screening committee. Jones did not fit through the mesh. The defeat upset him a great deal.
For Jones and the Temple, the fibers of his political network were unraveling almost as fast as they were woven. But progress was still made because, as Jones would say near the end, the church took “two steps forward, one step back.” Jones had created a moving target which with each stride added political armor. The vigorous activity in the 1975 election established the church as a factor in local politics, as a force within the black community and as a potential ally for those with compatible political goals or the pragmatism not to care. With that momentum, Jones transformed potential enemies into a second line of defense—his image of respectability and power.
Even those politicians disturbed by Jones’s personality problems, militarism or manipulation did nothing. First, who would want to risk opposing a church doing such worthwhile work in the community? Second, who would want to offend a machinelike political organization with friends in high places? Third, how could anyone speak against such a secretive organization with any certainty? Uncertainty—the psychological factor that kept some Temple members from defecting—inhibited political figures too. Those with misgivings about the church kept them to themselves. Looking around, they saw only forces of the Right speaking against the newfound political power of community groups such as Peoples Temple. With his constant chatter about the government, rightists, Nazis and others being after him, Jones implied that anyone who challenged him would be in bad company.
Most bases in San Francisco were covered neatly by 1976—Jones’s self-proclaimed Year of Ascendancy. A favorable rapport was established with virtually all important public figures. Where could opponents, skeptics or victims turn if Jones had friends or admirers in the state legislature and the U.S. Congress, the offices of the governor, the mayor, the police chief, the sheriff, and district attorney, as well as on the leading black newspaper and the largest daily newspapers?
TWENTY-NINE
Backwater
Guyana—in the native tongue “land of many waters”—had been blessed with neither the sandy white beaches of its northern neighbors, such as Barbados and Jamaica, nor the vast oil reserves and natural resources of its western and southern neighbors. Its economy had never quite recovered from slavery and sugar plantations under the Dutch in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries nor from British colonial rule and the system of indentured servitude in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The country seemed doomed to remain a British vassal state, until the early 1950s.
It was then that British Guiana saw the first stirrings for independence. A Marxist dentist, Dr. Cheddi Jagan, an East Indian educated in America, founded the People’s Progressive party, which quickly assumed power under colonial rule. Jagan was assisted in the drive by a brilliant British-educated Afro-Guyanese barrister named Linden Forbes Burnham. Within several years, however, Burnham broke with Jagan to form his own party, the People’s National Congress.
With the Cold War and the Cuban revolution to the north, the United States was absolutely determined not to let another “domino” fall in the Caribbean. So it entered the power struggle in obscure Guiana. Burnham had a more opportunistic side than the more doctrinaire Jagan, whose pro-Soviet sympathies were no secret. When the Central Intelligence Agency injected $1 million into labor unions to finance street disturbances, enough internal instability was created that Forbes Burnham toppled Jagan in 1964.
Two years later, Burnham announced independence, and two years after that, in 1968, his party swept the elections. Burnham became prime minister. On February 23,1970, the country became known as the Cooperative Republic of Guyana. To the surprise of the CIA, Burnham moved his country on a socialist path, flirting with Castro, the Soviets, East Germans and North Koreans, and nationalizing most of the country’s resources, including sugar, rice and bauxite, of which it is the world’s fourth largest producer. In any case, the economy worsened. There were chronic shortages of just about everything, particularly imported goods.
Burnham was essentially presiding over a minority-run government. He could not hold honest elections, since the East Indians, who outnumbered blacks 55 percent to 35 percent, voted for Jagan. Burnham won in 1968 because of a new provision that allowed Guyanese overseas to vote in national elections; the “proxy” votes went right to his party. He got the same help in 1973, when the army counted the ballots. A 1978 referendum on whether to keep him in power until a new constitution could be written was so patently rigged that Jagan told his people not to even show up at the polls.38
To kee
p his support, Burnham set up an elaborate system of patronage. For this reason, close to 90 percent of the army and police were black, as were most government ministers and high-level bureaucrats. Ensuring absolute loyalty became a tricky feat, however, as the economy worsened, and as churches and other institutions became alarmed over the erosion of civil liberties formerly enjoyed under British rule. As people began to chafe under Burnham’s regime, he cast about for allies.
One was Rabbi Edward Washington, an ex-convict from Cleveland, Ohio, who managed to persuade several hundred Afro-Guyanese that blacks were the original Jews. His House of Israel became a political enforcement arm of the Burnham regime. The organization broadcast a weekly radio show on the government-owned radio station in Georgetown, a sure sign of official favor. Another group that would get a weekly radio show was Peoples Temple.
Temple publicist Paula Adams was learning to find her way around Georgetown, the capital and major port at the mouth of the Demerara River. The city, protected by seventeenth-century Dutch dikes, had a certain backwater charm, though it housed the national offices for Guyana’s various ministries, nationalized industries and other government bureaucracies. Georgetown’s principal boulevard, Main Street, began near the muddy Atlantic Coast beaches, at the Hotel Pegasus, Guyana’s most modern hotel. Alive with cabs and donkey carts and parasol-carrying Afro-Guyanese women, the avenue stretched about a half mile to the center of town, to a thin marble shaft known as the Cenotaph, a memorial to Guyanese soldiers who died in World Wars I and II.
Main Street’s tree-lined esplanade, with its small cement canals for rain water and raw sewage, split the avenue in two. Government buildings, foreign embassies, airline offices and banks from all over the world were interspersed with the unlikeliest of neighbors, some with a touch of the slums.
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