This is a special part of the one city, one book extravaganza. Thank you for being so wonderful to work with and allowing us to present this incredible panel today. I want to give a special thanks and remembrance to jim jones, junior, who was hopeful to be with us today. He sends you and the panelists all his best, but he was unable to participate to health reasons. We will send out some good love to jim. The California Historical society is deeply honored to hold the peoples temple collection. The California Historical society was chosen as the repository in 1983. We have worked tirelessly with many survivors and many historians and students whatonate to learn happened over the intervening years. We are proud to be the largest repository of archival materials relating to the peoples temple and jonestown, whether it be the digitization of separate films were over 50 different collections contained within the peoples temple broader collection, we are honored to steward it. We invite you all into research it. All of ourly honored panelists have taken advantage of this collection. This is the work that you help us do, preserving, whether they be f. B. I. Files, photographs of those lost in jonestown. Your support enables our work. We are also honored to invite you after the program back to our library over my right hand shoulder. It is the Research Library many of you have used. It is the portal to our remarkable collections. Jamie henderson has lovingly laid out a number of pieces from the collection, including a number of letters david used to write his book. If you have not seen or touched that part of history, come back afterwards and hold history in your hands. It is even more powerful. Im honored to be here today and moderate the panel. Im going to introduce my wonderful colleagues up here and get the conversation going. Have them talk among themselves and then take questions from all of you. We are deeply honored that cspan2 is here. We are under lights which means we cannot see you well. You are beautiful because your moke to the mesh mostly backlit. To moderate and have questions flow, you will have found little pencils and blank cards. If you have questions, please feel free to jot one down. Raise your hand discreetly and one of my great team will collect them and i will ask them. What i have found is that some of the questions start to lay atop each other so we can answer a lot of questions in good time. Introduce to your right and my left, starting with john cobb. John is one of the few surviving members of the peoples temple. He was born into the temple. This value was part of the first pioneering members who moved out from indianapolis to Redwood Valley in california. They were there for the beginnings of reverend jones attempts at truly establishing a church. He was a member until the groups tragic end in 1978. He was in georgetown with the Basketball Team at that time. Tragically lost 10 members of his family in jonestown. He is currently writing a book about his story. We are all wishing him well. The completion date says 2016, and so it shall be. Right, wet and youre are thrilled to welcome marshall kilduff. He walked over from the chronicle building on fifth and mission. He has a long career of writing mostly for the chronicle but especially a very powerful piece that was not accepted by the chronicle in 1978. He has given voice to politics , government or lack there of, development, city affairs. And has been one of the lionsable true lanes of the San Francisco chronicle. He matriculated from the lovely campus on the old farm in palo alto. And joins us today to add a great depth of narrative. He coauthored suicide cult, history of peoples temple and jim jones. Next marshall is david talbot, the man who wrote season of the witch. There could seem to be no more as the choice generations fade who actively remember living here and being here in november of 1978. Season of the witch was published in 2012 and has a deep resonance with us still and is being read widely this week. Journalist american we are honored to call our own in california, a trailblazer and entrepreneur. He was the founder and and editorinchief of one of the worlds first web magazines, salon. Com. You might have heard about it he figured out the web long before anybody else, to his esteemed credit. Are you wearing your glasses . Look at you. I have sensitive eyes. Forgive me. When we talk later, i will take my glasses off. He has lovely eyes. Into an entireea way to consume knowledge with salon. Com. After leaving salon, he increased his reputation as a n historian. We are welcoming him into the tribal unit. He just finished a book on the kennedy brothers. Which i cannot wait to read. He has also worked as an editor for mother jones and rights for time, new yorker, rolling stone, and many other publications. Terms ofnot least in big heart, personality, and so ul is eugene smith. He had just turned 21 years old prior to november 1978. Im going to read his words because they are so beautiful. Forge thatwith the sealed me and dictated my immediate future at that time. My only responsibility was to survive. There was no place to hide or disappear. Eugene lost his mother, his wife and his infant son that day. , he has spent the rest of his life dedicated to remembering and persevering. His responsibility was to survive and bring us knowledge from the depths of his heart and memory. He turned to writing. Weinteresting part of what will talk about today is how you begin to write about this weather from memory or historic perspective. His recent articles include one for the jonestown report. He is at work on a book. I think 2016 is going to be a big year. It will be. It shall be. You have heard it here at the California Historical society. Please join me in welcoming my incredible panel. [applause] im going to ask david to provide a brief historical context. Share with us the time, as you so beautifully show us, starting after the summer of love and the rise of the counterculture. That helps us understand the rise of peoples temple and the of reverend jones. My new book is the devils chessboard, the dark history of the c. I. A. Is there any other . Temple,ext for peoples you have to look at some of what is going on in the city already. The social disruption, the re out theent that tou heart of black San Francisco. That was the seed in the garden establish histo political roots in this town and begin to have wide influence over the liberal leadership of San Francisco. I dont think he could have done that if the fillmore had not been hollowed out by the San Francisco redevelopment agency. It tore out the heart and soul of what was once known as the harlem of the west. A vibrant middle class black community. Nightclubs, stores, houses, and so on. My own son, joe talbot, is making a movie to continue that legacy. It looks at the legacy of that, the last black man in San Francisco. A this day, you have declining African American population it feels sidelined and robbed of its portable power. That definitely was the feeling at the time when jim jones came here from Redwood Valley, he was moving into a political vacuum. There were some African American churches. But he became such a powerful force because he was a master of manipulating people. He was a master of finding out what politicians weaknesses were. What his turn ons were at exploiting them. Of course, he delivered bodies and votes. Vote early, vote often. We can talk about the election of 1975 as a key turning point, which georgeace in moscone narrowly won election, do to voter fraud. San francisco has to analyze what it did to the african theican community, allowed negro removal as James Baldwin called it later, to happen. It was into that vacuum that jim jones moved. Thank you so much, david. I am often reminded of that wonderful James Baldwin quote that American History is more beautiful and more terrible than anything anyone has ever written about it. Horse ofontext of the firstrenewal, targeting the japaneseamerican communities which just had come back from being incarcerated at camp and then simultaneously the African American communities as well, many of whom had moved in during the war ironically to places held by the japaneseamerican community. Incredible cycle of displacement. A man with incredible charisma, charm, and power comes in. I like to ask john and eugene to share some firsthand experiences with the church in helping us better understand from their perspectives. John first. John my experience is unique in that there are probably two or three other people that were born into peoples temple still living. That is what i knew from day one. Most of the things i have read of the things we hear and talk about have been factual things. What happened on this date or that date. What has been missed was the daytoday occurrence of peoples functionedd how it in peoples temple. Not jim jones. There were several people that made that temple function. It would have functioned perfectly without jim jones, even better. Toward the end, he was incapable of doing anything. Of what a whole story happened day today in jonestown. How people lived, what drove people there. There is a sense that people were like mindless people following a cult. It was not that way at all. Many people i know still alive today are very successful and did not have a problem integrating back into society because we were not that much different at all. One of the things it offered, several things it offered, a lot of people say was involved politically. That was a big driving force for it. I look at the same things happening today. The things that people are looking for today, education, health care, housing, being able to put food on the table. Once you became a member of peoples temple, you did not have to worry about that anymore. Of course, everyone wanted to make the world a better place. But those basic needs were provided for you, at some cost, yes. I have talked to a person that i knew whose family was part of peoples temple for probably 20 years. She has a few kids and grandkids now. I saw her a couple of years back. She said i wish there was Something Like peoples temple now. Kids today need that structure and purpose. Granted, there were a lot of terrible things that happened. But the reason why people were there and what they did, the functionality, how they lived, has been missed. Part of the thing that has driven me to write is that the people who are no longer with us, their story has never been told. They died and were labeled as casualties of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Why were you there . Of course, some of the people didnt want to be there. Had they had the choice to leave, they would have. But there was so much more that was missed to that whole story. That is not been told. The negative and the craziness of jim jones has been repeated endlessly. I feel where we are in our culture in time, people are ready to hear what else happened there other than the facts and the end of it. That is what has driven me to write. That is where i am at with it. Like i said, i was born there. I have a different understanding of it. I saw it for what it really was behind the scenes. A lot of people saw jim jones as rophet, healer, god. I never did. A lot of things he perpetrated he could do i knew from day one he could not. My mother wanted a better life for her kids. Removed from indianapolis against my fathers will. He eventually followed us. There were other reasons for it. That is my story i am doing a good job of telling. I think it will be interesting. It will be a lot different from what is out there so far. I would love to come back to some of those stories about the in to Day Community formed the 70s when we hoped and believed we were all created equal. Thank you, sir. Eugene . Eugene i came into the temple when i was 15. The summer of ninthgrade, coming in. I had always been politically inclined because my mother was. In addition to that, she was always searching for that religion. In detroit, we were part of Aretha Franklins fathers church. We had been catholic, we had been baptists, we had been nondenominational. Every six months, it was a new religion. I basically revolted around 12 or 13 and i said im done with it. She had heard about jim jones. I went to hear him speak at irwin junior high in fresno. I thought it was interesting. The sunglasses threw me off. I didnt really come back until i was 18. Then i moved directly into a commune in San Francisco. I stayed behind stage initially. For me the temple was a candy , store in the sense that there were no limits on what i could do. There were no limits to who i could come in contact with. There was no end to my learning. In seventh grade, i was already reading at a 12th grade level. Coming into the peoples temple at 18 having a printing press, a woodshop, a construction crew to get you in the community to meet all these different people, it all seemed normal. What made it seemed so normal is brown at aee willie meeting or jane fonda. We are not all being fooled. Something about this has to be real. So you assumed. What happens after time is that jim jones became background noise. What you felt responsible for were the other people there. They were your family. You felt responsible towards them. A lot of people stay because they did not want to leave their family there alone. They didnt want them to be abused or possibly hurt or interrogated because you left. Some people stayed out of guilt, some people stayed out of responsibility. Some stayed out of love for other human beings to protect them and be at their call, so to speak. We never called old people, old people. We called them seniors. They were the repository of knowledge. When they spoke, you are expected to listen. If they needed assistance, you are expected to assist. They passed on their knowledge to us. We passed on our knowledge to the younger ones. Jonestown was a little bit different. Getting there was an adventure. Being there was an adventure. A lot of times, you were working on adrenaline. Even when you did know it was real, there was a certain urgency to it because you were being awakened out of a dead sleep and running to the pavilion to see what was happening. Were we under attack . Were they going to take the children . Were they going to bomb us off the map as if this never happened . Even if you knew that, there was a certain fright. My first night coming to jonestown, we are going through potholes which were huge because of the red clay. It could not see the jungle was so black. You only see what was in front of you. You could hear the pavilion miles away. People yelling and screaming. It was close to venezuela. That is why we were there. It was a disputed area between venezuela and guyana. Having a religious community with an Agricultural Mission justified guyana seizing that property. Jumping off the trailer and going to the brazilian, seeing people you had not seen for years or thought had left but have not, seeing my wife who was just weeks away from delivering. I had not seen her in four months. I had not seen my mother in over two years. Friends i had not seen longer than that in some cases. Getting there and acclimating was easy. Staying there acclimating was very difficult. That is it. Thank you. Marshall, you started work in probably about 1976. Intensively it seems in january of 1977, working as a reporter for the chronicle investigating the peoples temple church. Wanting to write about it for the chronicle but not accepted. David details that closely in terms of how close the chronicle editorial leadership was to jim jones. Was it 1978 . 1977, publishing his piece. Marshall if you are trying to get me fired, you are doing a very good job. Let me try to strike a quick note of contrast between these idealism driven accounts of the life in the church and the way it would look to a reporter was nothing like that. This church was hostile, very enclosed, didnt want to deal with the world except on its own strict structured terms. It went everywhere on its own. It beingd mentions flattened by redevelopment, that was part of the problem. But the church came in as a total unit. They did some recruiting. But they were by and large themselves, on buses, from Redwood Valley. It was not a totally homegrown or open organization. It was especially true if you were a reporter asking questions. Can i look your temple . Can i meet your people . It would be very difficult to be a casual joiner, inquirer, or historian. It was very circumscribed and founded world they lived in. Boss. Ronicle flattered my a new guy on the job would want to know that and be accepted. He went over and he was. When i went to the church, they sat me in the front row right next to my boss. It was very clear the temple was in charge of the deal and dont worry about it. That was not so much my problem as the aspects of the church that were the troubling part of the story that i am sure will be in the books they are writing. That was your life was really not your own in many ways that broke up families. Your money got turned over. If you are a woman, you are at a special disadvantage, to put it delicately. There was a lot of faith healing to win over folks. It was not always as idealistic and fordseeking forwardseeking as many of the ideals you would want to have. As this came out the church ran , away. They went to guyana because their time was up in San Francisco. Politicians saw what they wanted. They took what they wanted. When the whole thing fell apart, it was like, i did not know. You cant blame me. It is a whole other side of the story. This absentmindedness, absence of history forgetfulness and , choosing what you want to remember to me is one of the worst parts about this experience. There is no memorial in San Francisco to this thing. When the bodies were brought back, those that were not claimed are now in a corner of an oakland cemetery. Just pulled away from the story. Politicos are still hard at it. I doubt they want to talk about this. There are a lot of names that gone through this story that have not accounted for it, to put it politely. The story continues to have fingers into the present. As david said also, San Fran