The Press: Kennedy’s Press Chief

For the President-elect’s press entourage, the baby’s birth was the first crisis since the election. Newsmen had been filled in minute by minute as they flew back to Washington, but one inevitably sought detail was missing from the intimate picture. What did the baby look like? Pierre Emil Salinger. Kennedy’s press secretary, seemed slightly flustered, could only stammer: “Aw, it looks like a baby … It has some hair . . . The hair is dark . . . I’m very poor at descriptions of children.”

Such an answer would have astonished and perhaps irritated the assembled newsmen had it come from Eisenhower’s Press Secretary Jim Hagerty. But it caused no fuss coming from Pierre Salinger, a pudgy, 35-year-old father of three who looks naked without a cigar clamped between his teeth. Reporters admired Hagerty’s, efficiency; they personally are fond of Salinger, consider him their friend and ally in the incessant scramble for news.

After next January, Pierre Salinger will play a key part in reflecting the President to the U.S. public—though perhaps less so than Hagerty, their bosses being so different. Salinger is the first to say: “Hagerty is just about the greatest technician that ever came down the pike.”

Boy Skipper. Born in San Francisco, Pierre Salinger* was a child prodigy at the piano, at the age of six impressed an audience at Toronto’s International Exposition by rippling off a Haydn sonata.

After two years at San Francisco State College he joined the Navy and, just before his 18th birthday, became one of the youngest men ever to skipper a U.S. Navy ship, taking over a submarine chaser. Returning to San Francisco in 1946, Salinger became within five years, at 26, night city editor of the Chronicle. By the time he quit to go to Collier’s in 1955, he had made a name for himself by stories exposing prison conditions and breaking up a municipal bond racket, and by helping to solve a murder. On the side, he worked for California Democratic Politicians Pat Brown and Richard P. Graves, served as Adlai Stevenson’s California press-relations chief during the 1952 campaign.

Innovation Through Jack. Salinger’s career at Collier’s was short and bitter sweet: he was preparing an expose of West Coast Teamsters. Union operations when the magazine folded in 1956. Bobby Kennedy, counsel to the U.S. Senate’s special subcommittee investigating labor rackets, heard of Salinger’s work, and he was hired by the committee as a special investigator. There he met Jack Kennedy.

In his new job, Salinger will have some advantages over Jim Hagerty—as well as some disadvantages. Dwight Eisenhower, perhaps out of old Army habit, generally held himself coolly aloof from the White House press; Jack Kennedy, whose first job was as a reporter for the old International News Service, is far more accessible to the press, numbers several reporters among his closest personal friends. But White House reporters operate on a communal code, are likely to raise Cain with Salinger when favoritism is shown.

Salinger plans a major innovation in presidential press conferences: where Hagerty for the first time permitted filmed—and lightly edited—television versions of presidential news conferences, Salinger plans to authorize live TV conferences. “This would give the whole nation a chance to see the President as he actually answers the questions of reporters. We think it would be beneficial to the press,” he says. Then, recalling Kennedy’s television proficiency during the debates with Richard Nixon, Salinger adds: “And, indeed, we think it would be beneficial to all concerned.”

*He is no kin to J. D. Salinger, 41, talented chronicler of the prodigious young (The Catcher in the Rye).