Human Rights Rep

Cancer forces Lantos to retire from Congress.

Ron Kampeas

Jewish Telegraphic Agency

Washington

I

n his 27 years in Congress,
Democratic Rep. Tom Lantos had
two constituencies — California's
12th District, encompassing parts of San
Francisco and its suburbs, and the ghosts
of the Jews who perished in his native
Europe.
Lantos announced his retirement Jan. 2.
"Routine medical tests have revealed that I
have cancer of the esophagus:' he said.
Lantos, who turns 80 next month, will
serve out his term, which ends Dec. 31.
He is the chairman of the House Foreign
Affairs Committee and has long been seen
as a go-to lawmaker on an array of Jewish
issues.
Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., the House
speaker, said, "Tom Lantos is one of
America's leading experts on foreign
affairs and most effective advocates for
human rights both at home and abroad:'
Pelosi said. "As the only Holocaust survi-
vor ever elected to Congress, he has used
his position to fight for those whose voices
have been silenced by hatred and oppres-
sion!'
The American Israel Public Affairs
Committee described him as a ubiquitous
presence in U.S.-Israel relations. "There
is not a single issue impacting the U.S.-
Israel relationship that does not carry the
imprint or leadership of Tom Lantos," said
a joint statement by AIPAC's president,
Howard Friedman, and its executive direc-
tor, Howard Kohn
Lantos most recently led the battle to
substantially expand sanctions against
Iran, a bill that passed overwhelmingly in
the House and is under consideration in
the Senate.
At the same time, he is a strong advo-
cate of reaching out to rogue states, even
Israel's most bitter enemies. Lantos played
a role in swaying Libya to give up its own
weapons of mass destruction program in
2003 and has said he is willing to meet
Iran's leadership.
His pro-Israel credentials were critical
in giving Pelosi the upper hand when she
came under fire from the White House in
April for visiting Syria and delivering a

U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos, D-Calif., has been a congressman for 27 years.

peace message from Israeli Prime Minister
Ehud Olmert.
"It's obvious the White House is desper-
ate to find some phony criticism of the
speaker's trip, even though it was a bipar-
tisan trip:' Lantos said at the time. "I have
nothing but contempt and disdain for the
attempt to undermine this trip."
Lantos was 16 in 1944 when the Nazis
invaded his native Hungary. He fought in
the anti-Nazi underground and arrived in
the United States in 1947 to study.
"It is only in the United States that a
penniless survivor of the Holocaust and
a fighter in the anti-Nazi underground
could have received an education, raised a
family and had the privilege of serving the
last three decades of his life as a member
of Congress;' he said in his retirement
statement. "I will never be able to express
fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this
great country"
His Holocaust experience suffused his
politics. His congressional Web site fea-
tures links not only to his biography but
to his own account, titled "A Holocaust

Survivor:' and another reprinting his con-
tribution to a book published by Steven
Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, The Last
Days.
Lantos was an economist and a consul-
tant prior to his 1980 election to represent
the San Francisco-area district, yet it soon
became clear that human rights above all
drove his congressional mission.
He and his wife, Annette, took the lead
in the 1980s in meeting with Jews in the
former Soviet Union, said Mark Levin,
the executive director of NCSJ: Advocates
on behalf of Jews in Russia, Ukraine, the
Baltic States and Eurasia.
"He was able to put the cause of human
rights at the forefront of U.S. foreign
policy;' Levin said. In 1983, Lantos helped
found the congressional Human Rights
Caucus.
His appeal crossed the political aisle.
Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Fla., his com-
mittee's ranking minority member, called
him "a man of enormous integrity, energy
and substance!'
His commitment to human rights did

not bow to other loyalties. The sultans of
Silicon Valley, in his district, winced when
he excoriated the bosses of Yahoo, Google,
Microsoft and Cisco for cooperating with
Internet censors in China. In a 2006 hear-
ing, Lantos used the word "ashamed" nine
times.
"We comply with legally binding orders
whether it's here in the U.S. or Chine
the Microsoft representative said. Lantos
responded: "Well, IBM complied with legal
orders when they cooperated with Nazi
Germany."
Lantos had the gentlemanly bearing of
his central European upbringing, deliver-
ing blunt messages draped in velvet sar-
casm. It was a style that sometimes turned
off others in the Jewish community, who
saw it as imperious. Some critics said
Lantos practiced "with-me-or-against-
me politics:' cold-shouldering those who
did not champion his favored causes
— including the New Hampshire political
career of his daughter, Katrina Swett.
In September, Swett dropped her bid for
the U.S. Senate while suggesting she would
try again in 2010.
The conversion to Mormonism of
his two daughters and wife, a fellow
Hungarian Holocaust survivor, raised
some eyebrows in the Jewish community.
The couple has 17 grandchildren. Lantos
continues to identify as a Jew.
"He really came into his own in his
chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs
Committee," said Ira Forman, the
executive director of the National Jewish
Democratic Council.
Lantos took the lead in pushing sanc-
tions against Sudan for failing to stop the
genocide in Darfur and shaping the inter-
national components to the Energy Act
just signed by President Bush that seeks to
reduce reliance on fossil fuels.
In October, his committee voted to
declare as genocide the World War I mas-
sacre of as many as 1.5 million Armenians
by Ottoman forces. Jewish members of
the committee were torn between casting
a vote they knew could damage strong
Israel-Turkish ties and colluding with a
fudging of language that some saw as hav-
ing echoes of Holocaust denial.
Lantos joined the seven Jews who cast a
vote for the genocide designation, saying
he had "never been more proud" of the
committee. ❑

JN

January 10 • 2008

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