Jim Leach

This page is about a former Congressman from Iowa and now Director of Harvard University Institute of Politics at Kennedy School of Government. For other people named James Leach, please see James Leach (disambiguation).

Jim Leach
Member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa's 2nd district
In office 1977–2007
Preceded by	Jim Nussle
Succeeded by	David Loebsack
Personal details
Political party	Republican
Spouse	Elisabeth "Deba" Leach

James Albert Smith "Jim" Leach (born October 15, 1942) is the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University. On September 17, 2007, he was named the interim director of the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University, a position he is expected to hold until a permanent director is located after the 2007-2008 academic year. Prior to joining the Princeton faculty, this American politician served 30 years as a Republican member of the United States House of Representatives. In Congress he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China. He represented the 2nd district of Iowa in the state's east central and southeast area from 1976 to 2007 (previously the 1st district from 1977–2003).

Leach authored legislation on a range of issues including:

• the creation of an international AIDS Trust Fund,
• debt relief for the world’s poorest countries,
• authorization of an International Monetary Fund quota increase,
• making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency,
• from requiring the federal government to use soy ink,
• to prohibiting Internet gambling,
• restraining federal employee growth, and
• redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.

The legislation he is perhaps best known for is Gramm-Leach-Bliley which is considered one of the seminal pieces of banking legislation of the 20th century, second in import only to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, and won the 1960 state wrestling championship at the 138-pound weight class for Davenport High School. He was educated at Princeton University (where he became a member of The Ivy Club), Johns Hopkins University and the London School of Economics. He then entered the United States Foreign Service and served as 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. He was reelected 14 times.

During his 15 terms in Congress, Leach’s voting record was generally restrained on fiscal issues, moderate on social matters, and progressive in foreign policy. As Chairman 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 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 he was the only Republican to vote against the 2003 tax cut.

A member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, Leach maintained one of the most environmentally sensitive voting records of any member of Congress. His bill to end logging on federal lands never mustered enough support to reach the House floor. Nevertheless, the movement to support it began to have an impact in the development of public parks policies in Congress. In the years to come more members may come to recognize the bizarre stewardship circumstance, described by Leach in a New York Times op-ed, that the U.S. government is the only landlord in America that pays to have its resources denuded.

Portrait of Jim Leach, 2002, collection of U.S. House of Representatives

Jim Leach, after poll results came in, greeting the press on election night 2006. (Cedar Rapids, Iowa)

Serving 18 years in the minority and 12 in the majority, Leach's position on the abortion issue upset activists on all sides. He supported the right of choice except during the third trimester but also held that public funding represented a complicit infringement on the values of too many Americans to be defensible. A supporter of stem cell research, he believed little could be more pro-life than invigorating science to advance cures to extend and ennoble life itself.

Leach’s political career was hallmarked by concern for democratic process issues. He championed campaign reform and pressed unsuccessfully for a system of partial public financing of elections whereby small contributions could be matched by federal funds with accompanying limits on the amounts that could be spent in campaigns including the personal resources candidates could put in their own races. In his own campaigns Leach refused to accept political action committee or out-of-state assistance and placed limits on what individuals might give.

Leach was never comfortable with the partisan confrontations that increasingly came to characterize Congress. He concentrated on issues rather than what he described as the game of politics and believed in working constructively with committee leadership as it existed rather than what he might have preferred. As a member of the minority he became known for the development of three unique, unusually substantive reports – one in the 1980s calling for a more progressive approach to Central American politics; a second in the early 1990s on reforming the United Nations written for a national commission he legislatively established and later chaired; and the third issued when he was ranking minority member of the Banking Committee on the challenges of regulating derivatives.

Leach had more differences on ethical issues with several of his own party leaders than Democratic Speakers like Tip O'Neill and Tom Foley. In the wake of a 1996 Ethics Committee probe of then Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, which cited the Speaker for providing false information under oath to a House committee, Leach broke ranks with tradition and voted against his party’s nominee for Speaker in the subsequent Congress. In one of the few occasions in the 20th century when any party division was recorded on the initial leadership organizing votes on the House floor, he voted for the former Republican leader, Bob Michel, and received two votes himself, causing Leach to take a distant third in the contest for Speaker of the 105th Congress behind Gingrich and the Democratic nominee, Dick Gephardt.

Leach played a pivotal role in the House’s investigation of the Whitewater scandal. In the 1980s he had objected to political misjudgments that lengthened and deepened losses in the savings and loan industry. Accordingly, he felt there should be accountability outside and within the financial services industry. Because criminal referrals had been lodged by a federal agency against the Clintons and their partners in a real estate venture for their role in the failure of a modest-sized Arkansas S&L, Leach as chairman of the House Banking Committee held four days of hearings (all in the same week) on the causes and consequences of the failure. While federal taxpayer losses (approximately $70 million) associated with this particular S&L were not as large as with bigger institutions around the country, no S&L anywhere failed with a higher percentage of losses relative to assets than the one in Arkansas.

In the end, the Independent Counsel wrought more than 50 criminal convictions related to the failed S&L, including cases against Clinton’s successor Governor, Jim Guy Tucker, and his business partners in Whitewater.

Leach believed in the appropriateness of public disclosure but never thought the crimes surrounding the failure of the Whitewater-tied S&L should have been considered in an impeachment framework because the Constitution precisely holds that the impeachment process relates to acts committed in federal office. Like many in Congress, he was surprised that the Justice Department chose to refer certain sex related charges to Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater Independent Counsel, and even more so when Starr chose subsequently to refer certain of them to the Congress. But in what he described as a close judgment call Leach voted for the article of impeachment that related to felonious lying under oath.

2006

Based on prior Presidential voting, Leach in 2006 represented the most Democratic district in the country held by a Republican. In conjunction with a Democratic tide which swept Eastern Iowa in the election, there were two tipping factors in Leach’s defeat.

The first related to his refusal to allow Republican Party activists to distribute an anti-gay mailing. When Leach told the Republican National Chairman that he would not caucus with the party if they proceeded with such divisive tactics, social conservatives were offended and refused to back him.

Internet gambling

The second related to his success just before adjournment in passing H.R. 4411, the Unlawful Internet Gambling Enforcement Act The Unlawful Internet Gambling and Enforcement Act. Gambling interests opposed him during the election and contended the bill had passed without hearings. The bill had been subject to extensive hearings over several Congresses, especially on the House side where both the Financial Services Committee and the Judiciary Committee had shared jurisdiction. Leach argued that Internet gambling weakened the economy and jeopardized the social fabric of the family.

Conservative family groups also opposed Leach, and gambling interests are now trying to overturn the measure in this Congress claiming that they have polling data indicating that their opposition was responsible for defeating Leach.

Post-congressional career

After his defeat, Leach’s name was floated as a potential replacement to John Bolton as Ambassador to the United Nations. On December 8 2006, Leach’s House colleagues Earl Blumenauer (D-Oregon) and Jim Walsh (R-New York) sent a letter to President George W. Bush urging the President to nominate Leach for the post. However, the nomination instead went to the United States Ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad.

Today Leach teaches at Princeton and serves on the board of several public companies and four non-profit organizations – the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and Common Cause, where he serves as Chairman of the National Governing Board. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly served as a trustee of Princeton University.

Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received decorations from two foreign governments. He is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edger Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. A three-sport athlete in college, Leach was elected to the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the International Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.

On September 17 2007, Leach was named as Interim Director of the Institute of Politics at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government after former director Jeanne Shaheen left to pursue a U.S. Senate seat in New Hampshire.

Leach resides in Iowa City and Princeton with his wife Elisabeth (Deba), son Gallagher, and daughter Jenny.

External links

• United States Congress. "Jim Leach (id: L000169)". Biographical Directory of the United States Congress.
• 2004 campaign finance data
• Voting record maintained by the Washington Post
• June 21, 2007 speech by Leach on US foreign policy to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council, MP3