He tried to found in 1972 the Reforming Movement with Christian Democrat Jean Lecanuet, with whom he supported Valéry Giscard d'Estaing's conservative candidature to the 1974 presidential election.

Jean-Jacques Schreiber (his birth name) was born in Paris, the eldest son of Émile Servan-Schreiber, journalist, who founded the financial newspaper Les Échos, and Denise Brésard.

Beginning in adolescence, he accompanied his father to meetings with highly placed people such as Raoul Dautry, a cabinet-level officer under both Vichy and liberated France.

Having been accepted by the École polytechnique, France's top engineering school in 1943, he joined Charles de Gaulle's Free French Forces with his father and went to Alabama for training as a fighter pilot; however, he never entered combat.

The brilliant 25-year-old was hired to write for the recently founded daily newspaper Le Monde by its founder, Hubert Beuve-Méry, as a foreign affairs editorialist.

This led to his meeting the future Prime Minister Pierre Mendès-France, at that time a dedicated opponent of the French military effort in Indo-China.

In 1953 Servan-Schreiber co-founded (with Françoise Giroud) the weekly L'Express, initially published as a Saturday supplement to the family-owned newspaper Les Échos.

During Mendès-France's pivotal eight-month term as Council President (the formal title for the Prime Minister during the Fourth Republic), JJSS served him as a shadow councilor.

His family lost control of Les Échos; he split politically with Mendès-France; he divorced his first wife, and separated from Françoise Giroud, his mistress since the early 1950s, in order to marry Sabine Becq de Fouquières, who would become the mother of his four sons David, Émile, Franklin, and Édouard.

[citation needed] In 1964 following a study which he commissioned from his brother Jean-Louis, JJSS transformed L'Express into a weekly news magazine patterned after TIME.

He advocated decentralization through regionalization; reallocation of resources from the Concorde program to the Airbus; an end to nuclear testing; reform of the grandes écoles; and computerization.

In 1980 Servan-Schreiber published his second bestseller, Le Défi mondial (The Global Challenge), devoted to the technological rise of Japan through computerization.

[3] He served once again as shadow councillor to his close acquaintances François Mitterrand and Valéry Giscard d'Estaing; his friendship with the latter went back to the École Polytechnique.

He then moved to Pittsburgh where he had his four sons (David, Émile, Franklin and Édouard)[4] educated at Carnegie Mellon University, a leader in computer science.