Robert Scurlark Moore (September 5, 1895 – January 27, 1978) was a major general in the United States Army Finance Corps who served as a military liaison officer to the Senate and House Appropriations Committees for nearly three decades. When the Army refused to make him a general officer, Congress twice used appropriations bills to promote him anyway.
Career Moore was born in Paris, Texas on September 8, 1895, to Robert Scurlark Moore and Estelle (Lanier) Moore, and grew up in Ada, Oklahoma. He received a teaching certificate from East Central State Normal School in 1916, and was working as a teacher when the United States entered World War I.
World War I Moore enlisted in the Army on June 1, 1917, and served overseas in France as a private and private first class with Company F of the 7th Engineers, eventually rising to battalion sergeant major in the 5th Division headquarters. He was wounded in action while attached to the 27th Division in the Somme offensive. On October 1, 1918, he accepted an infantry officer's commission as second lieutenant in the National Army, which was the temporary volunteer force that augmented the permanent Regular Army for the duration of the war. The volunteers were disbanded at the end of the war, and Moore was honorably discharged from the National Army on April 7, 1920.Official Army Register. January 1, 1948, Volume I. The Office of the Adjutant General. Washington, D.C. 1948. pg. 1287.
Infantry officer After the war, Moore decided to make a career of the Army. He accepted an infantry commission in the Regular Army on September 21, 1920, with a promotion to first lieutenant backdated to July 1, 1920, and was assigned to the 29th Infantry at Camp Benning, Georgia, on November 17, 1920.Official Army Register. July 1, 1921. The Adjutant General’s Office. Washington, D.C. 1921. pg. 1057. He was detached in 1921 to take the Infantry School Basic Course. Upon graduating in 1922, he returned to the 29th Infantry, where he remained until 1924.
On March 1, 1924, Moore began pilot training at the Air Service Primary Flying School at Brooks Field, Texas, but his detail to the Air Service was terminated on June 11, 1924, only ten weeks into the six-month curriculum, and he did not graduate. Resuming his infantry career, Moore was assigned to the 13th Infantry in Boston, Massachusetts, first as commanding officer of a recruit center at the regimental headquarters at Fort Warren, and in 1925 becoming battalion and post adjutant for the 1st Battalion, 13th Infantry at Fort Strong.Army List and Directory, 1924–1931. The Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, D. C.
Moore married the former Adrienne Marot in Dorchester, Boston, on Thanksgiving Day 1925, and the couple moved to New Jersey, where Moore was attending the Signal School at Fort Monmouth. He graduated the next year, and the newlyweds took several months leave to visit the bride's native France, before moving to Fort McPherson, Georgia, for what would be Moore's final infantry assignment, as a communications officer in the 22nd Infantry from 1927 to 1929.
Finance officer Moore transferred to the Finance Department of the War Department on December 12, 1929, and was assigned as Chief of the Appropriations Language Branch, War Department Budget Division. He graduated from the Finance School in 1930, and was assigned to the U.S. Army finance office in Brooklyn, New York. In 1931 he was briefly posted to the Ninth Corps Area headquarters at the Presidio of San Francisco, California, and then he and his wife embarked for a three-year assignment overseas in the Philippine Department headquarters in Manila, where he served as a disbursing officer. He returned to Washington, D.C., in 1934 to attend the Army Industrial College. He was finally promoted to captain on October 1, 1934, after 14 years as a first lieutenant.
After graduating from the Army Industrial College in 1935, he spent the next fifteen years in key Army budgeting billets in Washington, D.C., except for a period as deputy finance officer, U.S. Army, in Brooklyn, New York from 1939 to 1940. Returning to the capital in 1940, he assumed the role of War Department liaison to the Senate and House appropriations committees, a duty he would retain in various forms for the next 28 years. He was promoted to major on July 1, 1940, and temporary lieutenant colonel on September 15, 1941.
World War II During World War II, Moore was responsible for preparing the language of military appropriation bills, and defending that language before the Bureau of the Budget and Congress. Over the course of the war, Congress appropriated $160 billion to the Army, and Moore was also charged with ensuring that the entire sum could be spent legally through the obligation and expenditure process.
He was promoted to temporary colonel on February 1, 1942, and permanent lieutenant colonel on December 11, 1942. From March 25, 1942, to July 6, 1943, he was chief of the Legislative Reference Section of the Fiscal Division in the headquarters of the Services of Supply, and Special Assistant to the budget officer for the War Department, for which service he was awarded the Legion of Merit. He was detailed to the General Staff Corps from July 12, 1943, to December 1, 1943.
After the war, Moore participated in negotiating hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements with the military governments of Germany and Korea, and with the civilian governments of Austria and Czechoslovakia. He was promoted to permanent colonel on March 11, 1948. By 1949, he was deputy chief of the budget division, and considered one of the foremost experts in military budgeting.
Congressional liaison In January 1950, Wilfred J. McNeil, the newly appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense (Comptroller), hired Moore to be his personal liaison with Congress, and specifically with the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Moore received the title of special assistant to the Comptroller of the Department of Defense, and was promoted to brigadier general on October 5, 1950. According to Henry E. Glass, Economic Advisor to the Comptroller, Moore achieved “extraordinary success” in this role. Glass described Moore as a “peculiar, not particularly articulate” person who was loved and trusted by the committee and its staff, and would spend as much as a thousand dollars of his own money to take congressional staffers to lunch.
Moore, whose duties had included congressional liaison since 1940, developed a knack for cultivating powerful admirers on both sides of the partisan divide. Democratic Senator John C. Stennis said, “I first became acquainted with General Moore in 1949 and soon became impressed by his abilities to analyze a problem and carry into speedy execution a workable solution. Since that time, as a member of the Defense Department Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee and, more particularly, during the years when I was chairman of the Military Construction Subcommittee, I learned that my evaluation was correct.” Republican Senator Milton Young said, “I first became personally acquainted with Bobby in 1951, when I was appointed to the Armed Services Subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee….I cannot begin to enumerate, within my own experience on the Appropriations Committee, how many times we have called on Bobby Moore to straighten out vexing problems in the defense area….And it does not matter whether the problem is large or small, involving a simple question of a constituent or the utilization of billions of dollars, Bobby may always be depended on to come up with the answer.” After Moore was promoted to brigadier general and major general by Congressional legislation, Senate Appropriations Committee chairman Kenneth D. McKellar and House Appropriations Committee chairman George H. Mahon were remembered as being his primary supporters. Moore liked to observe that “the Democrats were in power at the time of his first promotion and the Republicans at the time of his second."
Moore's fellow officers eventually came to believe that he belonged more to Congress than to the Army. According to General Herbert B. Powell, “He was older, unfit for field service, but worked hard and stayed on the job so long that he became a staff officer for the committee and not a representative of the Army. Every time we tried to relieve and replace him, the committee chairman would stop us…. The last time I saw him he was dressed in a blue uniform ballooning over his stomach, trying to get on an airplane and go to Europe with the [Armed Forces] subcommittee of the Senate Appropriations Committee.” As a member of that subcommittee, Senator Young warmly endorsed Moore's participation in such trips, saying, “I found him to be extremely knowledgeable on such occasions, not only in a broad defensewide understanding, but also in his detailed familiarity with individual installations. I grew to know him, respect him, and cherish him as a valued friend. He is one of the greatest personalities I have ever known.”
Retirement Moore received his final promotion, to major general, on May 1, 1954. Three months later, he voluntarily retired from the Army on August 31, 1954, but was recalled to active duty at the request of Congress on September 7, 1954, and continued as special assistant to the Department of Defense comptroller for another 14 years. In 1961 he was described as a former sergeant major who “has participated in the spending of more money than any other person in U.S. military history.”
By then, even Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara could not dislodge Moore from his liaison role. Every year, the annual defense appropriations bill was coordinated through the Comptroller's office, with Moore being the Defense Department's point of contact with the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. However, all other defense-related legislation, including the authorization bills produced by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees, was handled by the Assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Legislative Affairs. McNamara repeatedly tried to consolidate legislative operations into a single office, but Congress always blocked him. “We were never able to do that,” said David E. McGiffert, McNamara's Legislative Affairs Assistant from 1962 to 1965, “because one of the two Appropriations Committees wanted Bobby Moore to remain as the liaison individual and wanted that individual to remain in the comptroller’s office because the committee was used to being able just to pick up the telephone and call Bobby, or somebody else in the comptroller’s office, on technical points, and they were fearful that any reorganization would sever, to some degree, that channel. And no matter how much we told them that that wasn’t the intention, they were unwilling to really believe that that wouldn’t happen, intended or not.” The result was that McGiffert could schedule McNamara's appearances before every Congressional committee except one. For Appropriations Committee hearings, “I’d always have to go to Bobby to find out when McNamara was supposed to go. A silly situation, which, as I say, we never fixed.”David E. McGiffert, recorded interview by William W. Moss, December 29, 1970, (page 8), John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program.