Born Robert Lowell Moore Jr. on Halloween Night 31 October 1925 in Boston, Massachusetts and raised in Concord, Massachusetts. He attended Middlesex School and Belmont Hill School.

Robin served in the US Army Air Corp during World War II where he flew a tour of combat missions over Germany during the War as a nose-gunner and received the Air Medal.

He graduated from Harvard in 1949 and went to New York to produce television shows. In 1952 he returned to Boston to work for the Sheraton Hotel Company co-founded by his father, Robert Lowell Moore Senior. Robin really wanted to just write.

BIOGRAPHY OF ROBIN MOORE

Easy acceptance of his position as heir to an unimaginable fortune – his father co-founded the Sheraton Hotel Chain – would have given Robin Moore an enviable, if somewhat predictably ostentatious, lifestyle. However, Robin’s inherently adventuresome spirit rejected the path of least resistance, and the reluctant heir chose instead to seek new challenges, each of which would have taken an ordinary person a lifetime. Robin, as all would soon realize, was far from ordinary.

After graduating from Harvard College, he moved to New York City to become a television director and producer, in the process spinning off his first novel, an exposé, Pitchman. This book led to his summons before a Senate Committee investigating malpractice in the television industry. Following this initial foray into the media circus, he became a Vice President of the Sheraton Hotel Corporation, charged with expanding its Caribbean operations. In carrying out his commission, he met Fidel Castro, whose guerilla campaign was the subject of his next book, The Devil to Pay. His third book, Hotel Tomayne, chronicled his family’s business and understandably ended his career with Sheraton.

Whilst still working for Sheraton and based in Jamaica, he became a close friend of the legendary Errol Flynn, meddled in Jamaican politics, and started an air charter service on the island, using the first US built STOL (short take off and landing) aircraft. The airline’s operations, which included gun running and smuggling guerrilla fighters to Cuba, landed it in trouble with British authorities and led to its being sold.

Living at the time in a small cottage on the Blue Lagoon in Jamaica, he turned to pig farming, opened a saloon, rented cottages, bought and sold pieces of land, and, in his spare time, wrote risqué books for the US paperback market.

Temporarily leaving Jamaica at the age of 36 for another of his adventures, Moore connected with the US Army Special Forces, which trained him to be a Green Beret so that he could accompany this famous group into combat, and gather material for what would become his enormously successful book, The Green Berets. Selling 3.5 million copies, and spinning off a movie and a comic strip, this book about the Vietnam War managed to antagonize the CIA and US Army on one side, and the anti-war movement on the other. He concluded this plateau of his life with ten weeks on the movie set of The Green Berets with John Wayne, after which he and Barry Sadler collaborated on the popular song, The Ballad of the Green Berets.

Following his stint in the Special Forces, Moore returned to Boston, sought out Arthur Fiedler, and wrote the conductor’s biography, Fiedler, for Little, Brown and Company. Boston was too tame for Robin, however. Missing the dangerous lifestyle he had experienced in Vietnam, he linked up with the New York City Police Department and became friendly with the two detectives and their Mafia adversaries who participated in the spectacular drug bust Robin made famous in the book and movie, The French Connection.  Later, in collaboration with his friend, Milt Machlin, he exposed the story of what happened to the drugs in The Set Up.

Continuing to live in New York, he teamed up with the controversial Madame, Xaviera Hollander, to write The Happy Hooker, which became a successful movie and, with nineteen million copies sold, the best selling original paperback in publishing history.

More adventures and more books followed: The Treasure Hunter documented his stint as a treasure hunter in the Caribbean; a year in Iran and the Middle East witnessing gold smuggling and political subversion became Dubai; three years in Africa observing mercenaries fighting communists led to Rhodesia and The White Tribe. Robin then went to Korea to research and write the script for the film, Oh! Inchon, starring Lord Olivier as MacArthur, followed by his book of the same title. Two subsequent trips to Moscow documented corruption and rampant crime there in The Moscow Connection.

Moore’s book Compulsion caused the American Medical Association to declare compulsive gambling a disease like alcoholism, rather than a punishable crime. Further spheres of activity for Moore included his founding of a publishing company to assist unknown writers, and a campaign in 1981-82 for the Republican nomination for US Senator from Connecticut.

In December 2001, the US Army’s Special Operations division escorted him, at the age of 76 and suffering from Parkinson’s disease, to the war zone in Afghanistan to research his book about that war, The Hunt for bin Laden. He followed this with a trip to the war zone in Iraq in late 2003, to research his book Hunting Down Saddam.

It is natural for a person such as Robin Moore, whose many incarnations have included WWII vet, journalist, screen writer, play-write, song writer and television director, as well as hotel executive, Caribbean revolutionary, smuggler, aviation pioneer, pig farmer, saloon keeper, real estate developer, Green Beret, movie producer, treasure hunter, social reformer, publisher, politician, and prolific writer of some eighty published books, to seek out and meet challenges. However, the one challenge he would never have sought recently posed daunting to this remarkably strong man.

Diagnosed with cancer in 2005, he set about waging war against the disease, viewing his internal enemy as a foe to be conquered. With military precision, he rallied his doctors, took aim with chemotherapy, and pushed the enemy back behind the lines into remission. Summing up his determined philosophy, Robin stated recently, "I have a lot more to do and achieve over the next twenty years or so before I reach the age of one hundred!"

Lately he has written two new books: REACT: CIA Black Ops and The Singleton: Target Cuba. 

If you know Geoff (Jeff) Lambert, you know were The Singleton: Target Cuba came from. Robin Moore teamed up with retired Major General Jeff Lambert (Commander, U.S. Army Special Forces, 2001-2003) to tell the harrowing story of a solo special forces operator, hand-selected and trained to go into harm's way alone; known in the intelligence community as a 'singleton.'

He is an Honorary Life Member of Chapter 38, SFA, a Life Member of The Green Beret Veterans Association, Inc. , The Special Operations Association, as well as and a Life Member of the Special Forces Association.

Da Cajun, Da Birdie, and Da Ski 21 March 2003	Da Birdie and Da Rock September 2003