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