Newsman Pierre Salinger: Mayor of TV’s Global Village

These are exhilarating times for Pierre Salinger.

After a decade as the premier foreign correspondent of ABC News, 63-year-old Salinger is turning his multiple talents to a new challenge: helping ABC expand its power-base in the rapidly evolving business of international news.

“This is global village time,” Salinger said from his new headquarters in London. “My principal objective is to put into the New York mind-set a more global look at the world. Historically, the networks have been more interested in what’s going on inside the United States than outside. That has to change.”

The first television priority is pictures. To ensure global picture coverage in this era of budget cutting, ABC has joined with the London-based Independent Television News (ITN) to form a new image-gathering business called World Television News (WTN). NBC is seeking a similar formula with the London-based picture firm Visnews that it recently bought into.

As a kind of “chairman of the board” for ABC News in Europe and the Middle East, Salinger said he will be working closely with ITN on the new venture. He will also be developing new relationships with other foreign television networks, with the goal of knitting together an “Associated Press of TV news coverage,” a collective sharing and distribution of world news and pictures.

“We are witnessing a very important evolution of television news coverage, especially in the United States,” Salinger said. “While cutting budgets, we are also looking to be on top of stories all over the world, but not always with our own cameras. The goal is to concentrate our fire with more intelligence.”

To Salinger, helping shape the future of ABC News abroad seems a perfect way to crown his own rich and unique international career as correspondent, author, businessman, television gourmet, U.S. senator from California and White House press secretary to President John F. Kennedy.

“I started out in the news business 46 years ago as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle,” Salinger said. “At this stage, my new post here in London is exactly where I ought to be.”

For the past decade, Paris seemed exactly where Salinger ought to be. With panache and aplomb, he turned his post as ABC Paris bureau chief into a highly visible and influential reign as France’s favorite American in Paris.

On French Emmy night, who would present the award for top TV anchorman? Monsieur Salinger. On prime-time radio and television, who would explain U.S. elections to the French? Monsieur Salinger. And at the Brasserie Lipp, the preferred Left Bank bistro for the power players in French politics, media and intellectual circles, who would often command the best table? Eh oui, Monsieur Salinger.

Beneath all his public gloss, though, Salinger the private man remains a refreshing surprise. To those who know him well, Salinger at heart remains an eager cub reporter. His private address book may now be worth its weight in gold, but his colleagues say Salinger still chases scoops like a rookie in search of his first byline.

“Pierre is still like a little kid, delighted to meet influential people and chase big stories,” says William Dowell, a Paris correspondent who worked with Salinger at ABC before joining Time magazine. “His access is incredible. He has contacts that no other correspondent in Paris even approaches.”

“Pierre is in a class by himself,” says Scott Sullivan, European editor of Newsweek. “He’s done fine stuff from Northern Ireland and great stuff on Iran. By any standards.”

Pierre Emil George Salinger was born in San Francisco on June 14, 1925, one of four sons of Herbert and Jehanne Bietry Salinger. His father was Jewish American, his mother French Catholic, and Pierre had an auspicious baptism: in Paris’ great Cathedral of Notre Dame.

An engineer by training, Herbert Salinger was also a talented musician who helped found the San Francisco Symphony’s children’s concerts. In his youth, Pierre was regarded as a gifted pianist and he considered devoting his life to music. He was allowed to enter high school at the age of 11 and then went on to San Francisco State College.

In 1942, 17-year-old Salinger was going to college during the day and working at night as a cub reporter for the Chronicle. But he interrupted both to join the U.S. Navy, eventually serving out World War II as the 19-year-old commander of a sub chaser. He was awarded the Navy and Marine Corps Medal for helping rescue 14 stranded seamen.

After the war, Salinger finished a history BA at San Francisco State and for nine years worked as reporter for the Chronicle. In 1955, he joined Collier’s magazine until it folded, a demise that led Salinger to a most fortuitous contact: the Kennedy family.

“In 1957, I started working as an investigator for the Senate Labor Rackets Committee, working for Robert Kennedy,” Salinger said. “By 1959 I was press secretary to Sen. John Kennedy, and when he was elected President I went to the White House.”

In his book “Kennedy,” historian Theodore C. Sorensen describes Salinger as a “brilliant” press secretary who appeared to the press as an affable comrade, playing the piano, poker and looking every inch the cigar-loving bon vivant.

Beyond his press duties, though, Sorensen shows Salinger to have been an effective presidential trouble-shooter on several international tasks, as Salinger himself recounts in his memoir, “With Kennedy.” Salinger also wrote a novel drawn from the Cuban missile crisis, “On Instructions of My Government.”

After Kennedy’s assassination, Salinger stayed on under President Lyndon Johnson. On Aug. 5, 1964, Salinger was appointed by California Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown to fill the empty Senate seat resulting from the death of Clair Engle. But running as a Democrat, Salinger lost the election that November.

From there Salinger hopped from a motion picture company to a vice presidency at Continental Airlines, but in 1968 he left business to join the ill-fated presidential campaign of Sen. Robert Kennedy. After the senator’s assassination, Salinger moved to Europe, eventually becoming a roving editor for L’Express, using the respected Paris-based news magazine to explain Watergate and U.S. politics to the French.

With his plump cheeks and birds’ nest eyebrows, Salinger does not have a traditional television face or voice. But his golden contacts and his unique stature in the world of the press were not lost on a man who was about to change the face of television news: ABC’s Roone Arledge, now president of the network’s news division.

Salinger’s first assignment from Arledge was to help cover the 1976 Winter Olympics in Innsbruck, Austria, and he proved effective on-camera. In the fall of 1978, Salinger was named correspondent in Paris--to the initial chagrin of the Paris bureau.

“No one knew quite what to expect,” Dowell says. “But every morning at 8, there was Pierre, cutting the overnight wire service reports and changing telex ribbons. He’s a real pro.”

Indeed. And the following year, when Iranian revolutionaries stormed the U.S. Embassy and took diplomats hostage, Arledge and Salinger went to work on the hostage crisis.

In New York, Arledge mandated a special report every night late, to be anchored by a steely State Department correspondent named Ted Koppel. Under Koppel, the show later evolved into ABC’s highly respected “Nightline.”

In Paris, a French lawyer came to see the well-connected Salinger, looking to help Iran open secret negotiations with the administration of President Jimmy Carter. Salinger made a few calls, then stood back and monitored the long months of secret negotiations, without ever reporting them on air.

“Arledge and ABC were great about doing nothing that would jeopardize the lives of the hostages,” Salinger says now. “And within 48 hours of the hostages being freed, we were able to produce a three-hour documentary revealing the entire backstage story of how the negotiations had worked.”

Salinger won an Overseas Press Club Award for the story, which he also turned into a best-selling book, “America Held Hostage.” In his long career in journalism, Salinger sees the Iranian story as his finest moment.

“Television only rarely gets praise from the print press, but in this case we did,” Salinger said. “It showed that television could become a real competitor of the written press in terms of in-depth reporting.”

To keep in print himself, Salinger in recent years has written two novels with co-author Leonard Gross, “The Dossier” and “Mortal Games,” both recounting the swashbuckling adventures of a Franco-American TV correspondent named Andre Kohl. Hmmm. . . .

Although he has shifted his base of operations to London, Salinger--for professional and personal reasons--is not about to abandon Paris. After three marriages, which produced four children and three grandchildren, Salinger now shares his heart with Nicole de Menthon, who works for the Paris designer Guy Laroche. And besides, his sprightly French mother Jehanne still likes to make regular visits to the French capital.

Some veteran correspondents regard executive jobs as being put out to pasture, but not Salinger. In the first seven months of this year, he logged 120,000 miles in air travel to 20 countries, a pace he is eager to trade for real power to shape the future of American television news from abroad.

Paul Friedman, executive producer of “World News Tonight” with Peter Jennings, was himself director of European operations in London, a fact that Salinger says underpins ABC’s and Arledge’s own commitments to bringing Americans better news coverage from abroad.

“Neither CBS nor NBC has the same commitment to foreign news,” Salinger said. “I think using all the contacts I’ve developed over the years for the broader purpose of improving ABC’s foreign coverage is a good objective.”