The passing of Pierre Salinger marks the end of the Kennedy era.

Salinger was press secretary to President John F. Kennedy when I started covering the White House in 1961 for United Press International.

Salinger had been a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle and an investigative correspondent for Colliers magazine before his career gained luster as the spokesman for the New Frontier, as Kennedy called his policy agenda.

The cigar-chomping, poker-laying bon vivant died Saturday at his home in Provence, France, at the age of 79. Many old friends from the Kennedy White House turned up for his funeral rites at Holy Trinity, the Catholic church the Kennedy clan attended in fashionable Georgetown.

In his eulogy, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., said there "couldn't have been a New Frontier without him. Pierre was part of our family."

"You couldn't possibly make up Pierre," Kennedy said.

It's true. No one who followed in the spokesman's role could match him for the way he fielded complex subjects during the Cold War with warmth and understanding.

The senator said that on their first day in the White House, President Kennedy showed his wife around the West Wing, and when they popped into the pressroom, he pointed out my boss, and told her: "Jackie, this is Merriman Smith (UPI's veteran White House reporter) -- he comes with the place."

The senator continued: "Jackie loved Pierre, a great raconteur, and wanted him to visit often so that her children, (Caroline and John), could hear his stories about their father."

Salinger came on the national stage when the phrase "managed news" had crept into the journalistic jargon, referring to White House efforts to focus the news media in directions that favored the administration. But those early attempts were nothing compared to the "spin" that reporters are subjected to today.

Salinger had the saving grace of a sense of humor -- indispensable to press secretaries -- and a bottom-line honesty.

He could kibitz with reporters in the pressroom and then saunter into the Oval Office and joke around with the president. The Kennedy White House was that open and informal, so vastly different from the present.

Of course, the press corps was a tight little island that revolved around print journalism. This was long before the advent of 24-hour cable television.

Called "Lucky Pierre" or "Plucky Pierre," he was gregarious, hobnobbed with diplomats and statesmen, was a gourmet and such a terrific musician that he could have been a concert pianist.

Salinger was kept in the dark during the planning for the Bay of Pigs debacle in 1961, when the White House promised Cuban exiles that U.S. warplanes would provide air cover for the planned invasion of Cuba, only to have Kennedy throttle back at the last minute.

Salinger protested to Kennedy that he -- the White House press secretary -- needed to know when major news was breaking.

He won his point. After that he sat in on crucial White House deliberations during the eyeball-to-eyeball Cuban missile crisis in 1962, when the United States and the Soviet Union were close to a superpower showdown.

At Salinger's urging, Kennedy was the first president to hold live, televised news conferences. For the first time, this gave the American people a chance to see the way the adversarial press corps and the president played out their respective roles.

Some of his toughest times in the White House were not world crises, but when Jackie Kennedy was on a rampage about intrusive press and photo coverage of her little children it was up to Pierre Salinger to bring us into line.

He knew his ultimatums would never stick. Besides, the Kennedy children would sometimes wander into our midst and the photographers would have a field day.

Salinger, responding to the complaints of women reporters, persuaded President Kennedy to skip the all-male White House Correspondents Dinner as guest of honor if women continued to be barred. Miraculously, the dinner suddenly opened up for newswomen in 1962.

He spent many of his last years writing for the French magazine L'Express and broadcasting for ABC-TV from abroad.

Sen. Kennedy quoted Salinger as saying: "I've had my share of tragedy and my share of happiness, and Lord knows I've seen a lot."

Kennedy, in his eulogy, summed up the feelings of many of us.

"It's hard to say goodbye to a dear, dear friend," said Kennedy.

I feel the same way. We will miss him.

(Helen Thomas can be reached at the e-mail address hthomas@hearstdc.com).

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