Frank Moore, who as President Jimmy Carter’s congressional liaison toiled with mixed results to sell the agenda of a self-professed outsider to veterans of Washington, died on Thursday at his home in St. Simons Island, Ga. He was 89.
His son Brian confirmed the death.
Mr. Carter was known for having a “Georgia Mafia” around him during his presidency. Mr. Moore was a leading member of that group, and the two men remained close until Mr. Carter’s death. According to the Georgia newspaper The Gainesville Times, Mr. Moore was the last living person to have worked for Mr. Carter for the entirety of his political career: as an aide from his days as a Georgia state senator all the way through his presidency.
In Washington, the two men had what might have seemed like an ideal chance for legislative achievements. For all four years of the Carter administration, the Democrats controlled every branch of government, and from January 1977 to January 1979 they had supermajorities in the House and the Senate.
Yet it was a less ideologically homogenous era for the party. The Democratic caucus in the Senate, for example, encompassed liberals like Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, staunch anti-Communists like Henry Jackson of Washington and conservative segregationists like John C. Stennis of Mississippi.
These separate factions and their wily tacticians were relatively unfamiliar to Mr. Carter and Mr. Moore, who had first met far away from the nation’s capital — on a local planning panel in Georgia in the mid-1960s.
In the 1970s, after Mr. Carter had been elected governor, he made Mr. Moore his chief of staff. During Mr. Carter’s presidential run, Mr. Moore, a soft-voiced 40-year-old who held the title of national finance chairman, was one of a few of Mr. Carter’s Georgia allies to set up his campaign office in Washington.
By the standards of Mr. Carter and his allies, that made Mr. Moore a Washington expert. Mr. Carter made him the White House’s liaison to Congress immediately upon taking office.
Mr. Moore set about introducing himself to all 535 members of Congress and their roughly 15,000 staffers. In February 1977, The New York Times reported that he met with Mr. Carter up to four times a day, signed off on almost all the memorandums that reached the president’s desk, and helped formulate most official policy.
“I think I know about everything that’s going on,” Mr. Moore told The Times. “People are willing to give me more information than I can keep up with.”
He worked so tirelessly that even after he slipped on ice and broke his wrist, he declined to see a doctor for a week, The Times reported in a profile. He stopped attending his family’s dinners, leaving home before his children woke up and returning after they had gone to bed.
It was not enough. Members of Congress complained that Mr. Moore failed to consult them when necessary, neglected to return their calls, did not have experienced aides and could not speak credibly on behalf of the new administration.
“Each cabinet officer is operating under his own ground rules,” Benjamin S. Rosenthal, a veteran House Democrat from Queens, complained to The Times in 1977, adding, “Moore presumably is not strong enough to turn that around.” The Times called Mr. Moore “the most maligned man in the Carter administration.”
Mr. Carter himself was gaining the reputation of a political novice and micromanager. Responding to criticism, the administration issued ambitious new domestic policy proposals: welfare overhaul, energy reform, inflation reduction, budget balancing and measures that would reverse the decline of cities.
With Mr. Moore’s help, Mr. Carter passed legislation cutting taxes, reorganizing the Civil Service and creating new cabinet departments for energy and education. But many other administration proposals, like urban aid and welfare reform, gained little traction.
During the summer of 1979, Mr. Carter asked his entire cabinet to submit resignations. “Speculation about possible staff changes,” The Times reported, “has centered on Frank B. Moore, the president’s congressional liaison, who has been blamed for many of his difficulties with Congress.”
In the end, Mr. Carter accepted resignations from five cabinet officials, but Mr. Moore remained in his role. Mr. Carter lost to Ronald Reagan in a landslide in 1980.
“They ran against Washington, then became part of Washington, and were neither psychologically nor mechanically equipped to deal with that,” Representative Rosenthal told The Times.
Francis Boyd Moore was born on July 27, 1935, in Dahlonega, a Georgia mining town in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. His father, Charles, ran a small Ford dealership and hardware store. His mother, Elizabeth (Boyd) Moore, was a teacher.
He studied accounting at the University of Georgia and earned a bachelor’s degree there in 1960. He also met a fellow student, Nancy Wofford. They married in 1962.
Before working with Mr. Carter on the Georgia planning panel, Mr. Moore tested the cereal market in Georgia as an employee of Quaker Oats.
After Mr. Carter’s presidency, Mr. Moore was vice president for government affairs at Waste Management, a leading garbage removal company. An avid reader of World War II history, he was also involved in the planning of war memorials in the United States and abroad.
In addition to his son Brian, Mr. Moore is survived by two daughters, Elizabeth and Courtney Moore; another son, Henry; a sister, Ann Wimpy; and five grandchildren. His wife died of cancer in 2024.
In 2023, Mr. Moore told The Gainesville Times that he spoke to Mr. Carter on the phone every week. In spite of their four years together in Washington, they hardly ever spoke about the White House. Their favorite topics, Mr. Moore said, were hunting, family and their recollections of characters of yore from the Georgia state legislature.
But Mr. Moore did discuss his record in Washington at length in a retrospective oral history interview with the Miller Center of the University of Virginia, which focuses on presidential scholarship.
Mr. Carter, in his analysis, was an “activist president,” which meant that fighting with Congress was unavoidable.
“The way to have good congressional relations,” Mr. Moore said, “is not to send any controversial legislation.”
Joseph P. Fried contributed reporting.
Alex Traub is a reporter for The Times who writes obituaries.
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