 While in the Foreign Service, he was 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, Elliot 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 (defeating two-term Democrat Edward Mezvinsky), where he came to be a leader of a small band of moderate Republicans.