Leo Sauvage

Leo Sauvage was a German and French journalist, writer and art critic.

Life and career

Leo Sauvage was born Léopold Smotriez on February 23, 1913, in Mannheim, Germany. However some citations state his place of birth as Nancy, France. He was Jewish.
Sauvage studied at the Universite de Paris. During World War II he ran a theatre company in Marseilles that mocked the Vichy regime, leading to its shutdown.
In 1948, he moved to the United States, to work as a correspondent for Agence France Presse. Two years later he joined Le Figaro. He worked as a foreign correspondent for that paper until 1975 when he resigned and joined The New Leader as a drama critic.
Sauvage was one of the earliest critics of the Warren Commission, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald alone killed US president John F. Kennedy. His book The Oswald Affair, published in 1966, was among of a wave of books published in that year critical of the Warren Commission. Sauvage was skeptical of the official explanation from the beginning, having visited Dallas and found himself unimpressed by how Dallas PD had conducted its investigation. He penned the introduction to Accessories After the Fact by Sylvia Meagher, a book also critical of the commission. He was interviewed for the 1976 French documentary "Le Mystere Kennedy".
In 1973 he published the book Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary, a critical biography of Che Guevara. In 1983 he published Les Américans, an examination of American culture. It became a bestseller in France.
In 1988 he died aged 75 from a heart attack in his Manhattan apartment. He was survived by his wife Barbara Suchowolska, and their three children. He was paid tribute to by the French minister for culture, Jack Lang, who sent a telegram to Sauvage's eldest son Pierre, remarking that he was "a man of talent and courage, he embodied the honor of great journalism". His nephew-in-law was Samuel Pisar.