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Last Updated: Sunday, 17 October, 2004, 04:29 GMT 05:29 UK
JFK's press secretary dies at 79
Salinger and JFK
Pierre Salinger (centre) with President Kennedy in 1961
Pierre Salinger, John F Kennedy's former press secretary, has died of a heart attack aged 79.

His fourth wife, Nicole, confirmed he died on Saturday at a hospital near their home in Le Thor, France.

Mr Salinger had been a top journalist and author and was also President Lyndon Johnson's press secretary.

In later years he claimed the Pan Am Flight 103 crash over Lockerbie, Scotland, in 1988 was a bungled Drug Enforcement Agency operation.

He also claimed TWA Flight 800 was shot down near Long Island by a stray US Navy missile in 1996.

Iran scoop

Mr Salinger was the chief foreign correspondent for ABC News, having risen from a newspaper reporter in San Francisco to a top position at the White House before he was 40.

Pierre Salinger
Latterly Mr Salinger became something of a conspiracy theorist
After leaving the White House Mr Salinger returned to journalism.

He won a number of prestigious journalism prizes, including a George Polk award for his 1981 scoop that the US government was secretly negotiating to free the Americans held hostage by Iran.

'If Bush wins, I leave'

His wife said he moved to France four years ago because he was upset with the American electoral system.

She said: "Pierre said 'If George Bush is elected president, I will leave the country,' and we did."



Born in San Francisco to a French-born mother and a father who was a mining engineer, Mr Salinger enlisted in the Navy at the age of 17 during World War II.


Mr Salinger 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 Senator John F Kennedy.


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