{"id":70917,"date":"2017-10-27T09:03:10","date_gmt":"2017-10-27T16:03:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70917"},"modified":"2025-10-23T17:19:36","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T00:19:36","slug":"a-hope-in-the-seen-leo-ryans-victory-at-jonestown-resounds-today","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/jonestown.sdsu.edu\/?page_id=70917","title":{"rendered":"A Hope in the Seen: Leo Ryan\u2019s Victory at Jonestown Resounds Today"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Americans are accustomed to thinking, or at least feeling, that Leo Ryan’s\u00a0trip to Jonestown in November 1978 was a defeat for the congressman. Commentaries on the video footage of the ambush at Port Kaituma never fail to mention that the California Democrat was murdered by Peoples Temple gunmen. Most documentaries about Jonestown include an image of Ryan that suggests abject failure: His head, like the rest of his corpse, is planted on the ground on the dusty airstrip.\u00a0\u00a0No historians, journalists, and screenwriters have emerged to challenge the idea that Ryan was a beautiful loser at best and a naive son-of-a-bitch at worst.<\/p>\n

I too thought Ryan had failed. I grew up in Ryan’s district in the Peninsula in the early-to-mid-1970s and covered the Bay Area congressional delegation for the San Francisco Examiner and the Contra Costa Times in the late 1990s. Then I read books such as\u00a0Raven<\/em>\u00a0by Tim Reiterman with John Jacobs and\u00a0A Thousand Lives\u00a0<\/em>by Julia Scheeres. Buried within them was a statistic that jumped out at me: Ryan saved the lives of 25 people at Jonestown. Fourteen of the 15 defectors he led out of the jungle commune returned to the United States safely. Another 11 residents used his visit on the morning of the 18th<\/sup>\u00a0to slip away.<\/p>\n

Perhaps the conventional wisdom about Ryan was wrong. Certainly, members of Congress said as much. At a hearing of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in May 1979, Rep. Cardiss Collins, an Illinois Democrat, said Ryan was the ultimate champion for civil rights for blacks. \u201cHe had gone there to see about the well-being of black people,\u201d she said. \u201cWe who are black owe very large debt of gratitude for his concern that our people were not living the life they had hoped for a while there. He gave his life so that they could know real freedom in this country.\u201d In November 1983, Congress posthumously bestowed a Congressional Gold Medal to Ryan, one of the nation\u2019s two highest civilian awards.<\/p>\n

Off and on over the years, critics have trotted out another line of attack against Ryan: his trip precipitated the mass murder and suicides of November 18; if he had not disturbed the community, Jonestown would have endured. But this argument is little more than victim-blaming. It is like saying Dr. Martin Luther King\u2019s attempt to desegregate Birmingham, Alabama, in 1963 precipitated Bull Connor\u2019s order for his police to use fire hoses, billy clubs and dogs on student protesters. Like the students, Ryan was unarmed and attacked in an ambush rather than in a fair fight. And like Connor, Jones had trained his lieutenants to respond with overwhelming force; he had run suicide drills with members of his community for 14 months and conducted a suicide-loyalty test in San Francisco in late 1975. As author Jeff Guinn author of\u00a0The Road to Jonestown<\/em>, said, if Jones had not used Ryan\u2019s trip as a pretext to order the deaths of everyone, he would have found another one.<\/p>\n

In hope of seeing Ryan in a new light, for the last six months I have read old articles from local and regional newspapers. The clips, which can be found at\u00a0newspapers.com<\/a>, paint a fuller and richer picture of Ryan than has been presented so far. That won\u2019t surprise anyone with more than a passing interest in history. But what was surprising was the number of political victories Ryan had racked up before he arrived in Guyana. A few headlines from the era will convey the extent to which Ryan triumphed among voters, lawmakers, and bureaucrats alike.<\/p>\n