P. S., a Memoir

Press secretary to presidents Kennedy and Johnson, Salinger has written an engaging, whirlwind memoir. Both a participant in and an observer of history, he provides intimate glimpses of John Kennedy during the Bay of Pigs invasion and the Cuban missile crisis as well as an eyewitness account of Robert Kennedy's assassination. A child-prodigy pianist, born in San Francisco in 1925 to an American Jewish mining engineer of German descent and a French Catholic mother, Salinger at the age of 19 commanded a ship in the South Pacific during WWII; he served on a Senate antiracketeering committee that helped break Jimmy Hoffa's power and became a U.S. senator from California for five months in 1964. As Paris bureau chief for ABC News, he established back-channel negotiations in the Iranian hostage crisis in 1979, and covered stories ranging from Irish Republican Army terrorism to the Persian Gulf war. Now a vice-chairman of Burson-Marsteller, a PR firm in Washington, D.C., he writes guardedly of his four marriages and of personal tragedies (his son Marc committed suicide in 1977). Of note, Salinger divulges his 1989 meeting in Moscow in which Gorbachev told an American delegation that the Soviets had had 50,000 troops in Cuba in the fall of 1962--five times as many as the U.S. had presumed; Gorbachev also disclosed that Castro had urged Khrushchev to launch a missile attack. (Oct.)