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The New York Times, Nov. 5, 1988
Leo Sauvage, drama critic of The New Leader and a former foreign correspondent for Le Figaro, died Sunday at his home in Manhattan. He was 75 years old. Mr. Sauvage came to the United States in 1948 and was the New York correspondent of Le Figaro from 1950 to 1975. After resigning, he joined The New Leader. Mr. Sauvage wrote a controversial book, ''The Oswald Affair,'' published in 1966 by the World Publishing Company. It criticized the Warren Commission investigation of the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, alleging that the evidence against Lee Harvey Oswald was flimsy. Mr. Sauvage graduated from the Université de Paris. He was a drama critic in Paris and founded a theater troupe in Marseilles in World War II. Mr. Sauvage also wrote about Cuba and was the author of ''Che Guevara: The Failure of a Revolutionary.'' In an attempt to explain American culture, he wrote ''Les Américains,'' a best seller in France. At his death, Mr. Sauvage was writing a book on Sherlock Holmes, ''Sherlockian Heresies.'' Surviving are his wife, Barbara; two sons, Pierre, of Los Angeles, and Michel, of Manhattan; a daughter, Marianne, of Los Angeles, and three grandchildren.
© 1988 The New York Times Company
UPI press release, Los Angeles Times, November 6, 1988
French newsman and arts critic Leo Sauvage, a former Le Figaro New York correspondent whose book "The Oswald Affair" savaged the Warren Commission Report on President John F. Kennedy's assassination, died Oct. 30 [1988]. The 75-year-old journalist died of a heart attack at his Manhattan apartment, Myron Kolatch, executive editor of the New Leader, said Friday. Sauvage was the biweekly's chief drama critic since 1980. Born in Nancy [actually, Mannheim, Germany], Sauvage came to the United States in 1948 as a reporter for the French wire service Agence France Presse and became a correspondent for the Paris daily Le Figaro two years later, an assignment that would last a quarter century. He was the first European correspondent to cover the fall of Cuba's Batista dictatorship in 1959. "Che Guevara: Failure of a Revolutionary," one of the first of Sauvage's eight books, earned him wide respect as an authority on Cuban and Latin American politics. Sauvage traveled to Dallas just days after President Kennedy's Nov. 22, 1963, assassination and became skeptical of local police handling of the investigation. Sauvage led Le Figaro's questioning of the Warren Commission's inquiry and won acclaim in Europe for his 1966 book "The Oswald Affair," which criticized the panel's report. A lifelong theater lover and critic, Sauvage was a founder of a theater company in wartime Marseille that mocked the collaborationist Vichy regime [not really] and eventually shut down. Among his other books were the French best-seller "The Americans" and "The Lumière Affair: From Myth to History," a nostalgic [and provocative] study of the invention of motion pictures [not yet published in the United States]. He is survived by his wife of nearly 50 years, Barbara, three children and three grandchildren.
Copyright 1988 The Times Mirror Company Dr. Kenneth A. Rahn, Sr.'s hyperlinks on Leo Sauvage and the Kennedy Assassination
Léo Sauvage 1943 article, Le Cinéma au Village (in French, on a wartime screening of Charlie Chaplin in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon)
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