Alastair Francis Buchan

Alastair Francis Buchan (9 September 1918 - 4 February 1976) was a jounalist who was appointed the first director of the International Institute for Strategic Studies. He was the youngest child of John Buchan, first Baron Tweedsmuir, the novelist, barrister and MP who had worked for the British War Propaganda Bureau during the First World War. Alistair Buchan attended Eton and then Christ Church College, Oxford. He worked as assistant editor of The Economist from 1948 to 1951 when he became the Washington correspondent for The Observer. In Washington Buchan had made ‘a wide range of contacts in American political, academic and journalistic circles which were to prove a valuable asset when he became the first Director of the Institute’. As head of the Institute Buchan developed a reputation for being ‘one of the few Englishmen who can “make himself at home” in the Pentagon’.

Buchan headed the Institute until 1969 when his IISS colleague Denis Healey appointed him the first ever civilian commandant of the Imperial Defence College. Under his leadership the syllabus was broadened and the membership extended, its changed role being expressed in a new title: the Royal College of Defence Studies. In 1972 he became Montague Burton professor of international relations at Oxford, and began to develop a serious graduate school of international politics in that university.