October 17, 2004 in Nation/World

Former press secretary Pierre Salinger dies at 79

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Pierre Emil George Salinger, press secretary to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and chief European foreign correspondent for ABC News, died of a heart attack Saturday at a hospital near his home in Le Thor, France, his wife said. He was 79.

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 Agency operation that went wrong — a theory for which no evidence materialized. 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, 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.

Always a Democrat, 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.

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.”

A son, Marc, died in 1977, and his daughter, Suzanne, died in 1984. His first three marriages ended in divorce.

Survivors include his wife, Nicole Beuvillain de Menthon; and a son, Stephen, from his first marriage.

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