(Radio  Iowa) – Jim Leach, a Davenport native who represented Iowa in congress for 30 years, has died at the age of 82. Leach — first elected to the U-S House in 1976 — rose to be Republican chairman of the powerful House Banking Committee. Dave Loebsack — the Democrat who defeated Leach in 2006 — calls Leach a statesman.

“As I said many, many times — I wasn’t running against Jim Leach. I was running against total Republican control of Washington, D.C. at that time,” Loebsack said. “…I respect him for what he did in office. I respect him for breaking with his party as much as he did. I often tell people he was one of only six Republicans who voted, at the time, against the Iraq war resolution.”

That vote was in 2002. In 2008, Leach, a Republican, endorsed Barack Obama and the following year Obama appointed Leach to be chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities. In 2022 during an Iowa Public Radio interview, Leach said he’d become a registered Democrat and was backing Democrats running for the U-S House to make congress more functional.

“We have to come together as a society and if we don’t come together as a society, we’re going to have a very difficult time leading ourselves, let alone leading the world,” Leach said. Leach moved from his hometown of Davenport to Iowa City when congressional district lines changed for the 2002 election. Secretary of State Paul Pate served as mayor of Cedar Rapids from 2001 to 2005 when Leach was representing the city. “He truly listened and tried to do right by us,” Pate says.

Leach, a three-sport athlete in college, won a state wrestling title in 1960 as a high school senior and was elected to the National Wrestling Hall of Fame. After graduating from Princeton, earning a masters from Johns Hopkins University and studying at the London School of Economics, Leach entered the foreign service and, for a time, shared an office with Dick Cheney. In the past decade, Leach served in several academic roles. Leach briefly led the Institute of Politics at the Kennedy School at Harvard and taught at Princeton. He’d also been a visiting professor and a senior scholar at the University of Iowa.