Jim Leach, a soft-spoken, cerebral Iowa Republican who spent three decades in Congress tirelessly lofting the banner for the moderate political center — so much so that he endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and switched parties in 2022 — died on Dec. 11 in Iowa City. he was 82.
His daughter, Jenny Dix, said he died in a hospital from a heart attack and a hemorrhagic stroke.
Mr. Leach was probably the only U.S. representative who could speak learnedly about college wrestling, banking regulations and the influence of Thomas Hart Benton on the paintings of Jackson Pollock in the same interview — and then, if necessary, repeat his words in Russian.
He belonged to what conservatives once pejoratively called the “Gypsy Moth Republicans,” a loose group of moderate and liberal party members, mostly from Northern states, who sat out the Reagan revolution, particularly its embrace of tax and spending cuts.
In 1984 he helped form the Republican Mainstream Committee, which pushed for arms control, women’s rights, civil rights and environmental protections at the party’s national convention that summer in Dallas. He also supported abortion rights, earned high marks from the Sierra Club and was a campaign-finance ascetic — he took money only from inside Iowa, and no more than $500 per donor.
“I basically have always been a progressive in international affairs, a moderate on social issues and somewhat restrained on spending,” he said in a 2009 interview with the National Endowment for the Humanities, which he ran from 2009 to 2013.
He was one of the few Republican critics of the Reagan White House during the Iran-contra scandal. Yet he was evenhanded in his attacks: As a member of the House Banking and Financial Services Committee, he led the charge in 1994 against Bill and Hillary Clinton over their involvement in the failed Madison Guaranty Savings and Loan Association, part of the Whitewater scandal.
Considered one of Capitol Hill’s most well-informed regulators, he repeatedly proved prescient about government banking rules. In the late 1990s he warned of the systemic risk posed by the emergent derivatives trading sector, a corner of the industry that helped drive the 2008 financial crisis.
His crystal ball was not always clear: In 1999 he joined two fellow Republicans, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas and Representative Thomas J. Bliley Jr. of Virginia, in their successful legislation to repeal the Glass-Steagall Act, a Depression-era law that among other things prevented commercial banks from selling securities. Many economists also blame that change for the 2008 crisis.
Mr. Leach moved further from his party in the 2000s. He was one of only six Republicans to vote against authorizing the use of force against Iraq in 2002, and the next year he was one of just three Republicans to vote against President George W. Bush’s package of tax cuts.
Mr. Leach insisted on running positive campaigns. During his bid for re-election in 2006, he threatened to break with the Republican Party after it distributed fliers around his district attacking his opponent’s support for gay marriage.
He knew his opponent well: David Loebsack, a political science professor at Cornell College in Mount Vernon, Iowa, had invited Mr. Leach to lecture to his class and called him “a good man” on the campaign trail. Still, he beat Mr. Leach, in what was widely considered a dismal year for Republicans nationwide.
Still nominally a Republican, Mr. Leach not only endorsed Mr. Obama in 2008 but spoke at the Democratic National Convention that summer. Mr. Obama subsequently named him chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
James Albert Smith Leach was born on Oct. 15, 1942, in Davenport, Iowa, to James Leach, who owned several small businesses, and Lois (Hill) Leach, a community activist.
He was a state wrestling champion in high school and studied politics at Princeton, where he graduated in 1964. He received a master’s degree in Soviet studies from Johns Hopkins University in 1966 and later studied at the London School of Economics.
Mr. Leach joined the Foreign Service in 1968, where he worked on Soviet relations and disarmament issues.
He resigned in 1973 after President Richard M. Nixon ordered his attorney general, Elliot Richardson, to fire Archibald Cox, the special counsel investigating the Watergate break-in. Mr. Richardson refused, and resigned; William Ruckelshaus, the deputy attorney general, refused in turn, and resigned as well in what became known as the Saturday Night Massacre.
“All Foreign Service officers of any rank are presidential appointees,” Mr. Leach told the National Endowment for the Humanities. “I concluded that I couldn’t serve the president from that time on.”
He returned home to work for one of his father’s businesses.
Recruited by the local Republican Party, he first ran for Congress in 1974. He lost narrowly, despite the country’s post-Watergate backlash against Republicans. He ran again in 1976 and won.
Mr. Leach married Elizabeth Foxley, known as Deba, in 1975. Along with their daughter, she survives him, as does their son, Gallagher, and two grandchildren.
Unlike many colleagues who follow their congressional careers with cushy lobbying jobs, Mr. Leach went into academia. In addition to running the National Endowment for the Humanities, he taught at Princeton, Harvard and the University of Iowa, where he was also the interim head of the school’s art museum in 2018.
He remained active in politics, too. He endorsed Joseph R. Biden in 2020, the same year he joined more than 150 other Republicans in a letter saying that Donald J. Trump was unfit to serve as president.
He announced he was switching to the Democratic Party in 2022.
“Today, the Republican Party that I spent so many years with has really let the country down,” he told The Cedar Rapids Gazette that year. “And we need to have a political party that operates in a way that both parties can participate.
Throughout his career, Mr. Leach told The Los Angeles Times in 1994, he was guided by “a strongly held conviction that public ethics are not an issue of the left, right or the center.
“I feel this very strongly,” he added. “To paraphrase Barry Goldwater, ‘Moderation in the pursuit of truth is no virtue and vigilance in defense of public ethics no vice.’”
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