Jim Leach - Biography

Biography

Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, and won the 1960 state wrestling championship at the 138-pound weight class for Davenport High School. He received a Bachelor of Arts degree in politics from Princeton University in 1964, where he became a member of The Ivy Club, and 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. He was reelected 14 times.

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 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. He was one of only six House Republicans to vote against the resolution. 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.

Leach supported abortion rights except during the third trimester but also opposed public funding of abortion. Leach was a supporter of stem cell research.

Leach supported 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 did not accept donations from outside of Iowa.

As a member of the minority for his first nine terms, he became known for the development of three 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.

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. Because criminal referrals had been lodged by a federal agency against President Clinton, his wife, 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 brought more than 50 criminal convictions related to the failed S&L, including cases against Clinton’s successor as Governor of Arkansas, Jim Guy Tucker, and his business partners in Whitewater.

Leach did not think that the crimes surrounding the failure of the Whitewater-tied S&L should have been considered in an impeachment framework. 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.

Leach was usually reelected without much difficulty (including an unopposed run in 1994), even as his district turned increasingly Democratic, especially from the 1990s onward. For most of his career, he represented the Democratic strongholds of Davenport, Cedar Rapids and Iowa City. The district has not supported a Republican for president since 1984, and most of its state legislators are Democrats. The district became even more Democratic after the 2000 census, in which it was renumbered the 2nd District. This was despite the fact that Davenport, which had anchored the district for decades, was drawn into the 1st District (previously the 2nd District). Leach seriously considered running against fellow Republican Jim Nussle in the 1st District primary. Had he done so, it was considered very likely that the reconfigured 2nd would have been taken by a Democrat. However, Leach opted to move to Iowa City in the reconfigured 2nd and won reelection two more times. Still, it was considered very likely that Leach would be succeeded by a Democrat once he retired.