That former congressman John Burton lived until 92 instead of dying at 45 came about through an act of political cowardice. His obituaries, unsurprisingly, omit this, the most important moment of not only his political career but his life.
In 1978, his colleague in the House of Representatives and fellow California Democrat Leo Ryan invited him on a mission to check up on their Bay Area constituents living in the South American jungle.
Indeed, Burton’s constituents begged him to act, too.
Steven Loomis pleaded with him to investigate conditions at Jonestown, the jungle outpost of San Francisco-based Peoples Temple. Jim Jones, the charismatic leader of the group, held his 18-year-old fiancée, Tina Grimm, prisoner, he explained to Burton.
“I have good reason to believe that she is being forced to stay against her will,” he wrote his congressman. “It has been two months now, and this is my last resort.”
Burton never went. Ryan never came back — nor did Tina Grimm.
They died, along with more than 900 others, in Guyana.
Burton not only did not help those people. He hurt them.
Gunmen from the Peoples Temple murdered Ryan and four others on a grassy airstrip outside of Jonestown. Grimm, presumably, drank the cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid distributed by Jones’s flunkies that took the lives of nearly all of the 918 who died on November 18, 1978.
Burton not only did not help those people. He hurt them.
Along with his brother, Congressman Phil Burton, he spearheaded a political machine that used Peoples Temple for rent-a-rallies and campaign volunteers. In turn, Jim Jones won legitimacy from the San Francisco power brokers.
I came across one piece of evidence for how this process worked during the crisis in 1978 while researching Cult City: Jim Jones, Harvey Milk, and 10 Days That Shook San Francisco, a book I wrote years ago that Skyhorse just reissued in paperback. A list compiled by a Peoples Temple apparatchik detailed “support letters to the Burtons” written by members conscripted for that purpose. The 1978 document noted “comprehensive letters about the Project,” i.e., Jonestown, “asking that they not be influenced negatively towards us or aid to Guyana.”
The recipients list Leo Ryan and the Burton brothers. Ryan responded one way to the propaganda; the Burtons, another.
So much led to that.
On September 25, 1976, the Burton brothers attended a testimonial dinner for Jim Jones as honored guests. “Congressman John Burton lobbied the governor to appoint Jones to the high-profile board of regents, which oversaw California’s sprawling public university system,” David Talbot wrote in Season of the Witch. Peoples Temple even gave him a codename in its radio communications from Jonestown: Mr. Bellino.
Of course, others made fools of themselves in more public ways.
Mayor George Moscone, Burton’s best friend dating back to their school days, appointed Jones to the city’s housing authority commission. Willie Brown dubbed Jones “a close personal friend and highly trusted brother in the struggle for liberation” in a letter imploring Fidel Castro to treat the cult leader’s travels in Cuba as a state visit. Harvey Milk wrote Guyanese President Forbes Burnham, “Such greatness I have found at Jim Jones’ Peoples’ Temple.” Carlton B. Goodlett infamously defended Jones after the massacre, saying he could see “no wrong” in him and depicting the mass murderer as “a man who really attempted to practice the dogmas of Christianity.”
The city named its convention center for George Moscone. Willie Brown lends his name to a section of the Bay Bridge. Milk’s name appears on a terminal at San Francisco airport. Carlton B. Goodlett Way now gives city hall its address.
In this spirit of obfuscation and the perpetual Opposite Day celebrated in San Francisco, California media outlets, such as SFGate.com, KPIX, and The Sacramento Bee, censored any mention of Jim Jones or Peoples Temple in obituaries of Burton when he died earlier this week. So did national ones, such as the Associated Press,
When you managed Nancy Pelosi’s campaign, served as chairman of the California Democratic Party, and advanced progressive causes in one office or another since 1965, the media gods forget your sins — just not your name.
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