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Home/ stevenwarran's Library/ Notes/ November 16, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Jackie Speier -- moving on, moving up / Survivor of Jonestown ambush plans run for lieutenant governor, by Vicki Haddock,

November 16, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Jackie Speier -- moving on, moving up / Survivor of Jonestown ambush plans run for lieutenant governor, by Vicki Haddock,

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November 16, 2003, San Francisco Chronicle, Jackie Speier -- moving on, moving up / Survivor of Jonestown ambush plans run for lieutenant governor, by Vicki Haddock, 

 

There is a compartment in Jackie Speier's mind where she stores away the old memories of her fact-finding trip to the cult compound of Jonestown.

 

When it opens, all the agony comes rushing back: She is there on the oppressively humid jungle airstrip in her polka-dot sundress and platform shoes, a congressional aide with clipboard in hand, rushing anxious defectors onto a waiting plane. Then the ambush, as Jonestown's henchmen open fire.

 

She feels five bullets pierce her body, one blowing away a huge chunk of her thigh. She sees her boss and mentor, Rep. Leo Ryan, dead on the tarmac. She chills as flies and mosquitoes buzz around her wounds. She sips rum to deaden the searing pain. Left for dead with a handful of other wounded survivors throughout the night, she thinks of her parents back in the Bay Area and tape records them a farewell message.

 

On the cataclysmic night of Nov. 18, 1978, the Rev. Jim Jones dispatched the death squad to the airstrip and then led more than 900 of his flock -- most of them from the Bay Area and about a third of them children -- into a "white night" that became the worst mass murder/suicide in modern history.

 

Under his perverse sway and the watchful eye of armed guards, residents of his Peoples Temple compound in Guyana either drank cyanide-laced punch from a vat or had it injected into them.

 

The carnage was incomprehensible. So, too, perhaps, was the survival of Jackie Speier. Ten operations and 25 years later, she still carries within her some of the bullets and all of the psychic determination from that experience.

 

"After Guyana, I decided that life gives everybody their fair share of heartache and loss, and mine had just come early in life," she says now. "I was wrong, of course -- life isn't fair. Life is whatever you get, and what you do with it . . . and I've had to learn that. Guyana was just the beginning of a cascade for me."

 

Indeed, Speier's life store is studded with so much hardship that, were she a literary character, the novelist who conceived her story would be mocked for straining credulity.

 

Her misfortune over the years has approximated that of Job, prompting well-wishers to send her more copies than she cares to count of "Why Bad Things Happen to Good People." There is an almost subliminal undercurrent of wariness. She has had the eerie realization that today, at 53, she is the same age Ryan was when assassinated, and has marked the same birthday her first husband, emergency room physician Steve Sierra, was preparing to celebrate when his life was cut short in a car accident.

 

And yet she has followed her own mantra -- "Don't just survive, survive and thrive" -- winning election and re-election to the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors, then the state Assembly and state Senate.

 

She's now forming a campaign to run for lieutenant governor, which she acknowledges is a path toward becoming California's first woman governor.

 

"No, I don't think of myself as unlucky. Believe it or not, I think of myself as fortunate in so many ways. I certainly don't feel wary about the future," she says, suggesting that her Jonestown ordeal drained a lot of fear from her. "After you've once looked death in the eye and survived, really, what is there to fear?"

 

It may be that Jackie Speier developed a knack for scrambling up off the mat after life's loop-throwers as a child in Burlingame, when her father rebuffed her pleas for ballet classes and instead enrolled her in Cahill Judo Academy.

 

An armored truck driver, he wanted his pretty and petite little girl to be able to stand up for herself, so every Wednesday night her parents fed her and her brother liver and sent them off to class, where she earned a brown belt.

 

While the working-class Speier family was apolitical, young Jackie was enamored with the Kennedys, taking Jacqueline as her confirmation name. It was as a teenage volunteer that she came to know and eventually become legal counsel to Ryan, a maverick who practiced investigative politics.

 

When he learned about hunters clubbing baby seals, Ryan journeyed straight to the ice floes to confront them. When he heard horror stories about conditions in Folsom Prison, he had himself admitted undercover as an inmate to see for himself.

 

And when relatives of Peoples Temple members began to accuse Jones of physically and sexually abusing his followers, brainwashing them and holding them against their will in a South American jungle, Ryan bucked the local Democratic establishment and the Jimmy Carter administration's State Department to embark on his own trip.

 

Speier, a lawyer, then 28 and enrolled at long last in her first ballet class, went along with trepidation. Haunted by the harrowing details about Jonestown from defectors and relatives, she drafted a will and made her pending purchase of a condo in the Washington area contingent on surviving the trip.

 

"In those days, there weren't many women legal counsels in Congress, and I worried how it would reflect on women if I appeared reluctant to go," she said.

 

Returning from Jonestown broken and battered, she promptly ran to replace Ryan. She lost. Undeterred, she ran again and ultimately secured a seat as a San Mateo County supervisor and then as a state legislator, typically having to buck powerful political power brokers including Willie Brown, Lou Papan and Quentin Kopp, who derisively nicknamed her "the Poodle."

 

But her personal life was more problematic. She fell in love with fellow Supervisor Ed Bacciocco, the two announcing their engagement in a press conference in 1984, but it ended in a breakup.

 

Instead, she met and married Sierra, becoming the first legislator to give birth in office when her son, Jackson, was born. Then came a miscarriage, then a second miscarriage, in her second trimester. The couple adopted a baby, whom Speier named and joyfully introduced on the Assembly floor, before a fateful call: The birth mother had changed her mind and was going to reclaim the baby.

 

"I called my husband in tears, and I remember asking him, 'Why do these incredibly bad things keep happening to us?' " says Speier, who had been injured when she was hit by a car while jogging near Lake Merced. "And he reminded me of all the good things we had, especially each other."

 

Even that comfort was not to endure. An unlicensed driver with faulty brakes careened through a stop sign in 1994, broadsiding Sierra's car and killing him. Speier, as fate would have it, was two months pregnant with her second child, a daughter, Stephanie. And the couple had let his life insurance policy lapse, forcing her to sell their home.

 

"The loss of my husband was devastating in every way -- emotionally, financially," says Speier, who ranks the loss as at least as traumatic as Jonestown, if not more so. As friends wondered how much more grief she could possibly take, she recalls, "I didn't want to get out of bed."

 

Life has forced her to hone survival strategies, which in recent years, she has publicly shared with other women at various leadership and health conferences.

 

None of the advice she offers is earth-shattering -- compartmentalize, close friends can be much more helpful than therapists, anger and negativity are a waste of time, getting out of bed is a virtue even when you don't feel like it because you never know what blessing that day might have in store -- but it resonates because of her personal saga.

 

She also has found her legislative work therapeutic, and demonstrated an uncanny knack for taking on high-profile issues.

 

"I've never been interested in carrying bills about dotting i's and crossing t's," she says. "Guyana taught me: 'Why bother unless it's really going to make a difference?' I rely on my own outrage meter -- like when I read about an ex-felon who's able to access people's financial data that led me to carry legislation to protect consumer privacy. I figure if it upsets me, it's likely to upset the average person in my district, and it's an issue worth taking on.

 

"And when I carry bills to strengthen child-support enforcement, and suddenly some MD who owes $100,000 in back child support pays attention because if he doesn't pay he risks losing his medical license, frankly, that feels good."

 

Even when her political radar malfunctions -- she was taken aback by the resounding ridicule of her proposal to give 14-year-olds the right to vote,

 

saying it was a symbolic way to trigger discussion about state issues affecting teenagers -- the topics of her legislation generate media attention.

 

So much so that some political observers privately regard her as a publicity hound. Speier is not popular among her fellow legislators, some of whom complain she can be self-righteous and insufficiently respectful of protocol.

 

Although she worked briefly for an electronic game software company between her Assembly and Senate years, she voted with the California Chamber of Commerce only 6 percent of the time, prompting a Wall Street Journal report to query: "Didn't Ms. Speier learn anything at Electronic Arts?" Her response: "It's not like they carved out the consumer heart in me when I went to work" in Silicon Valley.

 

Asked about criticism that she is too uncompromising and not enough of a team player, Speier said she worries about the opposite. She wondered if the mercurial Ryan wouldn't be "dismissive" of her as too much a team player. "The herd instinct is rampant in the political arena today, and if you go against it you can be blackballed, you can be ostracized." She wishes she were more of a lone wolf.

 

Speier has never embarked on a statewide campaign, although she's telegenic enough to do so. Her life story may be a political consultant's dream -- the female equivalent of Arizona Sen. John McCain's POW ordeal -- but it remains largely unknown in vote-heavy Southern California. And it could boomerang -- who knows, voters might fret that electing Speier governor would be like inviting locusts and other misfortunes.

 

Remarried in 2001 to investment consultant Barry Dennis, she now lives in the tony enclave of Hillsborough and can afford extravagances such as a recent shop-till-you-drop with friends to Shanghai. Yet her working-class roots are still with her -- she proudly notes that the turquoise choker she's wearing cost her just 6 dollars at a gem show.

 

Religiously, once a month, she gets together with a circle of close friends calling themselves "The Merry Widows and the Married Widows" -- a club, Speier jokes, that no one wants to join. Convened informally by former "Evening Magazine" TV host Jan Yanehiro, the women are collaborating on a book about how to survive and thrive after loss.

 

But the one book she won't write is a book on Jonestown. She tried a few years ago but, beset by nightmares, decided it wasn't worth reliving the turmoil.

 

And this week, after reflecting on the experience again for the 25th anniversary, Speier hopes to close the box in her mind once more.

 

"In Guyana, I learned a critical lesson about the fragility of our existence and the importance of making every moment count," she says. "It's a lesson I've been given more than once, but I try to be grateful, because it's an awareness some people never receive their entire lives."

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