November 18th marks the 30th anniversary of a deadly ambush and mass suicide in a place called Jonestown Guyana. At least 900 people killed themselves or were forced to drink cyanide laced Kool-Aid after their cult leader signaled it was time to self destruct a compound that Jones and his followers had carved out of a South American jungle.
Jones had promised the remote village would serve as a Utopian society were residents could live closer to God, the problem was Jones thought he was God.
As is the case with all self proclaimed disciples Jones began to abuse his powers. When word of the problems reached the San Francisco bay area, the place where many of Jones’ followers were from, Congressman Leo Ryan decided to investigate.
My father, Don Harris, covered the west coast for NBC Nightly News at the time and decided he would accompany Ryan on his fact finding mission in Guyana.
After some resistance, Jones allowed the media and Ryan’s delegation to visit the compound. For two days with the help of lots of signing and dancing Jones was able to put on a pretty good performance … the people in the cult said they felt safe and happy.
However on the second night one of the cult members slipped my dad a small note. The yellow piece of paper explained that Jonestown was not a happy place, that women and children were being raped and tortured. The author asked that my dad fly him out of Jonestown and my dad agreed to save him a seat.
However the next day my dad decided to take the note and confront Jim Jones on camera. It was the last interview my dad would do. An outraged Jones ordered all of the visitors out of the camp and my dad, his camera crew and Ryan returned to a nearby airstrip. While they waited to board their two planes and tractor pulling a small trailer pulled up next to the aircraft.
A group of men who had been laying down in the trailer suddenly stood up and started shooting. My dad was one of the first people hit. Bob Brown, his camera man, bravely kept rolling during the ambush and I fear recorded his own execution.
Word that something had happened on the runway reached my family in Los Angeles later that day. My mom Shirley called me at my part time job at a drive through dairy but I downplayed her fears saying my dad was more than capable of taking care of himself. He was one of the last reporters in Saigon when it fell and covered the Six Day War in the Middle East.
Unfortunately I was wrong.
We now know Jones specifically ordered my dad killed and there wasn’t a lot of cover out on that runway. My dad’s sound man Steve Sung was able to escape into the nearby jungle but not before a shotgun blast tore away a good part of his forearm. I got to see him several years later at a political convention and was shocked by Steve’s wound. The flesh missing from his arm was a painful reminder that my dad’s death had been very violent.
Thirty years later finds me doing the job that I’ve wanted to do since I was five years old. That’s when my family says I walked into my dad’s Tampa TV station and asked general manager Bob Doty for a job. Bob declined my offer to work but the year after my dad was killed hired me on as a summer intern at WINK TV in Ft. Myers, Florida.
I regret I repaid Bob’s kindness by doing an unauthorized story on security at the Ft. Myers airport. Without any managers permission I tried to sneak some simulated Molotov cocktails passed the baggage screening area and got caught. My idea came from a story my dad had done in Dallas in 1972 when the airport had just started to use magnetometers to search for guns. My dad’s investigative report, done with his bosses approval, showed the equipment was not as effective as it needed to be.
My story showed that I was an idiot.
Trying to emulate your folks is all well and good, but I clearly did not have the experience or maturity to do what I did.
Doty had to fire me and my photographer the next day. The FBI asked that I not return to Florida.
Since 1982 I’ve made other reporter mistakes but have tried to up hold my heritage of fairness and honesty. Like anybody who follows in their folks footsteps you try to keep those qualities alive. I worry a lot of our viewers don’t like us and even worse, don’t trust the news media and I try to change those impression relations every day.
When my dad was killed in 1978 I vowed to become the youngest correspondent to join the network. At the time Tom Brokaw had set the mark at age 36. So I started jumping from market to market but something happened when I got a job here in Spokane. We bought our first house here, had our second baby at Sacred Heart and when we realized there was a park or lake just about every other block we decided to make Spokane our home forever.
After living all over the country we know you’d be hard pressed to find a prettier city with nicer people.
I regret my dad never got to meet my wife Lori. He would be very impressed. He would also be very proud the way his grandchildren Brad and Jessica turned out. Most of all he would be glad 30 years later we have moved on with our lives and we are happy but his daughters, his son and his wife still miss him very much.
