Jonestown Audiotape Project-Interview with Fielding M. McGehee III
May 5th, 2011 | by Peter Saint-Clair
Peter Saint-Clair: You’re probably one of the leading experts on the subject of Jim Jones and Peoples Temple. How did you become so involved with it?
Fielding M. McGehee III: My wife and I became really involved in Peoples Temple starting on November 19, 1978, the day after the deaths in Jonestown, because my wife had two sisters and a nephew who died there. From the start, the information that came out just didn’t fit with the type of people in Peoples Temple that my wife had known. We’ve tried to dig to find out what really happened in Jonestown and who the people were and to present them to the rest of the world as people, rather than as 918 bodies of rotting flesh lying in the jungle sun. So that’s pretty much how we got started.
PSC: Your father-in-law, John Moore, preached a sermon about the humanizing of the victims. Can you tell me a little about that?
FMMIII: At the end of the first week, my father-in-law preached a sermon which was reproduced around the world. His sermon was really the first sermon that tried giving humanity to the people who died in Jonestown. One of the things that he said in that sermon for example was “If I were to try to describe the people who joined who joined Peoples Temple, you would think they were members of this congregation and you would be right because those were the types of people who joined Peoples Temple. They were religious, very many of them were concerned about human suffering, about trying to make a better world and to help the people who needed it in our society.”
PSC: You and your wife, Dr. Rebecca Moore, work for the Jonestown Institute. Is that something you guys created?
FMMIII: Yes, the Jonestown Institute exists mainly in our heads. We do have stationary and stuff like that, but basically the office consists of a home office, inside our house in San Diego. My wife is the chair of the Department of Religious Studies at San Diego State University and we run the website through that, so it really is just us. We do get a lot of help, though, from people like you, people who volunteer to transcribe tapes or to digitize the tapes, and people who have helped us locate and to transcribe some of the primary sources that appear on our website.
PSC: And that includes former members, survivors and people like that?
FMMIII: I think probably the strongest part of the website is the section we have on the website called “Personal Reflections.” That’s the place where former members of Peoples Temple can come to talk about their experiences in Peoples Temple. And it really is a forum for anyone to come and say what it is that they have to say. They can be critical, they can set things straight, we are open to all comers. The only thing that we really request and actually insist upon is that the people who write for us are respectful of the people who died and also of the other survivors.
PSC: The FBI recovered more than 1000 tapes from Jonestown. Can you tell me a little bit about what is contained in those tapes?
FMMIII: The actual number of audio tapes was closer to about 950, and to give you a little bit of an idea of what the tapes contained, 50 of them are blank which they picked up. Another 150 are recorded music; in other words if someone picked up a cassette that somebody had just made of Rock ‘n’ Roll or R&B or soul music, and if it was lying on the ground and they didn’t know what it was, they just considered it part of the Jonestown tape. There are about 700-750 tapes that have some kind of conversation on them or otherwise have something besides music. Those are the tapes that we’re most interested in because they give an audio history of Peoples Temple. As you get closer to the end of Peoples Temple history on November 18, 1978, the more complete the history is because what happened was they recorded over old tape. You’ll have a tape was a sermon back in the 1970s and if it was just lying around or not being used for anything, they would stick it in the recorder for Jim Jones to read the daily news which he did a lot, especially towards the end of the time in Jonestown. But going backwards in time, just as recently as this week I transcribed a tape that was from 1966, which is about 12 years before the deaths in Jonestown. It was one of the earliest tapes that had been recovered from the Temples years in California and actually one of the earliest tapes all together. There are only two or three tapes from Indiana that we’ve been able to identify so far.
PSC: Have all the tapes been released under the FOIA? I ask because I know for a while there were some you couldn’t get because of Larry Layton’s trial.
FMMIII: Initially, most of the tapes were available for release. The FBI had to process and go through and listen to the tapes before they would release any of them, but there were 53 tapes that were withheld for a while. One tape that was initially withheld was called the “death tape,” and that’s the tape that Jim Jones recorded on November 18th as the deaths in Jonestown were occurring. It’s a 45 minute tape and it’s heavily edited, but edited by Jim Jones himself and it records some of the things he’s saying and the one lone voice of dissent, Christine Miller, and of the other people in Jonestown. But yeah, there were 53 that were initially withheld, but they’re all out now. The other thing to mention is that the FBI reviewed all of the tapes with one thing in mind. All they were really interested in was finding the stuff that could be used in the trial against Larry Layton.
The name's Chris writing under the nom de plume 
Tina Thomas March 27th, 2011 at 5:42 pm
I remember when that happened. I was in high school and it shocked us more than the Iran Hostage crisis did. It would be interesting to hear those tapes, I think. Maybe someone will use them in a documentary someday to shed more light on what led up to that tragedy for the general public. Thank you for sharing this interview, Peter!