Message from the Director

James A. Leach, Director of the Institute of Politics

James A. Leach is the Director of the Institute of Politics of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Prior to his appointment, Leach taught at the Woodrow Wilson School of Princeton University where he was John L. Weinberg Visiting Professor of Public and International Affairs. Before joining the Princeton faculty he served 30 years as a representative in Congress where he chaired the Banking and Financial Services Committee, the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs, and the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

Legislation Leach authored spanned the gamut from creation of an international AID's Trust Fund to debt relief for the world's poorest countries; from authorization of an IMF quota increase to making the Peace Corps an independent federal agency; from requiring the federal government to use soy ink to prohibiting internet gambling; from restraining federal employee growth to redressing certain Holocaust asset losses.

The legislation he is perhaps best known for is Gramm-Leach-Bliley which is considered one of the seminal pieces of banking legislation of the 20th century, second in import only to the Federal Reserve Act of 1913.

After attending Princeton, the School of Advanced International Studies of Johns Hopkins, and the London School of Economics, Leach entered the United States Foreign Service and served as 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, Eliot 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 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 restrained 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 1980's. 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. 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.

A member of Republicans for Environmental Protection, Leach maintained one of the most environmentally sensitive voting records of any member of Congress. His bill to end logging on federal lands never mustered enough support to reach the House floor. Nevertheless, the movement to support it began to have an impact in the development of public parks policies in Congress in large part because of the case Leach laid out in a New York Times op-ed. It was unconscionable, Leach said, for the U.S. government through road and industry subsidies to be the only landlord in America which pays to have its resources denuded.

On the abortion trigger issue Leach took a singular path that had a cohesive logic but managed to dissatisfy activists on all sides. He supported the right of choice except during the third trimester but also held that public funding represented a complicit infringement on the values of too many Americans to be defensible. A supporter of stem cell research, he believed little could be more pro-life than invigorating science to advance cures to extend and ennoble life itself.

Leach's political career was hallmarked by concern for democratic process issues. He championed 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 refused to accept political action committee or out of state assistance and placed limits on what individuals might give.

Serving 18 years in the minority and 12 in the majority, Leach was never comfortable with the partisan confrontations that increasingly came to characterize Congress. He concentrated on issues rather than what he described as the game of politics.

Ironically, Leach came to have more differences on ethical issues with several of his own party leaders than democratic Speakers like Tip O'Neill and Tom Foley. 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 Gephart.

Leach serves on the board of several public companies and three non-profit organizations - the Century Foundation, the Kettering Foundation, and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and formerly served as a trustee of Princeton University.

Leach holds eight honorary degrees and has received decorations from two foreign governments. He is the recipient of the Wayne Morse Integrity in Politics Award, the Woodrow Wilson Award from Johns Hopkins, the Adlai Stevenson Award from the United Nations Association, and the Edger Wayburn Award from the Sierra Club. A three-sport athlete in college, Leach was elected to the Wrestling Hall of Fame in Stillwater, Oklahoma, and the International Wrestling Hall of Fame in Waterloo, Iowa.

Leach resides in Iowa City and Cambridge with his wife Elisabeth (Deba), son Gallagher, and daughter Jenny.