Pierre Salinger, who served as President John F Kennedy's press secretary and later had a long career with ABC News, has died at a hospital in southern France. He was 79.
Mr Salinger died yesterday from heart failure following surgery last week at a hospital in Cavaillon to implant a pacemaker, his wife Poppy said.
Mr Salinger, pictured in 1996
The couple moved to Le Thon, near Avignon, four years ago to run a bed-and-breakfast hotel.
She said her husband decided to move to France because he was so deeply opposed to the presidency of Mr George Bush.
"He was very upset because he thought Bush was not fit to be President. He said he would leave if Bush became president and he did," Mrs Salinger said.
The cultured and outspoken Salinger rose from the ranks of newspaper journalism to become press secretary to JFK and eventually a trusted member of the family's inner circle.
He and Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis stayed in contact for many years following her husband's assassination.
Mr Salinger, who also served as press secretary for President Lyndon B. Johnson, said Kennedy was a "special man" who surrounded himself with advisers who "believed in each other" and in a common mission.
"There was no barrier on the President's door," Mr Salinger wrote in McCall's magazine in 1988. "Any of his dozen principal staffers could see him when they wanted to. They didn't need permission from a chief of staff to gain access."
A long-time newspaper journalist, Mr Salinger switched to television reporting when he joined ABC in 1977. In the years following he worked as the network's Paris bureau chief, chief foreign correspondent and senior editor in London.
He had left the network by 1997, when he became a prominent backer of the theory that TWA Flight 800, which crashed off Long Island in 1996 on a flight to Paris, was accidentally brought down by a US Navy missile.
Mr Salinger said at the time that a government document showed the Navy was testing missiles off the coast of New York and had been told planes would be flying higher than 21,000 feet.
The Navy was unaware that Flight 800 was flying at 13,000 feet because another commercial plane was flying above it, he said.
The National Transportation Safety Board found no evidence of a missile strike. It concluded that Flight 800 was destroyed by a centre fuel tank explosion, probably caused by a spark from a short-circuit in the wiring that ignited vapours in the tank.
AP