Benjamin Buckley

Benjamin Buckley is not simply an author telling an old family story. He is a man who followed a trail of blood, memory, war, and secrecy back through the American past and found that history was not finished speaking.

Born and raised in the Washington, D.C. area, Buckley is a descendant of Henry Christopher Binns Kendrick, a Confederate soldier who died at the Battle of Gettysburg. His professional life in construction took him onto government sites connected to national security work, giving him a firsthand view of the machinery, ambition, and secrecy surrounding America’s pursuit of power.

But the deeper excavation came after retirement, when Buckley discovered 52 Civil War letters written by his great-uncle. These were not museum pieces. They were dispatches from a man facing death, duty, fear, and remembrance. Across 164 years, Buckley found an emotional and philosophical kinship with a soldier whose words became more than history. They became a mirror.

Those letters helped Buckley confront the darkest chapters of his own life: war, abuse, buried memory, and the shadow cast by U.S. intelligence projects, including the CIA’s MKUltra. His story forces a hard question into the open: what happens when personal trauma, family history, and government secrecy all meet in the same soul?

Benjamin Buckley brings a rare testimony of ancestry, survival, moral reckoning, and the courage to answer what silence tried to bury.