Pierre Salinger Dead at 79

[liberalpragmatist]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38928-2004Oct16.html

Pierre Emil George Salinger, 79, press secretary to Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and chief European foreign correspondent for ABC News, died of a heart attack Oct. 16 at a hospital near his home in Le Thor, France, his wife said.

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 Agency operation that went wrong -- a theory for which no evidence materialized. He also fell for a hoax document found on the Internet that claimed that TWA Flight 800 was shot down near Long Island, N.Y., by a stray Navy missile in 1996; investigators concluded that it was blown up by a spark in its fuel tank.

<snip>

Mr. Salinger had recently been ill, said his fourth wife, Nicole, 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."

[faithnotgreed]

1. a good man, pierre... rip

[Tom Yossarian Joad]

2. If there's a paper in the sky, Pierre will be at the assignment desk.

Go well, Pierre.

[mediaman007]

3. I hope that Pierre can give us a little help by talking to the Big Guy

up there.

Its sad that the people we knew 40 years ago are in the news again for passing on. They do remind us of a hopeful time.

[Octafish]

4. A true Democrat. A real Friend. A good Man.

Tapes reveal reactions to JFK slaying

Friday, November 22, 2002 Posted: 6:04 PM EST (2304 GMT)

(CNN) -- On the 39th anniversary of President Kennedy's assassination new voices tell a chillingly familiar story.

"Give me all available information on the president. Over."

It's November 22, 1963, and two-thirds of the members of the presidential Cabinet are in a plane over the Pacific Ocean, en route to Japan, when President John F. Kennedy is fatally shot while he rides in a Texas motorcade. Ground-to-air radio messages -- beginning with the above query from White House Press Secretary Pierre Salinger -- boomerang between the White House and two aircraft carrying Cabinet members and newly sworn-in President Lyndon B. Johnson.

"John and Governor Connally of Texas have been in the car in which they were riding. We do not know how serious the situation is. We have no information." -- White House reply to Salinger

SOURCE:

http://archives.cnn.com/2002/US/11/22/kennedy.tapes/

[Awsi Dooger]

5. Great Democrat, I always enjoyed seeing him on TV

I hope the obits don't focus too much on the conspiracy focus of his later years, as opposed to all the great work that preceded it.