Pierre Salinger

American journalist who first came to prominence in the early 1960s as a journalistic investigator. Fluent in French, Salinger had a wide-ranging career that spanned the Atlantic, and he made powerful contacts around the world. He was considered a shrewd organizer as well as bon vivant. Over the course of his career, he worked as a political speechwriter, business executive, magazine columnist and co-authored "A Tribute to JFK" with Sandor Vanocur.

His father was a Jewish mining engineer of German descent, and his mother was a French Catholic. A very bright child prodigy with a tested IQ of 140, Salinger began playing the piano when he was only three or four years old. With the Wall Street crash of 1929, his father lost his job, and his family moved to Toronto, Canada where his parents enrolled him in the Toronto Music Conservatory. Beginning at age six, he played concerts until he was 12 years old. Because music consumed his life, with six to eight hours of practice every day, his parents felt he was too isolated from ‘real life’ and that he needed to have some friends. They had the boy stop playing for a year, and he never returned to music other than as a hobby. His family eventually moved back to San Francisco where he attended Lowell High School. After graduating at age 16, he enrolled in San Francisco State, but with the onset of World War II, he joined the U.S. Navy. Within a year, in 1942, he served as a commanding officer on a ship in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to college at the University of San Francisco, and while attending classes, worked at the San Francisco Chronicle.

Leaving the Chronicle in 1954, he soon went to work at Collier’s magazine. When Collier’s went out of business, he went to work for Bobby Kennedy, and in September 1959, became press secretary for Senator John Kennedy.