Leo Joseph Ryan Jr. (May 5, 1925 – November 18, 1978) was an American politician and teacher. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented California's 11th congressional district in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1973 until his assassination in the Jonestown massacre in 1978. Before that, he served in the California State Assembly, representing the state's 27th district.
After the 1965 Watts riots, Ryan took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions in the Los Angeles area. In 1970, he launched an investigation into California prisons. While presiding as chairman of the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform, he used a pseudonym to enter Folsom State Prison as an inmate. During his time in Congress, Ryan traveled to Newfoundland to investigate the practice of seal hunting. He was also known for his vocal criticism of the lack of congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), and co-authored the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, passed in 1974, which requires the president of the United States to report covert CIA activity to Congress.
In 1978, Ryan traveled to Guyana to investigate claims that people were being held against their will at the Peoples Temple Jonestown settlement. He was shot and killed at an airstrip on November 18, as he and his party were attempting to leave. Shortly after the airstrip shootings, 909 members of the Jonestown settlement died in a mass murder–suicide by drinking cyanide-laced Flavor Aid. Ryan was the second of two sitting members of the U.S. House of Representatives to be targeted in successful assassinations while in office, after James M. Hinds in 1868.
Ryan was posthumously awarded the Congressional Gold Medal in 1983.
Leo Joseph Ryan Jr. was born in Lincoln, Nebraska. During his early life, his family moved frequently, through Illinois, Florida, New York, Wisconsin, and Massachusetts. Ryan graduated from Campion Jesuit High School in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, in 1943. He then received V-12 officer training at Bates College and served with the United States Navy from 1943 to 1946 as a submariner.
Ryan graduated from Nebraska's Creighton University with a B.A. in 1949 and an M.S. in 1951. He served as a teacher, school administrator and South San Francisco city councilman from 1956 to 1962. He taught English at Capuchino High School, and chaperoned the marching band in 1961 to Washington, D.C., to participate in President John F. Kennedy's inaugural parade. Ryan was inspired by Kennedy's call to service in his inaugural address and decided to run for higher office.
In 1962, Ryan was elected mayor of South San Francisco. He served less than a year before being elected to the California State Assembly, winning the 27th district race by 20,000 votes. He had run for the Assembly's 25th district in 1958, but lost to Republican Louis Francis. Ryan served as a delegate to the Democratic National Convention in 1964 and 1968 and held his Assembly seat until 1972, when he was elected to the United States House of Representatives. He was reelected three times.
Ryan aide Jackie Speier, who later served in Congress, described Ryan's style of investigation as "experiential legislating". After the Watts riots of 1965, Ryan went to the area and took a job as a substitute school teacher to investigate and document conditions there. In 1970, using a pseudonym, Ryan had himself arrested, detained, and strip-searched to investigate conditions in California's prisons. He stayed for ten days as an inmate at Folsom State Prison while presiding as chairman on the Assembly committee that oversaw prison reform.
As a California assemblyman, Ryan also chaired legislative subcommittee hearings and presided over hearings involving Tom Lantos, his eventual successor in the House. Ryan pushed through significant educational policies and authored what came to be known as the Ryan Act, which established an independent regulatory commission to monitor educational credentialing in California.
During his time in Congress, Ryan went to Newfoundland with James Jeffords to investigate the inhumane killing of seals, and became famous for his vocal criticism of the lack of Congressional oversight of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), authoring the Hughes–Ryan Amendment, which would have required extensive CIA notification of Congress about covert operations. Ryan once told Dick Cheney that leaking a state secret was an appropriate way for a member of Congress to block an "ill-conceived operation". He supported Patty Hearst, and along with Senator S. I. Hayakawa, delivered Hearst's application for a presidential commutation to the Pardon Attorney.
In 1978, reports of widespread abuse and human rights violations in Jonestown at the Peoples Temple, led by cult leader Jim Jones, began to filter out of its Guyana enclaves. Ryan was friends with the father of former Temple member Bob Houston, whose mutilated body was found near train tracks on October 5, 1976, three days after a taped telephone conversation with Houston's ex-wife in which they discussed his leaving the Temple. Ryan's interest was further aroused by the custody battle between the leader of a "Concerned Relatives" group, Timothy Stoen, and Jones following a Congressional "white paper" by Stoen detailing the events. Ryan was one of 91 congressmen to write Guyanese Prime Minister Forbes Burnham on Stoen's behalf.
After reading an article in the San Francisco Examiner, Ryan declared his intention to go to Jonestown, an agricultural commune in Guyana where Jones and roughly 1,000 Temple members resided. His decision was also influenced both by the Concerned Relatives group, which consisted primarily of Californians, as did the Temple, and by his own distaste for social injustice. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, while he investigated, the United States Department of State "repeatedly stonewalled Ryan's attempts to find out what was going on in Jonestown" and told him that "everything was fine".
The State Department characterized possible United States government action in Guyana against Jonestown as a potential "legal controversy", but Ryan at least partially rejected this viewpoint. In a later article in The Chronicle, Ryan was described as having "bucked the local Democratic establishment and the Jimmy Carter administration's State Department" in order to prepare for his own investigation.
In November 1978, Ryan led an investigative delegation to Jonestown as part of a government investigation, with governmental permission and funding, in his role as chair of a congressional subcommittee with jurisdiction over U.S. citizens living in foreign countries. He asked the other members of the Bay Area congressional delegation to join him on the trip to Jonestown, but they all declined. Ryan also invited his friend, Indiana Congressman and future Vice President Dan Quayle, who had served with Ryan on the Government Operations Committee, but Quayle was unable to go.
The investigative group was initially to consist only of press and a few members of Ryan's staff, but once the media learned of the trip the entourage ballooned to include, among others, concerned relatives of Temple members. Ryan traveled to Jonestown with 17 Bay Area relatives of Peoples Temple members, several newspaper reporters and an NBC TV team. When Jones's legal counsel attempted to impose restrictive conditions on the visit, Ryan responded that he would go to Jonestown whether Jones permitted it or not. Ryan's stated position was that a "settlement deep in the bush might be reasonably run on authoritarian lines" but that its residents must be allowed to come and go as they pleased. He further asserted that if the place had become "a gulag", he would do everything he could to "free the captives."
On November 14, Ryan left Washington and arrived in Georgetown, the capital of Guyana, 150 miles (240 km) from Jonestown, with his congressional delegation of government officials, media representatives and some members of the "Concerned Relatives."