November 12, 1998, San Francisco Chronicle, Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite - They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor, by Michael Taylor,

November 12, 1998, San Francisco Chronicle, Jones Captivated S.F.'s Liberal Elite - They were late to discover how cunningly he curried favor, by Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer

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.