Jim Leach obit

Former U.S. Rep. Jim Leach dies at 82

 

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Iowa’s longtime U.S. Rep. Jim Leach has died at 82 years old.

Leach was born and raised in Davenport and served in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1977 until 2007. He was a Republican, but broke from his party in 2008, when he endorsed Barack Obama for president over John McCain.

Leach later changed his affiliation to the Democratic Party in 2022 and began backing many of Iowa’s Democratic Congressional candidates over their GOP counterparts. In an interview on IPR’s River to River from that year, Leach said it was the events on Jan. 6, 2021, at the U.S. Capitol that spurred him to cross the aisle again.

“Insurrection is absolutely untenable. And then when you have a party in Congress defend it, that’s absolutely bizarre.”

Leach held a law degree from the University of Iowa, where he was the public affairs chair for three years. He also chaired the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2009 to 2013 and was elected to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo.

Leach was the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. He also served as the interim director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard Kennedy School at Harvard University from September 17, 2007, to September 1, 2008, when Bill Purcell was appointed permanent director.

Previously, Leach served 30 years (1977–2007) as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives, representing Iowa's 2nd congressional district (numbered as the 1st District from 1977 to 2003). In Congress, Leach chaired the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services (1995–2001) and was a senior member of the House Committee on International Relations, serving as Chair of the committee's Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs (2001–2006). He also founded and served as co-chair of the Congressional Humanities Caucus. He lost his 2006 re-election bid to Democrat Dave Loebsack. Leach sponsored the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, a notable piece of banking legislation of the 20th century.

Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, and won the 1960 state wrestling championship at the 138-pound weight class for Davenport High School. He graduated from Princeton University in 1964 with an A.B. in politics after completing a senior thesis titled "The Right to Revolt: John Locke Contrasted with Karl Marx." While a student at Princeton, Leach was a member of The Ivy Club. He then earned a Master of Arts degree in Soviet studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1966. He later did further Soviet research at the London School of Economics, where he studied under Leonard Schapiro, the foremost expert on Soviet affairs.

Prior to entering the United States Foreign Service, he was a staffer for then U.S. Rep. Donald Rumsfeld. In 1969, he was an assistant to Rumsfeld, who had left his Congressional seat to become Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration. While in the Foreign Service, he was a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the U.N. General Assembly. In 1973, Leach resigned his commission in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre when Richard Nixon fired his Attorney General, Elliot Richardson, and the independent counsel investigating the Watergate break-in, Archibald Cox.

After returning to Iowa to head a family business, Leach was elected in 1976 to Congress (defeating two-term Democrat Edward Mezvinsky), where he came to be a leader of a small band of moderate Republicans. He chaired two national organizations dedicated to moderate Republican causes: the Ripon Society and the Republican Mainstream Committee. He also served as president of the largest international association of legislators – Parliamentarians for Global Action.

During his 15 terms in Congress, Leach's voting record was generally conservative on fiscal issues, moderate on social matters, and progressive in foreign policy. As chair of the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, he pressed for a Comprehensive Test Ban and led the first House debate on a nuclear freeze. He objected to military unilateralism as reflected in the Iran-Contra policy of the 1980s. He pushed for full funding of U.S. obligations to the United Nations, supported U.S. re-entry into UNESCO, and opposed U.S. withdrawal from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.

While he supported the first Gulf War in 1991, Leach was one of six House Republicans who voted against the authorization to use force against Iraq in 2002. Once the Congress committed to war, however, he held that it would be folly to assume it could be funded with tax cuts and therefore[citation needed] he was one of three Republican congressmen (alongside Michael Castle and Amo Houghton) to vote against the 2003 extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.