The Odyssey of Pierre Salinger
By • January 15, 2025 0 8
“I don’t want any more Bush presidents,” Pierre Salinger wrote in The Georgetowner in 2000. “If Bush wins, I’m going to leave the country and spend the rest of my life in France.”
And so, he did.
Salinger’s main claim to fame was being President John Kennedy’s press secretary. But he was much more than that. He was a child prodigy pianist who became a journalist. He was on Robert Kennedy’s presidential campaign in 1968 and a few feet from him when he was fatally shot. RFK’s assassination broke Salinger’s heart again — and he left for Europe.
Of course, the brilliant and charming San Francisco-born Salinger was no mere expat. He was already an American patriot, decorated in World War II. And he was an internationalist who talked easily with everyone, including Nikita Khrushchev, first secretary of the Communist Party and premier of the Soviet Union.
Bastide Rose.
By the 1980s, Salinger was ABC News’ chief European correspondent, covering top stories like the Iran hostage crisis and the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. He ended his career awkwardly by claiming that TWA Flight 800 was downed in 1996 by an errant missile off Long Island.
Shortly thereafter, Salinger was living in Georgetown and then Hillandale and writing a regular column for The Georgetowner. He focused on international affairs and seemed to call all world leaders “my good friend.” One of his most prescient columns, 25 years ago, was an urgent warning about Vladimir Putin’s coming to power in Russia.
Again, it came time for Salinger to go back to France — what with George W. Bush as president and the old press secretary hitting 75. He had some fun with his supposed exile, to the point where his wife Poppy, on the phone from France, told him to take off “that dirty shirt” with the image of the 43rd president.
A cover of The Georgetowner featuring Pierre Salinger.
Salinger soon left his apartment in the Colonial on 30th Street for the sunny beauty of Provence. Poppy Nicole Salinger had La Bastide Rose waiting — first as a bed-and-breakfast and, upon his death in 2004, the Pierre Salinger Museum. The landscape, the cuisine and the pink bastion in Le Thor, near Avignon, serve as a perfect tribute to the bon vivant of the New Frontier.
Indeed, as Newsweek’s Robert Korengold pointed out, Salinger was considered by the French not as “an American, or the American, but their American in France.”
Inside Bastide Rose.
A 2014 review of La Bastide Rose in The Georgetowner declared: “This is a place that exudes serenity. I could easily have stayed for a week with a few books, dips in the pool, leisurely walks and conversation with the assortment of international guests in search of the same. So, come for a few days, taste wines in nearby Châteauneuf du Pape, shop for antiques in Isle sur la Sorgue and most of all bathe in the warm hospitality of Poppy and her family.”
In death, Salinger — briefly a U.S. senator from California — returned home and rests in Arlington National Cemetery.
In this year, the centennial of his birth on June 14, let’s lift a bottle of Heineken to “Lucky Pierre,” preferably in one of his favorite Georgetown spots, Martin’s Tavern. Stepping outside to light up a cigar in his honor, we’ll know it’s time to plan that trip to La Bastide Rose.
