Journalist Pierre Salinger dies at 79

Pierre Salinger, the bushy-browed, cigar-chomping journalist who served as press secretary for Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and spent more than a decade as ABC News' chief correspondent in Europe, died Saturday. He was 79.

Salinger, who served briefly as U.S. senator from California in 1964 and became known as "Mr. America" in France during his many years as a Paris-based journalist, died at a hospital in Cavaillon, Provence, France, after suffering a heart attack, according to his son, Stephen. He had been in failing health for the past few years. Three years after joining ABC News as a European correspondent, Salinger's 1981 three-hour documentary on the secret efforts to free the American hostages in Iran after the takeover the U.S. Embassy in Tehran won a Peabody Award and an Overseas Press Club award.

In 1991, he obtained exclusive interviews with the two Libyan suspects in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, which blew up over Lockerbie, Scotland, and killed 270 people in 1988. Nine years later, he was the prosecution's final witness at their trial.

Salinger also made news — and subjected himself to criticism — in 1996 with his claim that TWA Flight 800 was inadvertently shot down by a Navy missile soon after taking off from New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport and that the government was conspiring to cover it up.

Salinger and others had obtained a videotape of the radar at Kennedy Airport, which Salinger believed showed a missile heading toward Flight 800 just before it blew up. But federal investigators called Salinger's accusation of a cover up "outrageous" and dismissed the images, saying there was no evidence on any of the radar data of a missile tracking toward TWA Flight 800.

The FBI investigation later concluded that the jumbo jet had was downed when a fuel tank had exploded for unknown reasons.

For all his years in the public eye as a journalist, Salinger once noted that people recognized him because he had been JFK's press secretary.

A former investigative reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and Collier's magazine who worked for Robert Kennedy as an investigator with the U.S. Senate's select committee to probe labor-management racketeering in the late 1950s, Salinger became then-Sen. John Kennedy's campaign press secretary in 1959.

In November 1960, after a hard-fought presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, President-elect Kennedy appointed Salinger as his White House press secretary.