Our Man in Paris

J.F.K. 's press secretary is now Mr. America to the French

The furry eyebrows still flutter like windshield wipers and the ever-present cigar is just as pungent as it was when Pierre Salinger served as John Kennedy's White House press secretary and a court jester to Camelot. One day this month Salinger, now 52, found himself conducting a press conference again, only this time his audience was a group of French businessmen: "The Concorde is a dinosaur ... There will be no candidate from the Kennedy clan in 1980 ... What do Americans think of France? They do not think about it at all."

Salinger was, of course, kidding about his countrymen. Reciprocally, the descendants of Tocqueville do entertain a continuing, if critical, interest in things American. Salinger has carved a new career as the American in Paris who provides Frenchmen with native insights into the inscrutable Yankee mind. As a grand reporter (roving editor) specializing in U.S. affairs for the French newsmagazine L 'Express, he has become the most prominent American apologist and explicator in Paris since CBS Commentator David Schoenbrun left in 1962. Salinger presides jovially over several music and film festivals in France. He is a regular commentator for Europe One's French radio station and frequently appears on French television. He has become a fast-selling author in France. From Le Mans to Marseille, he is much in demand as a lecturer (at up to 5,000 francs an appearance).

Salinger's transition from prankster on the Potomac to savant on the Seine was a while in the making. After Kennedy was assassinated, Salinger lost election to a Senate seat from California; bounced around a few uncongenial executive suites in the U.S., England and France; and helped manage George McGovern's 1972 presidential campaign. After that debacle, he fled to France, jobless. Publisher Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber immediately hired him for L'Express in 1973, shortly before the Watergate story broke. Salinger's ability to make that long and intricate crisis comprehensible to a nation of Cartesians won him a wide following. Says Salinger: "It was the start of a whole new life for me."

Today that life is divided comfortably between a weekend chateau near Tours and an apartment on the fashionable Rue de Rivoli, where Salinger lives and writes with his second wife Nicole and their son Gregory, 11. Though he learned the language of diplomacy from his French-born mother and grandmother as a boy in San Francisco ("If you didn't speak French in our house, you didn't eat"), he does his columns in English, then approves a L'Express translation.

Salinger's commentaries--on such topics as Carter's foreign policy, the Bert Lance affair, the Concorde furor--are a Franco-American spaghetti of high-minded civics lessons and smoke-filled-room atmospherics. Though he correctly foresaw Carter's troubles over energy legislation, he has blandly described the New York governorship as a major stepping stone to the White House--which it has not been since 1932. French journalists, unaccustomed to Salinger's anecdotal style, dismiss him as a lightweight. "I don't go running to him to find new information," sniffs a leading Paris editor. Counters Salinger: "Since French coverage of America has, with a few exceptions, always been either uninformed or biased, I've been able to fill a gap."

Last week he visited the U.S. to discuss filling a similar gap on this side of the Atlantic by becoming a European commentator for ABC News. Salinger concedes that he might have taken a post in the early Carter Administration if one had been offered, but he now concludes that his new life in Paris is too good to leave. "What the hell," he says with a Gallic shrug, "I have the best job in the world." He is also fond of quoting an earlier American in Paris, Thomas Jefferson, who once remarked: "Every man has two countries--his own and France."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.