Jim Leach

James Albert Smith Leach (born October 15, 1942) is an American academic and former politician.

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.

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).

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.

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 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 chair 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.

While he supported the first Gulf War in 1991, Leach voted against the authorization to use force against Iraq in 2002.

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

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.

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 was a top critic of President Bill Clinton and played a leading role in the House's investigation of the Whitewater scandal.

Leach sponsored the 1999 Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act, a notable piece of banking legislation of the 20th century.

In 2022, Leach broke with the Republicans and registered as a Democrat.

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 one of three Republican congressmen (alongside Michael Castle and Amo Houghton) to vote against the 2003 extension of the Bush-era tax cuts.

Leach supported abortion rights except during the third trimester but also opposed public funding of abortion, receiving an overall 30% rating from the Pro-Choice group NARAL.

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.

He lost his 2006 re-election bid to Democrat Dave Loebsack.

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.

He served as ninth Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities from 2009 to 2013 and was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives from Iowa (1977–2007).

Leach was the John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University.