The Road to Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple

by Jeff Guinn

Peoples Temple tape-recorded almost all of Jones’s sermons and addresses at meetings, including this one, his last. He began, “How very much I’ve tried to give you the good life.” Jones’s voice was clear, his tone resigned. There was about to be a catastrophe involving Congressman Leo Ryan’s plane, he explained. “One of those people on the plane” was “gonna shoot the pilot, and down comes that plane into the jungle.” It wouldn’t be the fault of anyone in Jonestown, Jones said—“I didn’t plan it, but I know it’s gonna happen.” But they still would be blamed. Soon, their enemies would “parachute in here on us.” Jones proposed a solution that would spare the Jonestown children from enslavement and the settlement seniors from slaughter: “My opinion is that we be kind to children and kind to seniors and take the potion like they used to take in ancient Greece, and step over quietly, because we are not committing suicide. It’s a revolutionary act. We can’t go back. They won’t leave us alone. They’re now going back to tell more lies, which means more congressmen. And there’s no way, no way we can survive.”