Parenting & Family Quote by Pierre Salinger

A press secretary admits he’s an “emotional ostrich” and, in doing so, performs the kind of controlled candor that public life rewards. Pierre Salinger’s first line is the standard Washington credential: steadiness, discretion, the ability to absorb chaos without turning it into spectacle. Then he undercuts it with a family-sourced jab, as if to say the restraint isn’t merely professional polish but an ingrained habit with a cost.

The phrase “I do not wear my emotions on my sleeve” is almost bureaucratic in its neatness; it reassures the listener that feeling won’t spill into decision-making or headlines. But “emotional ostrich” is sharper and more revealing. Ostriches are famous, inaccurately, for burying their heads in the sand; that myth matters more than the biology. He’s acknowledging a learned method of survival: when emotions threaten to become unmanageable, you manage the optics by refusing to look.

The son’s presence is the crucial subtext. Stephen’s description punctures the PR sheen because it comes from the one audience immune to official narratives: family. It suggests domestic fallout from the public servant’s persona - a man trained to translate crises into statements may be less equipped to translate vulnerability into intimacy.

Contextually, Salinger’s era prized stoicism as competence, especially for men in the Kennedy orbit where image was policy’s shadow twin. This quote works because it’s not a confession of feeling; it’s a confession of evasion. And in that sidestep, it quietly asks what gets buried so the job can be done.