A Lifetime, Legacy of Leadership: 1930-2013
By Jim Cardle
Texas Insider Report: AUSTIN, Texas — Its been a week now since friends & family gathered to pay their respect to James A. Leonard, who died September 12th, a month short of his 83d birthday.
In 1960, Leonard announced his candidacy for the Texas Senate as a Republican, despite the Republican Party in Texas at that time being no more than an agency for Post Office patronage in Houston. He lost the race in a vast West Texas district when a Republican running for local office in Texas was a ridiculous notion.
But then in early 1961, while continuing to build his fledgling oil business, Leonard agreed to serve as the first Executive Director of the Republican Party of Texas to emphasize the Party’s new intention to become a force in state government.
He promptly moved the Party Headquarters from Houston to Austin in the dead of night, and immediately mobilized the Party’s meager resources to support the candidacy of a then 36-year-old Associate Professor of Government, John Tower, to fill Lyndon Johnson’s vacated U.S. Senate seat.
Leonard was an architect of Tower’s breakthrough 1961 Senate victory to claim Johnson’s seat, and as chairman of Associated Republicans of Texas (ART) was a guiding hand behind the GOP’s once-quixotic goal of taking control of the Texas Legislature. Leonard directed future President George H.W. Bush’s first unsuccessful campaign for the U.S. Senate in 1964, after also directing Jack Cox’s strong, but losing campaign against John Connally for governor in 1962.
While an innovative political organizer and strategist, both in terms of grassroots organizing and the use of computer technology, Leonard also built an oil business and had cattle interests but never, as far as known, made any money from politics.
Leonard was drawn to politics, and to the Republican Party of Texas, by idealism and a desire to break away from the lockstep orthodoxy of the post-war Gray Flannel Suit generation. He was clever, efficient, and knew well-enough to stay out of the headlines.
His most audacious campaign was the decades-long effort to turn the Texas Legislative Map red, and Leonard pursued his once farfetched dream of a Republican Texas to protect individual liberty and respect individual enterprise.
As one of the founding fathers of the modern era’s Texas Republican Party, and strategist who helped mold the GOP in Texas, Leonard witnessed his work come to fruition with Republicans gaining control of the Texas Senate in 1996, and the Texas House in 2002.
James A. Leonard leaves his wife of 44 years, Jackie Leonard, two daughters, three sons, and two grandchildren. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, to Jay & Florence Leonard, raised in Fort Worth, Texas, and graduated from the University of Texas in 1951. He served in the Air Force during the Korean War.
His lifetime of accomplishment & his personal contribution of selfless giving to others helped make Texas what it is today.
