James Patrick Moore, Jr. (born April , 1953 in Joliet, Illinois) is an author,[1] professor, television commentator, lecturer, and former senior government official. Currently he teaches international business, corporate ethics, and leadership and management at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University. He also is the creator and continuing inspiration behind the American Prayer Project that was launched at the Washington National Cathedral on November 8, 2005.
Moore was born in Joliet Illinois on April 1953 while his father, Dr. James P. Moore, was in medical residency. His mother, Dorothy Robinette Woodring Moore, was the head of the World War II Canteen at Joseph Horne Department Store in Pittsburgh and served as an assistant to the legendary Gwilym Price, President and CEO of the Westinghouse Corporation, in the years after the war.
The Moore family settled in Ford City, Pennsylvania in 1954 where Moore’s father set up his medical practice. Moore graduated from Kiskiminetsa Springs School (kiski) in Saltsburg, Pennsylvania in 1971 where he cofounded the St. Andrew Society, dedicated to providing food and clothing to the poor in the surrounding community of Western Pennsylvania, which became the largest organization on campus, primarily due to the fact virtually no requirement to join made it great "padding" for college applications. He then graduated from Rutgers College of Rutgers University in 1975 with highest distinction in political science and went on to receive a Masters in Public and International Affairs at the University of Pittsburgh in 1976.
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From graduate school Moore was hired as legislative assistant to Congressman William Ketchum, a Republican from Bakersfield, California who sat on the House Ways and Means Committee. After the Congressman’s death in 1978, he became legislative director for the newly elected Congressman Charles Pashayan of Fresno, California. During his tenure on Capitol Hill he was involved in helping to draft several pieces of major legislation enacted into law related to business, government spending, and foreign policy.
In 1980 he decided to return to his legal residence in Western Pennsylvania to run for the U.S. House of Representatives. The political realities of reapportionment that year, however, prevented him from doing so. Consequently, he absorbed himself in the duties of the board of the National Air and Space Museum of the Smithsonian, to which he had been appointed by President Ronald Reagan. He became heavily involved in the selection of a new executive director for the museum and a major proponent in having the private sector underwrite a greater share of museum activities.
Three years later Commerce Secretary Malcolm Baldrige appointed Moore as his Deputy Assistant Secretary for Trade Information and Analysis as well as the Head of the U.S. delegation to the Industry Committee of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). As a result of a major realignment within the Department, he was responsible for monitoring U.S. industry at home and abroad on behalf of the U.S. Government. He also worked with the Director-General of the U.S. and Foreign Commercial Service in overseeing the commercial operations in U.S. embassies around the world and held the investment portfolio in the department in attracting foreign investment into the United States. During this period he traveled the United States and around the globe to represent U.S. interests. He delivered several speeches abroad in both French and German.
The Secretary then asked him to serve as Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary for International Economic Policy. It was in this position that he worked with country desk officers to help execute and maintain bilateral and multilateral trade and economic relationships. He headed negotiations on behalf of the U.S. Government with such countries as China, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. He helped to initiate talks with Canada that would lead to a bilateral agreement and later the creation of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). He also headed a 40-person team that negotiated the last trade and economic agreement with the Soviet Union and was one of the senior negotiators in launching the Uruguay Round which led to the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO).
President Ronald Reagan then nominated Moore in early 1987 to be his Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Trade Development. Confirmed unanimously by the U.S. Senate, he worked with nine deputy assistant secretaries covering various U.S. industries. He also was confirmed unanimously to be a member of the Board of the U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corporation (OPIC) and sat on the board of the Export-Import Bank of the United States (ex officio) and was a members of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). He also served simultaneously as U.S. Ambassador to the Bureau of International Expositions in Paris.
At the conclusion of the Reagan Administration, Moore was named a distinguished fellow at the business school of the University of Colorado (Denver). During that time, he triggered the launching of the Global Forum in Aspen, Colorado which brought together global leaders from business, government, and academia to discuss critical issues of the day. Serving as its chairman, with the university serving as the secretariat, he helped organize its first conference on the post-Communist transition of the Soviet Union. The four-day meeting, covered gavel to gavel by C-SPAN, consisted of top leaders from the United States and the Soviet Union. Several of the Soviet participants would later be appointed ministers by Soviet President Boris Yeltsin and Russian President Vladimir Putin.
During this period Moore founded ATI, an investment banking firm, with offices in Washington, London, Doha, and Moscow. He also accepted the Vice Chairmanship of the International Press Center and Club in Moscow, whose mission was to work with journalists from the former Soviet Union to provide understanding and technical know how on the workings of a free press. The multimillion dollar complex hosted President Yeltsin and world leaders who delivered speeches on a wide range of subjects, much like the National Press Club in Washington.
As a result of the death of his father in October 1997, Moore began to think about prayer in the context of American history. While working at his firm he began to research the subject in his off hours and found through the Library of Congress that nothing had been written on the topic. That discovery led him to begin to research and ultimately write One Nation Under God: The History of Prayer in America and its publication on November 1, 2005 by Doubleday.
The book was adapted into audio by Random House Audio. Joining Moore in reading the book were 20 prominent Americans who gave voices to the characters in his book. Some of those narrators were Senator John McCain (Stonewall Jackson, George Patton), actor Roscoe Lee Browne (Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass), journalist Hugh Sidey (Abraham Lincoln, Walt Disney), Broadway star Ben Vereen (Spirituals of the slaves), and historic novelist Gail Buckley (Harriet Tubman, Eleanor Roosevelt). U.S. Senate Chaplain Lloyd Ogilvie and U.S. House Chaplain Daniel Coughlin recreated the prayers they delivered to their respective chambers the day after September 11, 2001, and former astronaut recited the prayer he transmitted on Apollo 8 from space to earth on Christmas in 1968.
The book also led to the creation of a series of music CDs by PBA Music Publishing, the first entitled The Many Voices of One Nation Under God. This part of the American Prayer Project was launched to show how American genre music is rooted in prayer from African American Spirituals (i.e., jazz, rhythm and blues, gospel) to the hymns of Appalachia (i.e., folk, country). The eclectic mix of composers and performers such as Leonard Bernstein, Loretta Lynn, Tupac Shakur, and Dave Brubeck show how prayer has become the inspiration to even contemporary music. Moore has written the liner notes.
In turn, the book has been brought to the television screen in a public television miniseries entitled Prayer in America. The Emmy award-winning Duncan Group produced the film with Moore acting as the consulting producer. The project, including its outreach across the United States through Outreach Extensions, was funded by a grant from the Templeton Foundation.
The film also has generated a five-part program that will be video streamed into public, private, and parochial middle schools and high schools across the United States. The multimedia firm Questar will distribute the program in the fall of 2008.
The latest venture of the American Prayer Project is the upcoming release of The Treasury of American Prayers, also to be published by Doubleday, in the fall of 2008. The book compiles a series of prayers written by Americans since early Native America and provides descriptions to put the prayers and their authors into context.
The American Prayer Project was launched on November 8, 2005 at Washington National Cathedral. In conjunction with the Interfaith Conference of Metropolitan Washington, Moore served as the host for the evening with performers from a dozen faith traditions.
Moore has taught international business and ethics at the McDonough School of Business at Georgetown University since 1999. He has received several awards by the faculty and students for outstanding teaching. He also has lectured at universities and colleges around the United States including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania, and all of the U.S. military academies, and was named a distinguished fellow at the University of Colorado. In addition he has addressed a wide range of audiences outside of academia from the medical staff of the Mayo Clinic to senior corporate executives of such companies as 3M, Merck, Ciba-Geigy, and the New York Stock Exchange.
For more than a dozen years, Moore has been a guest commentator on CNBC and other news programs, discussing issues from political and economic hotspots around the world to domestic politics in the United States and its impact on the domestic and global economy. His articles and speeches have been translated into dozens of languages.