Russell Thurston Moore

20-Year Senior White House Producer, NBC News

Russ Moore, Emmy award winning former senior White House producer for NBC News, died after a long illness September 3 at Inova Mount Vernon Hospital in Alexandria, VA. He was 82.

Moore, who spent nearly 20 of his 40 years at NBC News on the White House beat, covered the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush.

Working with correspondents such as Judy Woodruff, Andrea Mitchell and Chris Wallace, Moore traveled the United States and the world. He oversaw White House coverage of the shooting of Ronald Reagan, the Reagan-Gorbachev summits in Geneva and Iceland, Operation Desert Storm, the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Clinton impeachment, the September 11 attacks, and the war in Iraq.

In 1961, Moore joined NBC News in Washington in as a motorcycle courier, racing film back from the White House and other sites to be processed in time for the evening news. Soon he was winning awards as a film and tape editor in Washington.

For a few years, Moore worked out of the NBC News Atlanta bureau as a field producer where he covered the Sadat-Begin peace negotiations in Egypt and Israel that led to the signing of the Camp David Accords with President Jimmy Carter.

While covering the war in El Salvador, he was badly injured when his jeep tumbled down a cliff. Moore went to Poland to cover the shipyard strikes under Lech Walesa. He also covered Jimmy Carter’s presidential campaign.

In 1979, Moore moved back to Washington and later became the NBC News producer covering Walter Mondale’s unsuccessful bid for president. Then he was named senior White House producer for NBC News.

“Russ always had this uncanny knack for knowing where the president might show up unexpectedly,” said one of his NBC News colleagues. “He’d position a camera where no one else did, and NBC would get exclusive footage time and again.”

Russell Thurston Moore was born to George Sidney Moore and Peggy Aurelia Thurston on August 11, 1941, in Detroit, MI. He grew up in Detroit, Charlottesville, VA, and Washington, DC.

In 1988, Moore married NBC News colleague Kristin Jessup, a writer-producer at the TODAY Show in Washington. Moore retired from NBC News in 2001.

Moore is survived by his devoted wife Kristin; daughter Donna Moore-Watson (Kenneth Watson) of Tampa, FL, and Hilo, HI; son Dale Russell Moore (Alexis Lewissohn) of West Palm Beach, FL, and daughter Mariah Alexandra Jessup Moore (Sascha Poeschl) of Berlin, Germany; as well as four grandchildren, Isabella and Charles Lewissohn-Moore, and Julian and Francis Moore Poeschl.

A memorial service will be scheduled at a later date. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Committee to Protect Journalists, POB 2675, New York, NY 10108.