Word: jonestown
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Dates: during 1978-1978
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Almost as amazing as the events in Jonestown is the apparent willingness of the American people to foot the bill for this madness. That's carrying the concept of collective guilt...
...very appropriate that the articles concerning the est extravaganza and the events in Jonestown appeared in the same issue [Dec. 4]. I dedicated myself to est for 1½ years. Only when I moved to a place where there were no other est people around was I able to think clearly again...
Many school and community leaders think that extensive press coverage of the Jonestown massacre may have played a role in the deaths. Others see a deeper malaise. They talk of a workaholic climate in Ridgewood's school system, which sends 80% of its graduates on to college, many to first-rank universities. "The pressures are high," says Richard Roukema, chief of psychiatry at Ridgewood's Valley Hospital. "You add to that a high divorce rate and a high number of dead marriages, and you see a lot of youngsters in isolation, not relating to their parents...
Charles A. Krause, the Washington Post's South American correspondent who had escaped from the Port Kai-tuma ambush with a superficial bullet wound, managed to join the pool of reporters that returned to the Jonestown site with Guyanese authorities. He was filing from his hotel room in Georgetown when Post Executive Editor Benjamin C. Bradlee recalled him to Washington. There Krause holed up in a suite at the Madison Hotel and began working. "It was sort of like Georgetown," Krause recalled. "I was being held captive." At first dictating his recollections and later doing his own typing, Krause...
Considering the journalistic haste with which they were assembled, Guyana Massacre and The Suicide Cult are solid documentaries. "It isn't War and Peace," admits Harwood, co-author of the Berkley book. Krause and his co-authors offer more sophisticated speculation about the psychological motives for Jonestown. One of the chapters is entitled "Scoop," a reference to Evelyn Waugh's satiric novel about journalists who cover an elusive crisis in a backward country. "A friend told me I would never write a book without a gun to my head," said Krause. Perhaps more editors and publishers should...