Pierre Salinger
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Pierre Salinger. |
Pierre Emil George Salinger (
June 14,
1925 –
October 16,
2004) was a
White House Press Secretary to
U.S. Presidents John F. Kennedy and
Lyndon B. Johnson. He later became known for his work as an
ABC News correspondent, and in particular for his stories on the
American hostage crisis in Iran, the bombing of
Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, and his claims as to cause of the explosion of
TWA flight 800.
Salinger served briefly as a
Democratic United States Senator in 1964 and was
campaign manager for
Robert F. Kennedy's
1968 presidential campaign.
Salinger was born in
San Francisco, California, his father a
German Jewish mining engineer and his mother a
French journalist whose father was a member of the
French National Assembly. After serving with the
United States Navy during
World War II, Salinger graduated from the
University of San Francisco and worked as a reporter for
The San Francisco Chronicle and as a contributing Editor to
Collier's in the 1940s and 1950s. When
John F. Kennedy became
President of the United States, he hired Salinger as his press secretary.
Following his service in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Salinger was appointed as a
Democratic United States Senator from
California to fill the vacancy resulting from the
July 30, 1964 death of Senator
Clair Engle, taking office on
August 4, 1964. In his bid for a full six-year term in the 1964 election, he was defeated by
George Murphy following a campaign in which Salinger's recent move to California, following many years living elsewhere, became an issue. He resigned from the Senate on
December 31, 1964, only three days before his term was to expire. Senator-elect Murphy, who was to take office on
January 3,
1965, was appointed to fill the remaining two days of Salinger's term, giving Murphy a slight advantage in seniority in the Senate over other members of the "class of 1964" at a time when seniority was even more vital in Senate affairs than it is currently.
Salinger worked on Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 presidential campaign and was reportedly devastated by RFK's
assassination. He moved to
France and returned to
journalism as a correspondent for
L'Express.
ABC
In 1978, he was hired by
ABC News as its
Paris bureau chief. He became the network's chief European correspondent based in
London in 1983.
In
1991, two
Libyans were later indicted over the bombing of
Pan Am Flight 103 in
1988, but Salinger believed Libya had been set up. In a 1989 ABC
Prime Time Live Special, he named the so-called "
Kenyan Three" as the masterminds of the bombing: three
Palestinians no one else had ever heard of. Although there was no evidence to support this widely ridiculed claim, the program won an
Emmy, much to the alleged dismay of other journalists who had worked on the PA 103 case.
One year later, Salinger went on air for ABC with a story blaming PA 103 instead on a
CIA drugs-smuggling operation that went wrong, in which terrorists inserted a bomb into a suitcase on a CIA-protected drugs-route. The
Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) set up an inquiry into Salinger's claims but found them to be without merit.
After the August 1990
invasion of Kuwait by
Iraq, ABC started work on a special program about the invasion and sent Salinger to the
Middle East, where he obtained a transcript in Arabic of a conversation between
Saddam Hussein and U.S.
Ambassador to Iraq
April Glaspie, in which Glaspie famously told Saddam: "We have no opinion on
Arab-Arab border disputes," controversially interpreted by some as giving Saddam the green light to invade Kuwait, which he did days later. Salinger brought the transcript back to London, ordering a London-based Arab journalist and an ABC researcher to sit through the night translating it into passable English. ABC, which had paid for Salinger's trip, wasn't sure whether to air the transcript immediately on World News Tonight or hold it back for a few days for their invasion special. Salinger was furious at the suggestion of delay and leaked the transcript to Hella Pick of the
British newspaper,
The Guardian, thereby ensuring that ABC would have to run with it that day. [
1]
It was because of incidents like this that relations with the network soured. Salinger was not a popular figure inside ABC, especially with anchors like
Ted Koppel and
Peter Jennings, but he always had the support of
Roone Arledge, the president of ABC News. Salinger would frequently telephone Arledge directly about something he wanted to put on air, bypassing the usual route of consulting with producers, correspondents and anchors, so that when they objected, as they often did, the message would come down that "Roone has approved it." But eventually even Arledge couldn't save him and Salinger left ABC in 1993.
After leaving ABC, Salinger moved back to
Washington, D.C. and became an executive with the Burson Marsteller public relations firm before returning to France in 2000. Until the late 80s, Salinger had been a popular "talking head" in France and was a frequent guest on French news and public affairs shows when someone was needed to explain or interpret American events for French viewers.
Salinger later became known for his claims in November 1996 that
friendly fire from the
United States Navy was the cause of the
TWA Flight 800 crash, based on what was later seen as an Internet
hoax. That experience has given name to the irrational belief in the veracity of internet rumors now known as the "Salinger Syndrome".[
2] In November 2000, he refused to step down from the witness box in the
Scottish court in the
Netherlands where the two Libyan intelligence officers were on trial for PA 103. Salinger shouted that he knew who the real bombers were and had to be asked to leave the stand by the
judge.
He later made a permanent move to France, making good on his promise that, "If
Bush wins, I'm going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France."
Salinger died in October 2004 of
heart failure near his home in Le Thor,
France, after suffering from
dementia at the age of 79. He is buried in the
Arlington National Cemetery across the
Potomac River from
Washington, DC.
With KennedyAmerica Held HostageSecret Dossier: The Hidden Agenda Behind the Gulf WarJe Suis un AmericainLa France et le Nouveau MondeP.S.: A Memoir, 1995
*
NY Times obituary*
Guardian obituary*
CNN on Salinger and TWA*
Hella Pick on Salinger*
Debunking Myth About Pierre Salinger
