Who'll Start the Rain?
Byron, Christopher
Christopher Byron Who'll Start the Rain? Why would a Republican public relations powerhouse hire a prodigal child of Camelot as its Washington rainmaker? A s everyone knows, you can't get...
...Salinger says the assertion is false...
...and Britain jointly accused the Libyan government of having orchestrated the bombing...
...But a receptionist at the foundation says Burson does indeed do work for it, a fact Salinger confirms...
...According to Salinger, they were working for Syrian-backed terrorist Ahmed Jibril, head of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command...
...When Salinger learned of Glott's explosion, he called the subordinate to his office and shouted that Glott could stuff it and to get on a plane pronto...
...When questioned on the matter, Burson's chief operating officer in its Washington office said he was unaware of any such client...
...Salinger would summon him to his office and—after pointedly not inviting him to sit—berate Warwick about one thing or another...
...Yet while continuing to work as a paid consultant to ABC News, he promoted the Normandy memorial undertaking—for which he worked as an unpaid "volunteer"—to the network's "Good Morning America" show, and wound up being put on the air to talk up the project...
...The writer of the Guardian story, Hella Pick, confirmed to me that Salinger gave her the transcript and that he did so not after the ABC news story was broadcast but earlier in the day of September 11...
...In one instance that has since become a matter of embarrassment to Salinger and Burson alike, Salinger managed to entangle his own affairs with those of the network, then drag the entanglements with him to Burson-Marsteller...
...Swathed in the aromas of Camelot, Salinger after the assassination had been appointed a U.S...
...Salinger's promotional efforts, launched from the platform of ABC's morning show, helped raise millions for the project, and ultimately led to the foundation's becoming a Burson client...
...Marc Gunther cites a hilarious example—when Salinger began a news segment by declaring, "This is Pierre Salinger in Rome," as the screen showed a close-up of the Pope disembarking from an airplane...
...Seeing none, he clapped Salinger on the back and said, "Great to have you back . . . gotta run" (or some such), and beat a quick retreat...
...Its bizarre mission: to promote the positive side of tobacco—an account that Burson has struggled mightily to keep secret...
...Shortly after the bombing, Salinger concluded—based largely, it would appear, on input from a pro-Libyan contact living in Paris—that Syrians were behind the attack...
...The company thought it was buying a magic bullet—and a fat Rolodex—to solve Burson-Marsteller's problems," says a top executive who recently left the firm...
...The 26 The American Spectator August 1994 most visible bloodletting took place at Hill & Knowlton, whose billings plunged after a series of well-publicized scandals...
...He was better known than any ambassador or corporate CEO...
...But that didn't stop Salinger from getting ABC to put it on the air—even to the point of actually naming the alleged bombers...
...According to a letter from the CIA contact, the flow of information and documents from Salinger continued for six months...
...In the words of one official, it wasn't long before life at the firm had begun to suggest the corporate equivalent of nuclear winter...
...office...
...after all, now that a 1990s version of John Kennedy was set to move into the White House, what better man for the job...
...Pierre was by far the best known American in Paris," says a correspondent for a rival network at the time...
...The truth was, hiring Salinger showed just how out of the loop Burson-Marsteller itself was...
...Nor were the British as bowled over as the French by Pierre Salinger...
...After looking more deeply into the matter, the Burson honcho reported back that he stood corrected, but allowed that the account was being run out of New York and has nothing to do with Washington...
...From the people who really counted there were plenty of sincere-sounding regrets, but the highest-ranking warm body from the administration who actually showed up was a staff flack from the Treasury Department...
...The problem was acute, because, as the firm's confidential records reveal, Burson-Marsteller's worldwide financial prospects were already darkening, a casualty of the weak economy and the cost-cutting pressures bearing down on the entire flack industry...
...Allowing for the five-hour time difference between New York and the U.K., the first edition of the Guardian was actually published ahead of the ABC broadcast, supporting the claim of the London source that the Guardian received the Glaspie transcript before ABC News went on the air, not after...
...Salinger's Normandy Foundation business also seems to be something the Burson folks would just as soon forget...
...His sources were obscure and often paid money for their information," says one of his London aides at the time...
...After all, here was a firm that had put together a Washington money-machine in the Reagan and Bush administrations...
...keep the gravy train on track forever, and scarcely had Bill Clinton won the 1992 election than the phone calls of Burson-Marsteller's army of flacks stopped getting returned...
...Every Frenchman knew his name...
...I am the one in charge...
...Salinger said that he and Glott, to whom he referred as "my deputy," got along famously...
...Salinger, long viewed as a soft touch for the Arab cause, was slipped a transcript of the GlaspieSaddam meeting in late August 1990...
...Everyone who counted in Democratic circles was invited...
...A s everyone knows, you can't get through a revolving door if you're carrying too much luggage—a lesson that is currently being learned anew by the folks at the Burson-Marsteller & Co...
...Handing the pooch to Salinger she would announce that it was his time to start handling some of the domestic chores at the Salinger house—which would cause twitters of approval all over the news room...
...But ABC would have none of it, and told him his contract would not be renewed...
...Last year the Republican-rooted firm picked up a Democratic "living legend" who was expected to lure clients to the company, especially its struggling Washington, D.C...
...More to the point, who could be persuaded to take it...
...Salinger stayed on the scene half a day, then strode back across the tarmac and departed heavenward...
...Little, Brown, 381 pages, $23.95...
...On Wednesday morning, September 12, 1990, the Guardian published an entire story on the Glaspie-Saddam meeting, complete with lengthy verbatim quotes from the actual transcript translation that Salinger's ABC underlings had prepared...
...y et whatever his accomplishments as ABC's official Door Opener to the Palace, Salinger was less impressive as an actual journalist...
...But not even the revelations of Gennffer Flowers could Christopher Byron is a contributing editor of Esquire...
...In the job of global rainmaker for Burson's Washington office, Salinger thought he saw a way to do just that...
...In the event, don't count Salinger out yet...
...Often he could be found ensconced at the most visible table in Brasserie Lipp, Paris's premier literary and political eatery, a fitting venue for a foreigner who had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor...
...ABC News wanted to use the 'transcript as the peg for an invasion special a few days later, but a source in London says Salinger was frantic to get it on the air immediately, and when the brass in New York would not oblige, he told an aide on September 4 to leak the transcript to the British newspaper the Guardian...
...hat Burson needed was someone able to bring in W new business worldwide, as well as get those Washington call-backs coming in from the Democrats...
...He's invaluable to us," says Charles Black of Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly, enthusing over Salinger's ability to dazzle clients and impress the high and mighty...
...B y the time Salinger became involved with the Normandy project, it was clear his days at ABC were numbered...
...But jealous rivals saw only the spectacle of the pompous super-journalist making yet another fashionably late arrival—and early departure...
...senator from California to fill out the term of Clair Engle...
...Unfortunately, the project's finances thereafter careened out of control, with much of the money that Salinger helped raise being allegedly diverted to other purposes...
...Burson officials say their firm is healthy and growing—and it certainly looks good when compared with some other big, multi-line PR operations...
...when he left, so did much of Burson's ability to wheel and deal inside the agency...
...Marc Gunther's recent book on ABC News 1 quotes a col1 The House That Roone Built: The Inside Story of ABC News, by Marc Gunther...
...Pan Am was trying to implicate the CIA in the bombing and Salinger would soon assert that the DEA might be implicated...
...There is news or there is no news...
...In any event, Salinger badly mishandled the lead...
...The next day, the news desk in New York held its routine conference call with all the field bureaus, and the "World News Tonight" producer who hosted the meeting began with this announcement: "Yesterday someone sent a memo to World News with the words 'Hot News' written across the top...
...The subject never came up again, and there were no more memos with "Hot News" across the top...
...Bedazzled by Salinger's celebrity, Arledge offered him a post in Paris as a roving bigfoot for the network news division...
...It seems likely that Salinger was simply hoping to open up a back-channel for swapping ABC News information for tidbits from the CIA—something the letter from his CIA contact clearly suggests was on his mind...
...The company thought it was buying a magic bullet—and a fat Rolodex—to solve Burson-Marsteller's problems," says a top executive who recently left the firm...
...Says Black, "He spends 90 percent of his time abroad," citing places like Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East...
...It was at this point that the offer materialized at BursonMarsteller...
...The American Spectator August 1994 27 Whatever the case, Salinger plainly did not want to move...
...But a London bureau source recalls otherwise, recounting an incident in which a recently hired Salinger aide was chewed out by Salinger for even listening to an attempt by Glott to countermand a Salinger order that would have sent the person to the Middle East on a story...
...Salinger moved into a spectacular apartment on the rue de Rivoli, and took up the life of a bon vivant and world-class name-dropper...
...Everyone in London knew the culprit was Salinger, who reddened in the face and got up and stormed back to his office...
...His office, of course, happened to be the plushest in the bureau, featuring an oversized oak desk, a couch and sitting area, and walls adorned with awards and photographs of himself with the world'shigh-and-mighty...
...Nonetheless, in 1987 Salinger got the first really bad break of his broadcast career, as ABC, under intensifying cost-cutting pressures after its takeover by Capital Cities, gutted its Paris operation, and transferred Salinger to London...
...But the show went ahead anyway, and Salinger won several awards for it...
...As he strode across the tarmac, there was the pilot tagging behind, carrying his bags...
...After that came a brief stint as a flack for a B-list airline, then a prestigious columnist's slot at the Paris weekly L'Express...
...In fact, it brought in a guy who'd been out of the loop for thirty years, with no one to speak of in his Rolodex at all...
...The aide did exactly that, in the process alerting the man to the fact that he was a suspect in the bombing...
...But the information they provided was often unverifiable, and sometimes demonstrably false...
...Ted Kennedy did make a walk-on appearance, but never got farther than the door into the ballroom...
...But another new piece of business seems pretty desperate by any measure: a y et for all Salinger's efforts, that much expected cloudburst still hasn't developed, and there looks to be little rain in the forecast anytime soon...
...In fact, much of the information came either from Salinger's pro-Libyan chum in Paris, or from other journalists who, in some cases, were simply passing along information they heard from each other...
...The show again starred Salinger...
...Nearly a dozen other heavyweights slip-streamed out the door behind him, taking many of the firm's biggest and most lucrative accounts...
...The biggest remaining account in the office was the Government of Mexico, but when NAFTA passed, there was nothing left to do for the Mexicans and that business all but dried up, too...
...28 The American Spectator August 1994 In any event, Salinger's information was basically worthless, and when it reached the CIA anti-terrorism group working on the bombing, it was dismissed, in the words of one group official, as "junk...
...A colleague in Europe still recalls Salinger's coverage of a TWA hijacking in the mid-1980s, especially his grand entrance upon arriving in Algiers via chartered plane from Nice...
...If an assistant happened to be in the room and asked whether to step outside, Salinger would dig the knife in even deeper by saying, "Oh no, this isn't important," then continue with his diatribe...
...It is no small accomplishment to be able to promote oneself into the role of living legend, and that alone made Salinger valuable to ABC News—at least for a while...
...He had been chief of staff to Senate Republican Bill Brock of Tennessee, and was once married to Dan Quayle's first cousin...
...The story appeared in all four editions of the newspaper, the first one of which was put to bed at 8:45 p.m...
...So long as some CEO somewhere still clings to the faint and fading memory of King John of Kennedy and his Court, there will doubtless be new opportunities still to be tapped by Camelot's crown prince of self-promotion...
...S alinger also played a clumsy role in the so-called April Glaspie affair, which featured reports of Glaspie, then the U.S...
...Finally in 1977, Salinger caught the eye of Roone Arledge, then undergoing his own meteoric rise from head of ABC Sports to head of the network's news division...
...In September, the company announced a buy-out offer to encourage anyone who wanted to leave to do so, and the mob scene at the down-elevator resembled panic...
...A recent adulatory profile quotes one ABC official as observing that Pierre could simply pick up the phone and get any number of heads of government on the line—an invaluable resource for any global news organization...
...In fact, it brought in a guy who'd been out of the loop for thirty years, with no one to speak of in his Rolodex at all...
...In his spare time, Salinger also managed to author eight books on various subjects, and that, too, is no mean feat...
...Instead, he kept confusing his stature It is no small accomplishment to be able to promote oneself into the role of living legend, and that alone made Salinger valuable to ABC News— at least for a while...
...ambassador to Iraq, witlessly giving Saddam Hussein what he interpreted as a green light to invade Kuwait...
...It didn't actually involve the PLO at all," a Burson official explains lamely, "just some Arab-Americans who wanted to support the PLO in the peace process...
...0 ff-the-record interviews with past and present ABC news people rarely brought flattering comments...
...Given the title of vice chairman, Salinger was said to have been lured aboard by a $500,000-plus salary and plenty of perks—one of which was visible to anyone who worked on the company's tenth floor, where workmen began knocking down walls to turn two abutting offices into a suite grand enough to suit the tastes of a Hollywood mogul...
...In a move reminiscent of his days as an Arab-leaning journalist, Salinger tried unsuccessfully to land an account representing the Palestine Liberation Organization—an effort that Burson officials clearly wish would be forgotten and insist is now dead...
...needed to find a way to keep trading on the one credential that had kept his entire 30-year career in public life seemingly on the rise: his job as John Kennedy's press secretary from Inauguration Day 1961 to Dallas a thousand days later...
...In fact, it may well have been only by chartered jet that Salinger could have gotten to the hijacking at all...
...Not knowing what to make of the information, he told an aide to go to the suspect's apartment and "interview" him...
...We know everyone is highly conscious of the situation and is doing their [sic] best to build income and control costs...
...But in London—home to the largest and most talented pool of American journalists abroad—Salinger was just one correspondent among many...
...According to an insider at the firm, the Mexico account had been generating roughly $4 million a year in fees, but is now bringing in less than a quarter of that amount...
...W ithin a month the exodus had begun...
...Meanwhile, even the big cheese himself—Tom Bell—has departed for the greener pastures of a corner office at Gulfstream Aerospace, and Salinger keeps doing his best to drum up new business...
...In Paris, Salinger had long since established himself as the government's first choice whenever a top official wanted to be interviewed on subjects of interest to Americans...
...The information was disbelieved by the CIA officials who reviewed it prior to airing...
...Unfortunately, Salinger's charm doesn't seem to be going far in Washington...
...Thinking he'd uncovered the biggest scoop of the age, Salinger tried to interest the CIA in what he thought he knew, and began feeding confidential ABC research files to a female contact in the personnel records branch of the CIA...
...Worse, in many cases, the people deciding to cash in their chips were among the best and most talented in the company...
...Nonetheless, since $3 million in project seed-money came from federal funds through the sale of commemorative coins, the General Accounting Office is now investigating, as is the Internal Revenue Service...
...The would-be rainmaker...
...Other big PR operations had faced squeezes, too, with bloated staffs, high-living top brass, and (ever since the 1987 stock market crash) penurious corporate clients...
...The chief operating officer, Tom Bell, was wired in to every Republican in town who mattered...
...The trouble was, he never quite seemed to realize it...
...The woman's June 1989 letter strokes Salinger's ego, telling him that her superiors are anxious to see whatever else he could come up with...
...A Burson-Marsteller official, standing just inside the doorway, recalls seeing Kennedy say hello to Salinger, then scan the room warily for friendly faces...
...Salinger, an obsessive cigar smoker, is listed in corporate filings as a member of the Smokers' Alliance board, yet he is identified not as a Burson-Marsteller official but as a "former U.S...
...Be that as it may, one person was clearly interested in the job, and that was Pierre Salinger, wholeague as remarking, "Roone has made it possible for Pierre to live the life to which he always wanted to become accustomed...
...Salinger's wife, Nicole, was a piece of work, and would make periodic grand appearances in the London bureau with the family dog on a leash...
...But by now, having apparently realized that it had named the wrong bombers in the earlier account, ABC simply eliminated all mention of them in its new and improved version of events—without, of course, acknowledging that the earlier story had been wrong in any way...
...As for new business, the firm has recently signed up the American Legion for a "multi-year" deal that will be worth "seven digits," says the insider...
...Back in the 1980s, Burson-Marsteller was the quintessence of the plugged-in Republican P.R...
...1.2 million account funded by Philip Morris and known as the "National Smokers' Alliance...
...Pierre Salinger, global super-journalist extraordinaire (so to speak...
...To that individual and to all of you I want to say that there is no such thing as 'hot news' at ABC...
...It reads, "We continue to perform below expectations, even as measured against the July forecast...
...01 The American Spectator August 1994 31...
...One told of Salinger's empire-building efforts to construct a "bureau within the bureau" in London, and of underlings getting whipsawed in turf struggles between Salinger and the London bureau chief, David Glott...
...Senator...
...Unfortunately, most of the people who turned up were Burson-Marsteller's 30 The American Spectator August 1994 own clients...
...Thereafter, in the spring of 1990, a freelance investigator with ties to ABC learned that the CIA was in fact investigating the possibility of Libyan involvement in the bombing, and had passed on to Salinger the name of a key suspect, who happened to be living in London at the time...
...The situation began to develop in January 1993, when Salinger gan promoting himself to New York to be reassigned to Washington as the network's bureau chief...
...One recently departed Burson official says a pitch was made to New York super-flack John Scanlon, who turned it down flat...
...Salinger prevailed and the subordinate headed for Heathrow...
...Salinger did have a coup or two...
...The aide refused, but a week later the Guardian was out with the story anyway, suggesting that Salinger himself had done the deed...
...Bolstered by the deep pockets of the Young & Rubicam advertising agency, which acquired Burson-Marsteller in 1984, Bell went on an acquisition drive that gobbled up some of the most influential Republican lobbying boutiques in town, including Black, Manafort, Stone & Kelly and Gold & Liebengood...
...In my interview with him, Salinger did acknowledge supplying the materials to the CIA, but said he did so only to help shed light on the Pan Am 103 bombing itself...
...But a report from the company's bean counters last August, which came out just about when Salinger was beginning work as the company's new "vice chairman," says Burson's glory days are over...
...I do not want to see a memo like that ever again...
...On another occasion, Salinger found himself having trouble getting responses to his memos to New York...
...Gunther notes, for example, that reporting by Salinger helped ABC scoop the world on the Iranian hostage release story...
...After nearly doubling its fee income in the last two years of the Bush presidency, the Washington office saw its fee income actually drop in 1993, to $30.5 million—an abrupt reversal of fortunes...
...To remind the brass who they were dealing with, he sent yet another rocket to New York, this time attaching a photo of himself to it and splashing "HOT NEWS" across the top...
...Salinger's promotional efforts, launched from the platform of ABC's morning show, helped raise millions for the project, and ultimately led to the foundation's becoming a Burson client...
...But who should be offered the job...
...Thus, in November 1989, Salinger starred in an ABC "PrimeTime Live" special, fingering three specific individuals known as the "Kenyan Three": Mohammed al-Makoussi, Ibrahim Twafik-Youssef, and Hassan Hadi alAhar...
...public relations firm...
...London time...
...Scanlon confirms that he did indeed turn down an offer to join the firm, but says the position involved a job in New York, not Washington...
...That was particularly so with his reporting on the December 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103...
...She in turn had been angling to get herself reassigned to a CIA group doing work on terrorism—and started passing the files around the Agency to promote herself as someone with access, via Salinger, to the internal files of ABC News...
...Salinger arrived in grand style...
...Further, reported Salinger, the information came to him from "sources inside the terrorist movement...
...Back at the office, the circumstances that accompanied Salinger's arrival could not have been worse...
...Pines had been the big star in Burson-Marsteller's pharmaceuticals group...
...Now the business in that office was coming under pressure, threatening a financial crunch on the entire worldwide enterprise—which at its peak at the start of the nineties had numbered more than 2,000 employees in sixty-two offices in twenty-eight countries...
...Buoyed by his credentials on the Parisian social circuit, Salinger was appointed Paris bureau chief in 1978, then in 1983 was elevated to the still grander slot of chief European correspondent...
...But does Salinger's claim make sense...
...Salinger seemed to enjoy torturing one bureau executive, Ned Warwick, a Capital Cities man sent to London as a budget-cutter...
...Pierre does not make the decisions around here," roared Glott...
...Salinger himself has been accused of no wrongdoing...
...There was, for example, Wayne Pines, one-time deputy commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration...
...But Burson-Marsteller's problem was, if not the most severe, then certainly the least expected...
...The tip proved to be prescient, for it wasn't long after that the U.S...
...Salinger's hiring was celebrated at a Burson-sponsored gala thrown at Washington's Willard Hotel...
...It was my employer's decision, not mine," he said...
...Interviewed for this story, Salinger said that the main reason was that ABC News was picking up a portion of his taxes and that the tax burden was expected to be lower on him in Britain...
...Although he does admit to having supplied the Glaspie transcript to the Guardian, he says he didn't do so until after ABC had used it for a special entitled "A Line in theparlayed his credentials as a World War II vet—along with his top-drawer political and social contacts in France—into the chairmanship of a nonprofit project to raise money for a memorial to commemorate the Allied invasion of Normandy...
...S alinger's record as an actual investigative journalist was mixed...
...Perhaps sensing as much, Salinger tried to play his Camelot card one last time, and, following Bill Clinton's 1992 victory, beSand," which aired on Tuesday night, September 11, 1990...
...Scarcely had the news gone out when the brass at Burson's parent company, Young & Rubicam, announced a desperate, new get-tough policy to cut costs: Whenever the firm loses an account, everyone who worked on it gets fired...
...Moreover, said Salinger, he checked personally with "World News Tonight" before doing so...
...as one of the last figures of Camelot with his role as a working journalist, creating a sense of overblown self-importance that enveloped him like a cloud...
...With the finger of suspicion now beginning to point toward not Syria but Libya, "PrimeTime Live" in December 1990 ran a rehashed version of the The American Spectator August 1994 29 November 1989 story...
...Unable to open doors with the mere mention of his name, he had to compete in the workaday world of breaking news, and this made his self-puffing efforts seem even more out of place and distasteful...
Vol. 27 • August 1994 • No. 8
