How Jim Leach Fought the Future

Big news yesterday was, a former Republican congressman, Jim Leach of Iowa, has gone and crossed party lines and endorsed Barack Obama.

I wasn’t surprised by his maverick(!) turn. In my new book Bad Moon Rising, which is a case study of the moral decay of the Religious Right, a crucial and illuminating scene finds Rep. Leach, old-school Republican, taking another lone stand. Leach pitted himself against Grover Norquist, Jack Abramoff, and other future superstars of the George W. Bush era—in 1983.

Claiming these people were cheapening the GOP into a party of fear and greed, Leach threw a press conference to protest what he saw as a new low. The resulting commotion occasioned a furious debate, mostly kept from public scrutiny, among conservative insiders, over the new values of a rapidly-changing Republican Party.

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William McKenzie, now a columnist with the Dallas Morning News, can still see Grover Norquist’s January 5, 1983 temper tantrum as if it happened yesterday, with George W. Bush’s future economic “field marshal” hurling papers to the ground in fury, he remembers, after a congressman accused Norquist of selling his soul to the Reverend Moon.

Norquist, 26, and his friend Jack Abramoff, 24, had been accused by Rep. Jim Leach (R-Iowa) of having “solicited and received funds” for the College Republicans from a grotesquely inappropriate source. That source was the Unification Church, led by Moon, the flamboyant New Age leader and subject of controversy on the evening news—whose malnourished teenage followers chanted “Smash Satan” as they drove through the night to the next flower sale; who that very week, defiant over a conviction of felony tax evasion, had summoned a worshipful audience to Manhattan to joke that he had broken free of the American melting pot (“instead of America melting Reverend Moon, America is being melted by him!”) and proclaim himself “the elder statesman in the land of darkness…emerging in the new morning light.”

In 1983, it would not do for a young conservative to be tied to this man. So Norquist arrived at Leach’s press conference and started a shouting match during Q&A time. “Those are lies,” Norquist said, according to a wire report. “You’re saying we took money and we didn’t…That is not just a lie, it’s charging us with a federal crime…"

McKenzie, then a researcher for the moderate Ripon Society, believes the conniption fit was all for show. “He was throwing us off our game,” he says in a wry drawl. “He knew full well what he was doing.” He was showing his tooth-and-nail style, says the columnist: a guy who will “fight you at every turn.”

Today Norquist, the 52-year-old president of Americans For Tax Reform, is a key conservative advisor—a compact, serious, fair-haired little man whose brows knit together in owlish sorrow when he talks about the capital gains tax. Having brooded on the IRS from boyhood, he has likened the estate tax to “the morality of the Holocaust.”

His unkind view of government (he wants to “drown it in a bathtub”) is often held up by critics as proof he’s a bearded radical, out to disassemble the New Deal. And Abramoff has earned infamy as the ultralobbyist who corrupted huge swaths of Washington in the 1990s before being linked to a web of casinos, murder, and bribery. But in his salad days, Abramoff was a Brandeis University student with big dreams of driving liberals from Washington. He disliked the music of David Bowie, loved to blare “We Are the Champions,” and let a young man named Ralph Reed crash on his couch.

In 1983, Norquist and Abramoff were part of a new wave of Republicans—they called themselves “movement conservatives”—struggling for control of the GOP. The old guard, symbolized by Rep. Jim Leach and his think tank, the Ripon Society, urged caution at the new politics of God, gays, abortion and trickle-down economics. They warned that the new faction was ripping up the pre-1964 roots of the party.

“Jack Abramoff is an Orthodox Jew and I am a Christian,” Norquist shot back. “We do not take this very kindly.”

Leach was gracious to such criticism—maybe excessively. After someone in the Norquist camp called the piece “a bunch of ridiculous malarkey,” Leach courteously confessed to his audience that the work might well suffer from “less-than-perfect research, and less-than-perfect facts.” Jim! thought McKenzie in consternation.

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But no one had accused the duo of being Moon Children—at least, not literally. Over six months, McKenzie and fellow investigator Ken Ruberg had painstakingly researched what they saw as a cynical symbiosis forming during Reagan’s Morning In America. Several deals had been struck between right activists who raked in more money than ever by claiming to defend American tradition, and Moon, who was hostile to it. “Our position,” McKenzie says, “was, ‘Do you want to have Republicans lined up with a group that has these values?’”

What could conservatives possibly have in common with a Korean mystic from the fringes of the counterculture? Crude fearmongering, Leach argued. Conservatives were now "[a]ppealing to the lowest instinct rather than the highest in the America psyche,” he wrote. They had “inundated the country with fundraising appeals that tear apart the ethic of tolerance which binds our society together […]ust as Moon attempts to influence the young by offering simplistic allegiance to himself, the ‘Father,’ as a pallative to the anxiety endemic to modern society…”

What was on the line, he said, was “whether the Republican Party returns to its traditions, re-establishing itself as a party of rights and pragmatism, or adopts an agenda catalyzed by Moon and Richard Viguerie, becoming instead a party of anger and socialized values.” Viguerie, the most intriguing of all of Leach’s targets, was known as the "Founding Funder" of the Reagan revolution, whose direct-mail money machine had helped sweep Reagan Republicans into office.

Leach singled out the Washington Times, Moon’s conservative newspaper, and he singled out the influential religious right lobbyist Gary Jarmin of Christian Voice, who was bizarrely using his influence in Christian circles to launch attacks on anti-cult moms; and Warren Richardson, a friend of Sen. Orrin Hatch’s who had been rejected as Reagan’s health czar for ties to anti-Semites, and who had just accepted a formal position within the Unification Church anti-communist group CAUSA.

Wrote Leach: “A party basing its appeal on old-fashioned patriotism and family values simply cannot justify an alliance with a cult that preys on the disintegration of the American family and advocates allegiance to an international social order operating with cell-like secrecy.”

But Leach’s assertions died and lost steam. The way the press conference went, says McKenzie, it “blew up in our faces.” Moon’s Washington Times called his claims “flummeries.” Richard Viguerie told the Washington Post that the attack on him was “silly” and that he’d “be hard put to name one or two people whom I know are Moonies.” In fact, Viguerie had personally worked with the Rev. Moon’s right-hand man, Bo Hi Pak, as early as 1965…