Word: ryan
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recent years by outbreaks of violence and turmoil (see following story). It was horrified two weeks ago when it awoke to the realization that it had nourished the Peoples Temple, an ostensibly humanitarian and religious cult whose leader, Jim Jones, had ordered the assassination of California Congressman Leo Ryan and then led 911 followers to their deaths in a frenzy of mass suicide and murder in remote Guyana. But San Francisco's shock was more centrally focused last week from the moment when a tearful Dianne Feinstein, president of the board of supervisors, stepped outside her city hall office...
...course it isn't, and so of course the headlines began screaming again soon enough: Guyana, Leo Ryan, Jim Jones. Then George Moscone, and sanity and structure gave way to the theater of the absurd. Nothing profound, naturally--simply a reminder that the neat little island remains surrounded by a world that knows and cares little about the gentilities of life in Cambridge...
Then a truck drove up to the pavilion. Said Clayton: "The people in the truck rushed up to Jones. He announced that Congressman Ryan was dead and we had to do what we had to do. He told the nurses to hurry with the potion. He told them to take care of the babies. He said any survivors would be castrated and tortured by the Guyanese army...
Inevitably, bitterness erupted over whether the tragedy at Jonestown could have been prevented. Members of Congressman Ryan's saddened staff claimed that the U.S. embassy in Georgetown should have known of the cult's potential for violence and warned him. Sorrowing relatives of the victims charged that both the State Department and FBI should have long ago heeded their warnings about Jonestown. Yet both agencies had a valid point in claiming that there are important legal restrictions against the Government's prying into the private affairs of Americans living abroad, as well as constitutional protection of groups claiming...
...gravest threat imaginable to such a group is for someone to try to take members out of the 'family,' " says U.C.L.A. Psychologist David Wellisch. Leo Ryan's mission to Guyana may have been just such a threat, the spark that triggered the tragedy...