Jim Leach
Based on Wikipedia: Jim Leach
In 1973, a young Foreign Service officer named Jim Leach did something remarkable. He resigned his government commission in protest of the Saturday Night Massacre—the night Richard Nixon fired his own Attorney General and the independent counsel investigating Watergate. It was the kind of principled stand that would define Leach's entire political career, a career that would eventually see him cross party lines so dramatically that he'd end up speaking at a Democratic National Convention and, in his final years, officially switching his party registration after more than six decades as a Republican.
Leach died in December 2024 at age 82, but his story reads like a case study in political independence—the kind that seems almost quaint in today's hyperpolarized environment.
The Wrestler from Davenport
Jim Leach was born in Davenport, Iowa, in 1942. Before he became known for legislative accomplishments and principled stands, he was a wrestler. Not metaphorically—literally. In 1960, he won the Iowa state championship at 138 pounds for Davenport High School. He was good enough that decades later he'd be inducted into both the National Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the International Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.
This matters because wrestling teaches you something about individual competition and accountability. There's no team to hide behind. When you lose, you lose alone on the mat in front of everyone.
From wrestling, Leach went to Princeton, where he studied politics and wrote his senior thesis on "The Right to Revolt: John Locke Contrasted with Karl Marx." The choice of topic is telling—comparing two philosophers who both theorized about when citizens are justified in overthrowing their government, but who came to radically different conclusions about what should replace it.
After Princeton, Leach earned a master's degree in Soviet studies from Johns Hopkins University, then continued his research at the London School of Economics under Leonard Schapiro, who was considered the foremost expert on Soviet affairs at the time. This deep grounding in understanding America's Cold War adversary would shape his later work on arms control and international relations.
From Rumsfeld's Office to the Geneva Disarmament Conference
Before joining the Foreign Service, Leach worked as a staffer for Donald Rumsfeld—yes, that Donald Rumsfeld—when Rumsfeld was a congressman from Illinois. When Rumsfeld left Congress in 1969 to become Director of the Office of Economic Opportunity in the Nixon administration, Leach followed as an assistant.
Then Leach joined the Foreign Service proper, serving as a delegate to the Geneva Disarmament Conference and the United Nations General Assembly. It was serious diplomatic work at the height of the Cold War, when nuclear arms negotiations weren't academic exercises but matters of potential species survival.
And then came the Saturday Night Massacre.
On October 20, 1973, President Nixon ordered Attorney General Elliot Richardson to fire Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor investigating Watergate. Richardson refused and resigned. Nixon then ordered Deputy Attorney General William Ruckelshaus to do it. Ruckelshaus also refused and was fired. Finally, Solicitor General Robert Bork carried out the order.
The whole country watched in shock. Jim Leach resigned his Foreign Service commission in protest.
He went home to Iowa to run a family business. But he wasn't done with public service.
Thirty Years in Congress
In 1976, Leach ran for Congress and won, defeating a two-term Democrat named Edward Mezvinsky. (An interesting footnote: Mezvinsky's son Marc would later marry Chelsea Clinton.) Leach would hold that seat for fifteen terms—thirty years—until 2007.
His voting record defied easy categorization. Generally conservative on fiscal issues. Moderate on social matters. Progressive in foreign policy. This was a politician who chaired two national organizations dedicated to moderate Republican causes—the Ripon Society and the Republican Mainstream Committee—while also leading the Arms Control and Foreign Policy Caucus, where he pressed for a Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and led the first House debate on a nuclear freeze.
He objected to military unilateralism. He pushed for full funding of American obligations to the United Nations—obligations the U.S. frequently shirked. He supported American reentry into UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, which the Reagan administration had pulled out of in 1984. He opposed American withdrawal from the compulsory jurisdiction of the International Court of Justice.
In short, he was an internationalist Republican at a time when his party was moving in a more nationalist direction.
The Iraq Vote and Other Heresies
Leach supported the first Gulf War in 1991, when the United States led an international coalition to expel Saddam Hussein's forces from Kuwait. That war had clear objectives, international support, and UN authorization.
The second Iraq vote was different. In October 2002, Congress voted on whether to authorize the use of military force against Iraq—the vote that would lead to the 2003 invasion. Only six House Republicans voted no. Jim Leach was one of them.
Think about what that meant. This was barely a year after the September 11 attacks. The Bush administration was popular. Opposition to the war was being framed as unpatriotic. The Republican caucus was expected to fall in line.
Leach voted his conscience anyway.
He also joined only two other Republican congressmen—Michael Castle of Delaware and Amo Houghton of New York—in voting against the 2003 extension of the Bush-era tax cuts. On abortion, he supported reproductive rights except during the third trimester but opposed public funding, landing him in that uncomfortable middle ground that pleased nobody and earned him a 30% rating from NARAL, the pro-choice advocacy group.
He supported stem cell research. He supported campaign finance reform and refused to accept donations from outside Iowa in his own campaigns. He founded and co-chaired the Congressional Humanities Caucus.
The Banking Committee and a Controversial Legacy
From 1995 to 2001, Leach chaired the House Committee on Banking and Financial Services. This is where his legacy gets complicated.
In 1999, he co-sponsored what became known as the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. The law repealed key provisions of the Glass-Steagall Act of 1933, which had been passed during the Great Depression to separate commercial banking from investment banking and insurance. The idea behind Glass-Steagall was simple: banks that hold people's deposits and make loans shouldn't also be gambling in securities markets. Keep those functions separate so that when the gamblers lose big, they don't take down the whole banking system.
Gramm-Leach-Bliley tore down those walls. Banks could now be financial supermarkets, offering checking accounts and mortgages alongside stock trading and insurance policies.
The proponents argued this would make American financial institutions more competitive globally. The critics warned it was a recipe for disaster.
Nine years later, in 2008, the global financial system collapsed. Lehman Brothers went bankrupt. AIG required a massive government bailout. The housing market imploded. The world economy entered its worst crisis since the Great Depression.
How much was Gramm-Leach-Bliley to blame? Economists still debate this. The law certainly wasn't the only cause—there were also failures of regulation, perverse incentives in mortgage lending, problematic credit rating practices, and excessive leverage throughout the system. But the repeal of Glass-Steagall contributed to the creation of financial institutions that were "too big to fail," and it's now widely viewed as one piece of the deregulatory puzzle that made the crisis possible.
The Dodd-Frank Act of 2010, passed in response to the crisis, included what's called the Volcker Rule, which reimposed some of the restrictions that Gramm-Leach-Bliley had eliminated. In other words, Congress eventually decided that tearing down those walls had been a mistake.
It's worth noting that Leach himself, before Glass-Steagall's repeal, had issued a report as ranking minority member of the Banking Committee warning about "the challenges of regulating derivatives"—those complex financial instruments that would later be at the heart of the 2008 meltdown. He saw some of what was coming. He just didn't see all of it.
Standing Against His Own Speaker
In 1997, Leach did something almost unheard of in Congress. He voted against his own party's nominee for Speaker of the House.
The background: Newt Gingrich, who had led the Republican Revolution of 1994 and become Speaker, had been cited by the House Ethics Committee for providing false information under oath. This wasn't a minor matter. The committee fined Gingrich $300,000—the first time in history that a Speaker had been disciplined for ethical wrongdoing.
When the new Congress convened and it came time to elect a Speaker, the Republican caucus nominated Gingrich again. Almost everyone voted along party lines, as they always do for these leadership elections.
Leach voted for Bob Michel, the former Republican leader who had retired two years earlier. Two other members voted for Leach himself. It was one of the only times in the twentieth century when any party division was recorded on the initial leadership vote on the House floor.
Gingrich won easily, of course. Leach came in a distant third behind Gingrich and Democratic nominee Dick Gephardt. But he had made his point.
The Whitewater Investigation
Leach's relationship with Bill Clinton was complicated. As Banking Committee chair, he led the House's investigation into the Whitewater scandal—a real estate venture in Arkansas that involved Clinton and his wife Hillary before he became president.
The scandal centered on the failure of a savings and loan institution, Madison Guaranty, whose collapse cost federal taxpayers about $70 million. Federal agencies had lodged criminal referrals against the Clintons and their business partners. Leach held four days of hearings on the matter.
The independent counsel investigation eventually produced more than 50 criminal convictions related to the failed S&L, including cases against Jim Guy Tucker, who had succeeded Clinton as Governor of Arkansas, and the Clintons' business partners in the Whitewater development.
The Clintons themselves were never charged.
But then the investigation took a strange turn. The Justice Department referred certain unrelated matters—specifically, allegations about Clinton's relationship with Monica Lewinsky—to Kenneth Starr, the Whitewater independent counsel. Starr then referred these to Congress, which eventually led to Clinton's impeachment.
Leach didn't think the Whitewater-related crimes should have been considered in an impeachment framework. He was surprised, like many in Congress, that the investigation had expanded to include the Lewinsky matter. But when the impeachment vote came, he described it as "a close judgment call" and voted for the article of impeachment related to perjury—lying under oath.
The 2006 Defeat
Leach's district had been trending Democratic for years. It included Iowa City, home to the University of Iowa, and Cedar Rapids—reliably liberal areas. The district hadn't supported a Republican for president since 1984. By the mid-1990s, most of its state legislators were Democrats.
Leach kept winning anyway, sometimes without even facing a serious challenger. In 1990, he ran unopposed. He remained personally popular even as his district's partisan lean moved against him.
After the 2000 census, redistricting shuffled the map. His hometown of Davenport was drawn into a different district. Leach moved to Iowa City and kept winning.
In 2006, he faced Dave Loebsack, a political science professor at Cornell College. Loebsack had only qualified for the Democratic primary as a write-in candidate. He wasn't on many target lists. He was not supposed to win.
He won by about 6,000 votes.
What happened? Two things stand out. First, Leach refused to let the Republican National Committee distribute leaflets attacking Loebsack's position on gay marriage. The literature was seen as anti-gay, and Leach wouldn't allow it. Second, as always, he refused to take out-of-state money or political action committee contributions, which left him outgunned financially.
There was also the matter of H.R. 4411, a bill Leach had pushed through Congress just before adjournment that restricted internet gambling. The gambling industry opposed him heavily during the election and claimed the bill had passed without hearings—a claim Leach disputed, noting that the bill had been subject to extensive hearings over several Congresses.
Leach argued that internet gambling "weakened the economy and jeopardized the social fabric of the family." Whether or not you agree, the gambling interests poured money into defeating him.
Sometimes principled stands cost you.
The Republican Who Spoke at the Democratic Convention
After leaving Congress, Leach taught at Princeton and Harvard, served on corporate and nonprofit boards, and collected honors: eight honorary degrees, decorations from two foreign governments, the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association.
Then came 2008.
On August 12, Leach endorsed Barack Obama over fellow Republican John McCain for president. Thirteen days later, he spoke at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Senator Tom Harkin, a Democrat from Iowa, introduced him.
A Republican congressman speaking at a Democratic convention. It was extraordinary.
After Obama won, Leach served as an emissary for the president-elect at an international economic summit alongside Madeleine Albright, Bill Clinton's Secretary of State. In 2009, Obama nominated him to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities—a position he held until 2013.
In 2020, Leach joined over 130 other former Republican national security officials in signing a statement declaring that President Trump was "unfit to serve another term" and endorsing Joe Biden.
And in 2022, at age 79, Jim Leach officially changed his party registration from Republican to Democratic. He cited the January 6th attack on the Capitol and the national party's response to it. He wanted to support Christina Bohannan, a Democratic candidate for his old congressional district, in the primary.
The man who had resigned from the Foreign Service over the Saturday Night Massacre, who had voted against his own Speaker, who had opposed the Iraq War, who had spoken at a Democratic convention while still nominally a Republican—that man had finally had enough.
What Does Political Independence Mean?
Jim Leach's career raises uncomfortable questions about political independence in a two-party system.
On one hand, his willingness to buck his party on matters of principle was admirable. He voted his conscience on Iraq. He refused dirty campaign tactics. He held his own Speaker accountable for ethical violations. He resigned from government service when he saw lawlessness at the highest levels.
On the other hand, that independence may have cost him his seat. And once out of office, his influence diminished. He could speak at conventions and serve on boards and collect awards, but he couldn't vote on legislation anymore.
There's also the complicated matter of Gramm-Leach-Bliley. Was that bill a principled vote for free markets, or was it a catastrophic mistake that helped enable the worst financial crisis in generations? Can you be praised for independence on foreign policy while being criticized for deregulation in banking? How do we weigh a politician's various legacies against each other?
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Leach is that he didn't fit. He was a moderate Republican in an era when his party was moving right. He was an internationalist when nationalism was ascendant. He was a campaign finance reformer who wouldn't take out-of-state money in a system that rewards whoever raises the most. He was a wrestler who wouldn't take a fall.
When he died in December 2024, the tributes came from both sides of the aisle. That itself says something. In an era of hyperpartisanship, a politician who earns respect from opponents is either a sellout or a statesman, depending on your point of view.
Jim Leach spent sixty years as a Republican and two years as a Democrat. He spent thirty years in Congress and seventeen years afterward teaching and serving in other capacities. He won a state wrestling championship and lost a congressional race to a write-in candidate turned political science professor.
He lived long enough to see his party become something he no longer recognized. And then, quietly, he switched sides—not because his principles had changed, but because, in his view, his party's had.
That's one version of political independence. Whether it's the version we want more of depends on what you think politics is for.