Marian Buchanan

Just posted one of those articles in its original English, on the ThomasGBuchanan.com site: https://thomasgbuchanan.com/articles/the-day-they-tried-to-murder-castro/ It's about the similarities between the JFK assassination and the attempts on Castro's life, which, according to the Cuban government official my father interviewed, were instigated by the CIA.

Update to the ThomasGBuchanan.com website: Just posted the English version of an article my father wrote in 1970, published in Spanish in Triunfo, for which my sister just found the original manuscript. The article is about the similarities between the way JFK was assassinated and the methods used in the assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, which the Cuban Ministry of the Interior official told my father were planned and equipped by the CIA. https://thomasgbuchanan.com/articles/the-day-they-tried-to-murder-castro/

RE: is Willens account correct? Well, the way this part is worded is misleading: "Buchanan had emigrated to France after he lost his Washington job as a journalist when his Communist Party membership became known." It makes it sound like he immediately went from being sacked to moving to France. The truth is, he was sacked a week before his first child was born, in 1948, and didn't move to France until 1961. In terms of my father implicating LBJ along with the Texas oil men, I'd have to re-read the book to be sure, but as I recall, he expressed that such an implication would be too fantastic. Mind you, it's possible this was an avoidant way of saying something without saying it, to satisfy the publishers' liability concerns. More information is needed to be sure. (My sister is currently searching for me, for the removed pages mentioned in the publishers' liability report that we've found in my father's papers.) In terms of Willens' perspective on why he was granting my father an audience, did Katzenbach tell Willens that he was sending my father over to him to get him out of his office without bad press, or was that just Willens' guess? Either way, my father wouldn't know their thoughts or motives. ( I don't see why Katzenbach couldn't just get my father out of his office the usual way: by politely thanking him for his thoughts and indicating that his time was up--if necessary, saying he had another appointment. So the reason Willens gives seems contrived.) From my father's perspective, both Katzenbach and Willens were polite and accommodating and appeared willing to listen. He wasn't deluded that they would adopt his views on the JFKA, but he was appreciative of them taking the time to listen. And it was Willens who invited my father to file his report (not yet published as a book) with the Warren Commission. Here's how my father mentions Willens in his book (in the Author's Note in the front matter): The "representative of the President's Commission" is of course Willens. RE: Did my father find it strange... My father was not referred to Edward Kennedy by Robert Kennedy, but rather it was his editor at L'Express who had arranged a meeting with Senator Kennedy. (He may or may not have tried first to get a meeting with RFK -- I don't have information on that either way.) It might not have seemed strange that someone at that level of government would delegate the meeting to someone else, and the fact that it was to the Deputy AG made sense because it was more of a DOJ concern than a Senate concern, and the AG himself was delegating most of his responsibilities to the Deputy AG at the time. But what seemed surprising to my father was that it wasn't until he arrived in New York on his way to Dallas (for the Ruby trial), that he was told the meeting wouldn't be with Edward Kennedy after all, that the Senator had arranged for it to be with Katzenbach. The other thing that surprised him was the fact that a Newsweek journalist already knew of his plans to see Edward Kennedy, even though he didn't mention it himself. When my father had arrived in New York, he'd checked in with the NY office of L'Express, where they told him he was asked to go see someone at Newsweek right away. The two newspapers collaborated with each other sometimes, so that wasn't the surprising part. But when he got to Newsweek, the journalist in question (not named but presumably Jay Iselin) berated him for writing articles suggesting Oswald had connections to the CIA and FBI. FOIA documents reveal that Iselin was reporting my father's activities to the FBI.

No, only in Dutch, in the Netherlands. I'm hoping to eventually unearth the original manuscript (which would be in English) but my sister (who has all his papers in her possession now that our stepmother has passed away) hasn't found it yet and is still trying to get things organized. I'd help her if I were living on the same side of the ocean, but she's in France and I'm in Canada. If I do ever publish anything related (the book itself in English, or a blog post, or more details on the webpage about the book), it'll be on the thomasgbuchanan.com site.

It's working fine for me. Which browser are you using? Do you have a web-security setting-or-plugin in your browser that might block it? Like a javascript blocker or something? Or is it malware? https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffab&q=WEB+PAGE+IS+BLOCKED+FOR+SECURITY+REASONS&ia=web Whatever it is, I suspect it's coming from your own browser or computer.

I don't think the Warren Commission used my father's book as a blueprint for questions they needed to answer, it's just that they were directed to deliberately counter each of my father's points. That's why I wrote this on the homepage of the thomasgbuchanan.com site: If you read the US version of Who Killed Kennedy? (which is not just a reprint of the British edition, but adds a whole new section responding to the Warren Commission), you'll see he was not satisfied with the report, and counters it point by point. It's not that he disappeared from journalism and writing after that, it's just that if you're in the US you wouldn't have seen anything else he published, because there were efforts made to dissuade editors from publishing his work. (The pressure worked in the US but not as much in Europe.) So no, not an intentional withdrawal from American publication, and he didn't give in to any personal reasons for avoiding unwanted attention. He always stood up for his convictions and the integrity of his writing, even when there might be personal consequences. (A source of a bit of anxiety for my mother and us children, worrying if the CIA or such might have him killed.) Here's what I answered (just a few minutes ago) to someone else's question about what happened to my father: US agencies continued to try to interfere with his writings getting published (USIA visits to editors trying to discourage them from publishing his work; FBI and CIA efforts to discredit him) He continued nevertheless to publish articles on the JFKA (in Europe -- no one in the US would publish him) See Triunfo's digital archives: https://www.triunfodigital.com/resbcombinada.php?autor=Buchanan, Thomas G., 1919-1988&inicio=0&paso=10&orden=Titulo He published one other (small) book relating to the JFKA: De getuigen sterven (The Witnesses Die), published only in Dutch. He made some FOIA requests and wrote a book about the FBI surveillance he'd been under during his life, first for being a member of the American Communist Party, and then for his writing about the JFKA. The book, Big Brother, was only published in French, in 1984. He died of multiple myeloma in 1988, in Paris, France. Hope this fills in the blanks a bit for you. 🙂

Here's what happened to my father (Thomas G Buchanan): US agencies continued to try to interfere with his writings getting published (USIA visits to editors trying to discourage them from publishing his work; FBI and CIA efforts to discredit him) He continued nevertheless to publish articles on the JFKA (in Europe -- no one in the US would publish him) See Triunfo's digital archives: https://www.triunfodigital.com/resbcombinada.php?autor=Buchanan, Thomas G., 1919-1988&inicio=0&paso=10&orden=Titulo He published one other (small) book relating to the JFKA: De getuigen sterven (The Witnesses Die), published only in Dutch. He made some FOIA requests and wrote a book about the FBI surveillance he'd been under, first for being a member of the American Communist Party, and then for his writing about the JFKA. The book, Big Brother, was only published in French, in 1984. He died of multiple myeloma in 1988, in Paris, France.

Minor tangent: While my father (Thomas G Buchanan) only published one book on the JFKA (unless you count the additional small one published only in Dutch, about the suspicious deaths of witnesses), he did continue to write articles about it for a few years. You can find a bunch of them in the digital archives of the Spanish magazine Triunfo: https://www.triunfodigital.com/resbcombinada.php?autor=Buchanan, Thomas G., 1919-1988&inicio=0&paso=10&orden=Titulo In particular, there's an interview he did with Garrison, with whom he had an ongoing correspondence for a while. (That's a whole story in itself, that I'll write up some day on the thomasgbuchanan.com blog, about the way they had to work around the interception of Garrison's mail).

Small correction: the author of Who Killed Kennedy? was not James Buchanan, but rather my father, Thomas G Buchanan.

@Michael Clark In case you'd like to keep this index accurate, here are the corrections needed for my father, Thomas G Buchanan: DOB: 3/14/19 died in Paris in January 1988

It was a mock allegation, not meant to be taken literally. http://thomasgbuchanan.com/the-non-existence-of-k-o-sauvage/

No, this wasn't about wishful thinking, it was humor that apparently not every reader understood. I've clarified in the thread about my father and also on his website in a blog post titled "The non-existence of K.O. Sauvage."

No, this wasn't about wishful thinking, it was humor that apparently not every reader understood. I've clarified in the thread about my father and also on his website in a blog post titled "The non-existence of K.O. Sauvage."

There are a few posts in this forum that demonstrate a misunderstanding about the use of humor in my father's 1964 exchange with Léo Sauvage. John Simkin and J. Raymond Carroll show that misunderstanding in the short thread on Leo Sauvage, and in this thread we're in, John Simkin wrote: I didn't respond to this right away when I first came across this thread, because I wanted to verify my facts first. Your statements, John, confused me into wondering if maybe you had factual information that I didn't. However, I now have confirmation from Léo Sauvage's son, Pierre Sauvage, that Léo did NOT have a brother named K.O., and that my understanding of my father's letter-to-the-editor was accurate. So I'd like to explain it here for John and anyone else here who misunderstood the humor and took the reference to “K.O. Sauvage” literally. As you know from previous posts in this thread, the piece that started the exchange was an article by Léo Sauvage called “Thomas Buchanan, Detective” which was published in the Thinking Aloud column of The New Leader on September 28th, 1964. This wasn't a dispassionate explanation of why Sauvage disagreed with my father's methods of research, way of reasoning, and theories about what might have really happened. Although it addressed some of the points of disagreement, it was expressed in a derisive way that was a personal attack on my father's abilities and character. In response, my father wrote a letter to the editor, titled "In Defense of a Theory," in which he used humor to take Sauvage's attack on him lightly while still getting his own points across. The tongue-in-cheek allegation was that the reader had been duped into believing this was the real Léo Sauvage when (so my father feigned believing) it couldn't possibly be, since the article's lowered quality of journalism and focus on attempting to disparage my father would seem to be a departure from the respectability of Léo's usual work and more in line with the tactics of the US Information Service.* And so, the mock accusation goes, this must point to it being "his brother" K.O. instead -- which I take to mean "knock-off" as in imitation, or "knock-out" as in someone throwing punches in a boxing match, or the other kind of "knock-out" as in the kind of alteration of behavior that lab mice suffer when they've had certain genes "knocked out." * (FBI files obtained much later do confirm that the USIS was seeking information from the FBI for the purposes of discrediting my father so that his writings on the Kennedy assassination would be dismissed by the public.) In the title of his article, Sauvage's use of the epithet “detective” was derisive. My father had never claimed to conduct any detective work, merely a logical analysis of the contradictory reports made by his colleagues in the media. In response to being given the mock designation, my father played along by appending it again to his name in his signature, and saying that, “in [his] capacity as criminal investigator,” he had detected a “crime” – which was basically that Sauvage was behaving like an impostor of his more reputable self. I'm told by several readers that the humor was easy for them to detect. However, given that this was not the case for all who read the piece, I thought it best to clarify that the allegations were not to be taken literally. This will hopefully allow those who missed the point to re-read with a fresh perspective, and also set the record straight for the sake of historical accuracy about both my own father and the father of Pierre Sauvage. P.S. It may be of interest to note that some of the other Warren Report critics, who had met Sauvage and had had some correspondence with my father, felt a distaste for this exchange, even when they agreed with Sauvage's position on the assassination. In a letter to Maggie Field in July 1965,** Sylvia Meagher wrote: “I decided against inviting Sauvage to see the photographs at this juncture; […] Furthermore, he made some very disparaging and unfair remarks about Mark Lane, which saddened me, as did his gratuitous published insults of Buchanan. So I continue to hesitate...” And in a letter to Sylvia Meagher in August 1965,** Maggie Field wrote: “Léo Sauvage has, somehow, seemed to me, at all times, to be the most responsible, the most logical and the most unemotional of the critics. […] But I must quarrel, nevertheless, with Sauvage on a few counts. To wit: I wish he would refrain from attacking Buchanan publicly, however much he may have cause to, and from lashing out at Lane, too. Surely, he should comprehend the folly of such pursuits and the harm he does not only to the very cause he seeks to champion but to all the rest of us who support his position.” ** source: John Kelin, author of Praise From a Future Generation.

The Big Brother book is only available in French at the moment. As far as what I've been exposed to because of my father's interests, you have to understand that I was a child during the time he was writing about the JFK assassination, so it's not like he discussed the facts or theories with me. Once I was adult, both he and I were focusing on other things -- not the same things as each other, I might add. Although I'm sure he followed any JFK-related news that might have arisen between JFK's death and his own, he didn't dedicate his life to the JFK story, he continued to write as a journalist about whatever new topics drew his attention at any given time. I don't have more information about my father's JFK research findings than what he made public during his own life. If it turns out there's any thus-far-unrevealed information in any unpublished pieces that my stepmother might have in her possession, I will publish it on thomasgbuchanan.com. But don't hold your breath -- I won't be getting to France anytime soon to go digging myself, and I don't know how soon my stepmother will get around to doing a little searching and forwarding for me. Much as I'd like to be helpful to anyone still doing research on the subject, my role here is not really to participate in the discussion of the theories, it's merely to set the record straight concerning my father's character, his writings, and the events of his life. Having said that, I do take an interest in the assassination and finding out the truth of the matter, so thank you, Jim, for those links. Unfortunately, I don't have a lot of time to read these kinds of materials at the moment, since my own life is full and my work on thomasgbuchanan.com and participation in the forum has to happen in my "spare" time. I do hope to eventually get a better feel for what other theories have been put forward and what other facts might have surfaced since the publication of Who Killed Kennedy?, but for the moment my higher priority is to contribute a more accurate picture of my father.