Remembering Jim Leach

and what made him unique

Official portrait of Jim Leach from 2012, when he was chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities

This original reporting first appeared at Bleeding Heartland and is shared here as part of the Iowa Writers Collaborative. For regular emails linking to all recent Bleeding Heartland articles and commentary, subscribe to the free Evening Heartland newsletter. If your email provider truncates this post, you can read the whole article without interruption at this link.

“They don’t make them like Jim Leach anymore,” posted the elections analysts at The Downballot after learning Leach had passed away on December 11. They were commenting on his extraordinary warning to the Republican National Committee chairman that he would not caucus with Republicans in the next Congress if the Iowa GOP continued to fund direct mail attacking his 2006 Democratic challenger.

Among Iowans who have served in Congress, Leach was unique in many ways.

A DIFFERENT WAY OF CAMPAIGNING

Leach represented parts of eastern and southeastern Iowa from 1977 to 2007, making him Iowa’s third longest-serving member of the U.S. House.

Few would have predicted such a lengthy tenure when he first ran for office. Leach was building a career in the Foreign Service but resigned from his State Department job to protest President Richard Nixon’s “Saturday Night Massacre” at the Justice Department.

The Scott County native decided to run for Congress in 1974. The first district, which is red on this map, was Iowa’s most Democratic-leaning U.S. House district at the time.

When I researched women who have managed Iowa campaigns six years ago, I learned that Leach was the first Iowa Congressional candidate to hire a woman for that role. Linda Weeks managed his losing campaign against first-term Democratic incumbent Ed Mezvinsky, as well as the rematch, which Leach won in 1976. Debby Stafford managed some of his other winning campaigns.

Leach would later describe that 1974 campaign as “the best race I ever ran.” It’s a fair assessment, since he received about 46 percent of the vote against an incumbent in the post-Watergate Democratic landslide year.

The relatively narrow loss encouraged Leach to try again. He and Mezvinsky ran positive campaigns, and Leach prevailed by 51.9 percent to 47.8 percent. After that, he typically won re-election by large margins, often attracting a substantial crossover vote from Democrats.

Leach supported campaign finance reform efforts and followed several self-imposed rules that were unusual, if not unprecedented. He didn’t take money from political action committees. He capped individual contributions at $500 (well below the legal limit for federal campaign donations) and didn’t accept funds from people living outside Iowa.

Tom Cope, who worked on Leach’s staff during the 1990s, recalled that his boss stuck to those principles even after becoming chair of the House Banking Committee in 1995. (Bleeding Heartland will soon publish an essay by Cope sharing more of his memories about Leach.)

Democrats didn’t target Leach’s district, then numbered IA-02, during his last campaign in 2006. The map adopted following the 2000 census was unlucky for him; he lost his home base of Scott County and now represented Linn County (Cedar Rapids area) as well as Johnson County (Iowa City) and southeast counties that voted Democratic for many years (they don’t anymore).

The second district is orange on this map.

Congressional Quarterly’s Lydia Gensheimer wrote in a 2006 profile of Dave Loebsack,

Loebsack went so far as to call Leach “a good man” in a television ad. Leach, a senior member of the House International Relations Committee, had been a guest lecturer in Loebsack’s political science classes at Cornell College; Leach’s campaign manager, Gary Grant, was a former student of Loebsack’s.

The state Republican Party distributed mailings without Leach’s consent that attacked Loebsack’s views on gay marriage; Leach reacted by telling Ken Mehlman, chairman of the Republican National Committee, that if the mailings continued, he would not caucus with the House Republicans if he were re-elected.

He took that stand even though Iowa had a law banning same-sex marriage on the books, and Republicans had successfully campaigned on “defending marriage” in many states in during the 2004 cycle.

A blue wave carried Loebsack over the line with 51.4 percent of the vote to 48.6 percent for Leach.

David Redlawsk, who volunteered for Democratic candidates for many years in Johnson County, recalled this week,

While I worked hard on the 2006 Dave Loebsack campaign to beat Rep. Leach, the morning after we won the election, I was walking in downtown Iowa City feeling kind of sad about what we’d done. And while I was very happy Dave won—and think he did a great job during his years in office—I wished it hadn’t had to be at the cost of beating Jim Leach.

A DIFFERENT WAY OF GOVERNING

Leach was the first Iowa member of Congress to hire a woman as chief of staff, picking Lee Goodell for that role after winning in 1976. He also hired his former campaign manager Linda Weeks to run his district offices.

In a 2009 interview discussing his new role as leader of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Leach characterized his philosophy this way: “I basically have always been a progressive in international affairs, a moderate on social issues, and somewhat restrained on spending.” He was a leader of the Ripon Society and the Republican Mainstream Committee, groups uniting moderate Republicans.

Jim Chrisinger, who worked for Leach as a summer intern and later as a legislative assistant, recalled in a Substack post,

He believed in good government, government that was both effective and efficient, and not bigger than it needed to be. He didn’t have much patience for either conservatives who wanted to burn it all down or liberals who thought government could do it all. […]

While better known for his banking and financial leadership, Jim was a natural on the Foreign Affairs Committee (then International Relations). At the time, Jim was the only former Foreign Service Officer in the House and several mid-career Foreign Service Officers did six-month fellowships in his office, which inspired me to later join the Foreign Service. Which enabled me to witness the Velvet Revolution and the fall of communism as a diplomat in Czechoslovakia in 1989. Richard Nixon was among the dignitaries who visited Prague in the following months. When I introduced myself I mentioned that I had worked for Jim. Nixon tapped his finger to his temple and said “smart, very smart.”

Many politicians pay lip service to “reaching across the aisle” while voting consistently along party lines. In contrast, Leach was one of his generation’s most bipartisan members of Congress. During the 1980s, he supported the nuclear freeze movement and joined Democrats who spoke out against the Reagan administration’s Iran-Contra policy.

Due to his advocacy for education and the environment, he repeatedly was endorsed by the Iowa State Education Association and the Sierra Club Iowa chapter, which usually backed Democratic candidates for federal offices. He was also the last pro-choice Republican to represent this state in Washington, DC.

Leach was among just six House Republicans who voted against authorizing the Iraq War in October 2002, and the only Iowan in Congress to take that stance. (The two Democrats representing our state, Representative Leonard Boswell and Senator Tom Harkin, both voted for the war resolution.) In his 2009 interview, Leach was asked to give “an example of a trillion-dollar consequence to not studying the humanities.” He replied, “Well, I think a student of Muslim culture would have been hard-pressed to advocate a war against a country that didn’t attack us in the Middle East.”

Gensheimer’s 2006 article noted that Leach’s “score in Congressional Quarterly’s study of ‘party unity’ votes in 2005 — a measure of how often lawmakers voted with most members of their own party against most members of the other party — was the lowest among House Republicans (63 percent).”

LISTENING TO IOWANS

In all the years I’ve covered Iowa politics, I’ve heard only good things about Leach, even from Democrats who didn’t vote for him. Harkin said in a statement, “His serene composure, unaffected friendliness, and willingness to listen and consider divergent views marked Jim as a unique and admirable Congressman for 30 years.”

That willingness to listen was a common thread in memories readers shared with me this week.

Rabbi Henry Jay Karp wrote,

I assumed the pulpit of Davenport’s Temple Emanuel in July, 1985. Being a rabbi who has had a long commitment to matters of social justice, it was not long before I went to our board and proposed that ours be a sanctuary congregation for Salvadoran refugees. The very idea shook some of my more conservative congregants.

The next thing I knew, I received a call from Jim Leach, who wanted to get together with me. So I invited him to the synagogue for a breakfast. My secretary set out this lovely breakfast in my office and the two of us sat and talked. He said something along the lines of, “Henry, I admire what you are trying to do but just maybe you are moving a little too fast. Give your people a little time and they’ll come along to your way of thinking.”

That was the beginning of a very nice friendship! We talked every so often on many a subject, especially international affairs. How I miss the days when Democrats, like myself, and Republicans, like Jim, could have respectful and enlightening conversations, as well as friendly relationships.

When our son became a Bar Mitzvah, Jim was there. We had a reception in our backyard, during which poor Jim was cornered by my father-in-law from Michigan for a considerable amount of time. For our next Bat Mitzvah, he sent a gift. Who could blame him! But my wife Gail, our cantor, made up for it when she acceded to his request to sing a blessing at a campaign event for George W. Bush!

Jim Leach was my friend and he was one of the people I most admired; a man of integrity, a man of intelligence, a man so decent, honest, and what we Jews call “a real mensch.” He will be missed by so, so many people. The people of Iowa was indeed fortunate to have such a person representing them in the United States Congress.

Jon Muller recalled an interaction from 2002:

I was running a pooled money market fund for public schools. Iowa law said the fund either had to be Aaa rated by a ratings agency, or registered with the SEC [Securities Exchange Commission]. We had always paid for the ratings agency, which I decided was a waste of money. We pretty much followed all SEC regulations regardless, so seemed an unnecessary expense.

So we stopped getting rated and filed with the SEC. The SEC sent us a letter claiming we cannot register with the SEC because we were not required to register with the SEC. Fine, we’ll just get rated. The SEC said we couldn’t go back to being rated because we’d filed for SEC registration. We could not be registered, and we could not go back to the way things were.

I met with Congressman Leach in his Iowa City office, as he was the Iowa Congressman with the most power to help us with this kind of issue. He listened to my tale of woe. I asked if he could help us. He sat there quietly, rubbing his temples with his fingers, then let out a sigh. Then he said something like….. “Your problem, Jon, is you’re interesting. And when it comes to the SEC that’s the last thing you want to be. Those bureaucrats work on almost the same thing every day. When they see something they’ve never seen before, it’s interesting to them. If I send a letter to them, they’ll think there is surely more to the issue than they see on the surface, and they’ll dig in harder.”

I asked him what he would do in my shoes. He advised me to just keep operating, keep responding to their requests, do everything they ask me to do. He told me, “Trust me, they’ll get tired of you.”

It was comforting somehow. We did as he advised, and ended up registering with the SEC after some months. Went down just like he said.

Linda K. Kerber remembered,

Jim was the only Republican to join the House Humanities Caucus in 2006. At the Humanities Advocacy Day in April, 2006 I went to Washington to pay calls on Iowa members of Congress to urge them to support the NEH [National Endowment for the Humanities].

The other members assigned staffers to speak with us (as briefly as possible) but Jim met with us in person, and gave us a tour of the art in his office! At a reception later that day where he eloquently linked the public policy choices that Congress makes to the grounding that the humanities provide. He observed that perhaps the most important recipients of federal funding for the humanities are the historians’ offices attached to the branches of the military, whose work guards the integrity of the historical record and against the temptations to spin history.

At another time, Jim observed that when he was in graduate school, his work on Soviet economics, politics, and theory had no value after the collapse of the Soviet Union. BUT, he said, “Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin – they endure!!”

Linda also told me something I’d never heard about Leach.

Many people don’t know that when Jim was Chair of the House Banking Committee in the 1990s, he undertook an inquiry into the holdings of Jewish assets – including art—by Swiss banks during the Holocaust. Their shocking findings led to the 44 country Washington Conference on Holocaust Art held in 1998, and chaired by Jim.

The 11-point agreement that emerged to guide the restitution of stolen art is known as the Washington Principles and is still cited today in virtually every report on the return of art stolen by the Nazis. It was one of his proudest achievements.

A DIFFERENT APPROACH TO LIFE AFTER CONGRESS

Many former elected officials cash in with seats on corporate boards or jobs at lobbying firms. But Leach worked to promote the arts and humanities. He taught at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and Princeton’s School of Public and International Affairs, then was President Barack Obama’s choice to chair the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The University of Iowa noted in a December 11 news release that while in Congress, Leach had “championed academic research, supporting science and humanities programs that resulted in more than a half-billion dollars of peer-reviewed competitive grants to the UI.” He maintained a “close connection” to the university later, moving to Iowa City in 2012 to take up “a three-year dual appointment as the University of Iowa chair of public affairs and visiting professor of law.”

“Jim Leach contributed significantly to the College of Law after he left Congress,” says Kevin Washburn, dean of the UI College of Law. “Though not a lawyer, he wrote many laws during his 30 years in Congress, and that made his teaching a rich resource for students and faculty. We will miss him.”

Leach also was a senior scholar with the college’s Center for Human Rights and continued to serve on its advisory board after retiring.

Leach served as the interim director of the UI Museum of Art (UIMA) from January 2017 to April 2018, during which time the museum was renamed after benefactors Richard (Dick) and Mary Jo Stanley. Leach collaborated with external architects and the UIMA planning team on the design of the new museum, and he and his wife, Deba, donated more than 300 artworks to the museum.

Julie Gammack wrote on her Iowa Potluck newsletter that the Leaches attended the “Iowa Day” parties that she and her husband, Richard Gilbert, organized in the DC area. Jim and Deba Leach later hosted those gatherings for Iowa expats after Julie and Richard moved away from Maryland.

Leach didn’t regularly weigh in on political topics after leaving office, but he endorsed several Democratic candidates, from Obama in 2008 to Joe Biden for president in 2020. He remained a registered Republican until 2022, when he became a Democrat. That year, he backed University of Iowa law professor Christina Bohannan’s campaign for the first Congressional district.

I didn’t know Jim Leach well, but I always felt an affinity to him. His way of thinking reminded me of my father, also a pro-choice “Rockefeller Republican.” Having majored in Russian history and literature, I shared Leach’s love for Russian culture. I particularly valued his support for the humanities, since many politicians seem to think higher education should focus only on STEM, business, and vocational training.

May his memory be for a blessing.

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Appendix: Political reaction to the passing of Jim Leach

President Barack Obama posted on X/Twitter, “As a foreign service officer, a Congressman, and citizen, Jim Leach put country above party time and again. He was a dedicated public servant, and we were lucky to have him as part of my administration. Thinking of Jim’s family and friends today.”

Former Representative Ed Mezvinsky told Bleeding Heartland, “Jim Leach’s life and public service will be remembered as exemplary. My thoughts and prayers go out to his loving family.”

Statement released by former Senator Tom Harkin and his wife Ruth Harkin: “Ruth and I mourn the passing of Jim Leach, a friend and fellow public servant of over 40 years. Jim served our nation and state with uncommon courtesy, intelligence, and respect for others. His serene composure, unaffected friendliness, and willingness to listen and consider divergent views marked Jim as a unique and admirable Congressman for 30 years. He was liked and admired by all who knew him, including Ruth and me. Our condolences go out to Deba and family.”

Dave Loebsack posted on X/Twitter, “I am very saddened by the passing of Jim Leach. Jim served Iowa in Congress for 30 years. He was principled and thoughtful, so much so that he ran afoul of his own party leadership on several issues. Terry and I send our condolences to Deba and the rest of his family.”

Senator Chuck Grassley posted on X/Twitter, “Sad to hear of the passing of former Cong Jim Leach I served w him for many yrs & he was a friend He served the ppl of Iowa well Barbara & I are praying for his family”

Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks (R, IA-01) posted on X/Twitter, “Sad to hear of the passing of former Congressman Jim Leach, a true statesman who represented Iowa in Congress for 30 years and was known for his bipartisan efforts. My heartfelt condolences go out to his family and loved ones during this time of loss.”

Representative Ashley Hinson (R, IA-02) posted on X/Twitter, “Deeply saddened to hear that Jim Leach passed away. He dedicated his life to serving Iowans & reaching across the aisle. My prayers are with his family during this time.”

Representative Zach Nunn (R, IA-03) posted on X/Twitter, “Kelly and I were saddened to hear of the passing of former Congressman Jim Leach. Our prayers are with his family and loved ones.”

Governor Kim Reynolds posted on X/Twitter, “Kevin and I are saddened to hear of the passing of long-time public servant Jim Leach. As a member of U.S. Congress for 30 years, Jim dedicated his life to serving his country and the state of Iowa. Our prayers are with Jim’s family.”

State Auditor Rob Sand released this statement: "Congressman Jim Leach was a leader who served with integrity and honor. It was a privilege to get to know him over the last few years. Our prayers are with his family."

Iowa Attorney General Brenna Bird posted on X/Twitter, “Jim Leach was a good friend and dedicated public servant. When we taught an Iowa law class together, he was always a joy to work with and inspiration to many students. I am very sad to hear of his passing. Bob and I are praying for his family.”

As of December 14, neither the Republican Party of Iowa nor its state chair Jeff Kaufmann had made any public statement to honor Leach’s memory.

UPDATE: Miller-Meeks honored Leach with these remarks on the U.S. House floor.