Pierre Salinger, journalist and White House press secretary, dies at 79

By Patricia Sullivan
The Washington Post

Pierre Salinger moved 4 years ago to France.

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Mr. Salinger, a witty, debonair bon vivant, rose from a newspaper reporter in San Francisco to a top position at the White House before he was 40. He was an appointed senator from California for five months, wrote books and became ABC's Paris bureau chief. His journalistic reputation was besmirched in the 1990s after his insistence that two major airline crashes were not what they seemed.

He said the 1988 crash of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, was a Drug Enforcement Administration operation that went wrong — a theory for which no evidence materialized. Later he fell for a hoax document found on the Internet that claimed TWA Flight 800 was shot down near Long Island, N.Y., by a stray Navy missile in 1996; investigators concluded it was blown up by a spark in its fuel tank.

Until those incidents, Mr. Salinger enjoyed a reputation as a reporter with sources in the intelligence communities of the world. He won a number of prestigious journalism prizes, including a George Polk Award for his 1981 scoop that the U.S. government was secretly negotiating to free Americans held hostage by Iran.

Mr. Salinger had recently been ill, his wife, Nicole, said in a telephone interview from their home in Le Thor, Provence, where she runs a bed-and-breakfast. They moved there four years ago from London and Washington.

"He was very upset with the electoral system in the States," she said. "He said, 'If George Bush is elected president, I will leave the country,' and we did."

Always a Democrat, Mr. Salinger worked for John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on their presidential campaigns, and for George McGovern in 1972. He was White House press secretary from 1961 to 1964 and ran the first live televised presidential news conference in 1961.

President Kennedy called him "the voice of the White House," but Mr. Salinger described himself as "a reporter for the rest of the press." He was agile at leaking news and suggesting stories. The job demanded incredible discretion; between the president's sexual liaisons and his secret ailments, Mr. Salinger was often called to account for a missing commander in chief.

In a 1993 Washingtonian interview, Salinger said a journalist once asked directly about Kennedy's sex life. "I gave him a 1960s answer, not a 1990s answer: 'Look, he's the president of the United States. He's got to work 14 to 16 hours a day. He's got to run foreign and domestic policy. If he's got time for mistresses after all that, what the hell difference does it make?' The reporter laughed and walked out. That was the end of the story. For sure, I couldn't get away with that in the '90s."

Born in San Francisco to a French-born mother and a mining-engineer father, Mr. Salinger learned to play piano before he learned to read, and gave his first recital in Toronto at age 6. Fearful of the effects of a career started so young, his parents cut off his public performances but continued private lessons. He attended San Francisco State College and at age 17 enlisted in the Navy during World War II, commanding a submarine chaser in the Pacific. After the war, he finished his degree at the University of San Francisco.

He plunged into journalism at the San Francisco Chronicle, several times having himself jailed as a vagrant to write a series about prison abuses. He worked for Collier's magazine in the mid-1950s before becoming an investigator with Robert Kennedy on the Senate anti-racketeering committee from 1957 to 1959, when he went to work for then-Sen. John Kennedy.
 
Mr. Salinger, a ferocious poker player and two-fisted drinker who boasted of many mistresses, was exceedingly popular with the overwhelmingly male reporting corps covering the White House.

After President Kennedy's assassination, Mr. Salinger worked for Johnson until March 1964, when he resigned to run for a Senate seat from California. He won the Democratic primary and was appointed by Democratic Gov. Edmund Brown in August of that year to fill the vacancy caused by the death of another Democrat, Clair Engle. Mr. Salinger lost the general election to Republican George Murphy and went into corporate public relations.

By 1973, he was back in journalism as a roving editor for L'Express of Paris, and five years later he became ABC's Paris bureau chief, and later its chief foreign correspondent and senior editor for Europe. He retired in 1993 and became a consultant.

He wrote a number of books, including a 1995 memoir, three novels and a 1991 book, "Secret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf Crisis."

In 1998, Mr. Salinger wrote an admiring preface to a book of short stories by Col. Moammar Gadhafi, the Libyan leader.

His first three marriages ended in divorce. Survivors include his wife, Nicole Beuvillain de Menthon; and a son, Stephen, from his first marriage.