Thomas Peter Lantos (born Tamás Péter Lantos; February 1, 1928 – February 11, 2008) was a Hungarian-born American politician who served as a U.S. representative from California from 1981 until his death in 2008. A member of the Democratic Party, he represented the state's 11th congressional district until 1993. After redistricting, he served from the 12th congressional district, which included both the northern two-thirds of San Mateo County and a portion of the southwestern part of San Francisco.
Lantos, who served as Chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee in his last term, announced in early January 2008 that he would not run for re-election because of cancer of the esophagus. He died before finishing his term. A Hungarian Jew, Lantos was the only Holocaust survivor to have served in the United States Congress; he survived the genocide with help from Raoul Wallenberg. In speaking before the House of Representatives after his death, Speaker Nancy Pelosi stated that Lantos "devoted his public life to shining a bright light on the dark corners of oppression. He used his powerful voice to stir the consciousness of world leaders and the public alike."
In 2008, after his death, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, which he founded in 1983, was renamed the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission. Its mission is partly "to promote, defend, and advocate internationally recognized human rights". In the final weeks of his life, Lantos asked that a non-profit be established to carry on the work he felt so passionately about. The Lantos Foundation for Human Rights & Justice was founded later that year to carry out that wish. In 2011, the Tom Lantos Institute was set up in Budapest to promote tolerance and support minority issues in Central Europe and Eastern Europe, as well as around the world.
Early life
Lantos was born Tamás Péter Lantos () into a Jewish family in Budapest, the son of Anna, a high school English teacher, and Pál Lantos, a banker. His family was heavily involved in education, and included an uncle who was a professor at the University of Budapest and a grandmother who was a high school principal.
World War II
His life in Hungary would change after the annexing of Austria by Nazi Germany in 1938, with the Austrian border just from Budapest. Lantos remembered this period and a newspaper headline he read when he was ten years old, "Hitler Marches into Austria". Even at a young age, he understood the significance of this invasion, recalling in a 1999 interview with University of Washington Magazine, "I sensed that this historic moment would have a tremendous impact on the lives of Hungarian Jews, my family, and myself".
Six years later, in March 1944, the German military invaded Hungary and occupied Budapest, its capital. As he was Jewish, Lantos, then 16, was arrested and sent to a forced labor camp outside of Budapest. He escaped, but was soon caught by the Germans and beaten severely, then returned to the labor camp. He again escaped, this time making his way back to Budapest, away. There, he hid with an aunt in a safe house set up by Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish diplomat. In January 1945, less than a year later, Soviet military forces fought door-to-door battles and liberated Hungary from German occupation. However, Lantos, then 17, returned home only to discover that his mother and other family members had all been murdered by the Germans, along with 440,000 other Hungarian Jews, during the preceding 10 months of their occupation.
Lantos described some of his experiences in the Academy Award-winning documentary film The Last Days (1998), produced by Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation. In his floor speeches as a congressman, he sometimes referred to himself as one of the few living members of Congress who had fought against fascism. In 1981, Lantos sponsored a bill making Wallenberg an Honorary Citizen of the United States, and became a member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation. In January 2006, he traveled to Hungary and attended a ceremony commemorating the 61st anniversary of the liberation of the Budapest Ghetto. The event was held at the Great Synagogue in Budapest.
Education
In 1946, Lantos enrolled at the University of Budapest. As a result of his fluent English, he wrote an essay about Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he was awarded a scholarship by the Hillel Foundation to study in the United States. He then emigrated to the U.S., and studied economics at the University of Washington in Seattle, where he earned a B.A. in 1949 and an M.A. in 1950. He continued his post-graduate education at the University of California, Berkeley, and received a Ph.D. in economics in 1953. His student years were thinly fictionalized in the character of Ted Lambros in Erich Segal's 1985 novel The Class.
Early career
After graduation from Berkeley, Lantos became a professor of economics at San Francisco State University. In subsequent years, he worked as a business consultant and television commentator on subjects of foreign policy. He eventually became a senior advisor to various U.S. Senators, and in 1980, he was elected to the U.S. Congress, where he remained until his death in February 2008. Recalling his early life, he announced his retirement by stating to Congress, "I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country." Annette's father Sebastian was the brother of Jolie Gabor, with Jolie's daughters Magda, Zsa Zsa, and Eva Gabor being first cousins to Annette Lantos.
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette Marie and Katrina, and 18 grandchildren, including Levi Tillemann, an author and energy expert; Tomicah S. Tillemann, a former Democratic political speechwriter; and Charity Tillemann-Dick, an opera singer and activist. The Lantoses' daughter Annette was married to Timber Dick, an independent businessman in Colorado, until his accidental death in 2008.
Lantos's younger daughter, Katrina Lantos Swett, is married to ambassador and former U.S. Representative from New Hampshire Richard Swett, and was herself a candidate for Congress in New Hampshire. She now serves as President of the Lantos Foundation for Human Rights and Justice, and she is also the co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit.
Lantos considered himself a secular Jew.
Political career and positions
Lantos made his first run for office in 1980, challenging Republican Congressman Bill Royer, who had won a 1979 special election after Democrat Leo Ryan was killed in the Jonestown massacre. Lantos defeated Royer by 5,700 votes. He never again faced such a close contest, and was re-elected 13 times. Lantos earned a reputation as a champion for various human rights causes, such as having Yahoo CEO Jerry Yang testify at a congressional hearing after the company turned over the email records of two Chinese dissidents to the Chinese government, allowing them to be traced and one sentenced to jail.
thumb|left|The [[California's 11th congressional district|11th district that Lantos served from 1981 until 1993 included a small portion of San Francisco, as well as Daly City and San Mateo.]]Lantos was a member of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and repeatedly called for reforms to the nation's health-care system, reduction of the national budget deficit and the national debt, repeal of the Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001. He opposed Social Security privatization efforts. He supported same-sex marriage rights and marijuana for medical use, was a strong proponent of gun control and adamantly pro-choice.
Lantos was an advocate on behalf of the environment, receiving consistently high ratings from the League of Conservation Voters and other environmental organizations for his legislative record. His long-standing efforts to protect open space brought thousands of acres under the protection of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, including Mori Point, Sweeney Ridge, and Rancho Corral de Tierra, which will keep its watersheds and delicate habitats free from development permanently.
right|thumb|San Francisco Mayor [[Gavin Newsom and Lantos]]
While Lantos was an early supporter of the Iraq War, from 2006 onward, he acknowledged public criticism about the conduct of the war and called for a diplomatic approach toward ceasing hostilities.
Foreign affairs issues
left|thumb|[[United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon with Tom and Annette Lantos]]
Lantos served as the chairman of the United States House Committee on Foreign Affairs. Through its more than 20 years of work, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus—of which Lantos was co-chair with Representative Frank Wolf—covered a wide range of human rights issues. They included speaking for Christians in Saudi Arabia and Sudan to practice their faith, helping Tibetans to retain their culture and religion in Tibet, and advocating for other minorities worldwide.
Among his other efforts was a demand that Japan apologize for sex slavery during World War II. He declared Turkey's mass killings of Armenians during World War I to be genocide.
On other aspects of American foreign policy, Lantos spoke out against waste, fraud and abuse in the multi-billion dollar U.S. reconstruction program in Iraq, and warned that the U.S. could lose Afghanistan to the Taliban if the Bush administration failed to take decisive action to halt the current decline in political stability there. Lantos was against U.S. military aid to Egypt as the Egyptian military had failed to stop the flow of money and weapons across the Egyptian border to Hamas in Gaza, and Egypt had not contributed troops to the peacekeeping efforts in Afghanistan and elsewhere.
"Nurse Nayirah" later turned out to be the daughter of Saud Nasser Al-Saud Al-Sabah, a member of Kuwait's ruling Al-Sabah family who served as Kuwait's ambassador to the United States at the time. Asked about having allowed the girl to give testimony without identifying herself, and without her story having been corroborated, Lantos replied, "The notion that any of the witnesses brought to the caucus through the Kuwaiti Embassy would not be credible did not cross my mind... I have no basis for assuming that her story is not true, but the point goes beyond that. If one hypothesizes that the woman's story is fictitious from A to Z, that in no way diminishes the avalanche of human rights violations." Yet Representative Tom Lantos has been caught doing exactly that. His behavior warrants a searching inquiry by the House Ethics Committee."
War in Iraq
On October 4, 2002, Lantos led a narrow majority of Democrats on the House International Relations Committee to a successful vote in support of the Resolution for the Use of Force, seeking the approval of the United Nations and under the condition that President George W. Bush would allow UN weapons inspectors to finish their work and that Bush would need to return to Congress for an actual declaration of war before invading Iraq. The resolution later passed the House and the Senate with a total of 373 of 435 members of Congress supporting it. "The train is now on its way", said Lantos after the resolution successfully passed both houses of Congress. In later hearings on the war, Lantos continued his enthusiastic support.
Starting in early 2006, Lantos distanced himself from the Bush Administration's Iraq policy, making critical statements at hearings, on the House floor and in published media interviews about the conduct of the war. During hearings of the House International Relations Committee, where he was then the ranking member, Lantos repeatedly praised the investigative work of the office of the Special Inspector of Iraq Reconstruction General Stuart Bowen, which uncovered evidence of waste, fraud and abuse in the use of U.S. taxpayer dollars intended to help secure and rebuild Iraq. Lantos was an immediate and consistent critic of the troop surge advocated by President Bush. On the night in January 2007 that Bush announced his plan, Lantos responded, "I oppose the so-called surge that constitutes the centerpiece of the President's plan. Our efforts in Iraq are a mess, and throwing in more troops will not improve it."
During a joint House hearing on September 10, 2007, featuring General David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker, Lantos said:
At the same hearing, Lantos drew comparisons between some of the current U.S. activities in Iraq to U.S. support two decades earlier of Islamic militants in Afghanistan:
Human rights advocacy
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Tibet
As co-founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983 and as Chairman of the Foreign Affairs Committee, Lantos would "stir the consciousness of world leaders and the public alike", according to Representative Nancy Pelosi. She added: "Wherever there was injustice or oppression, he used his expertise and moral authority to put the United States on the side of justice and human rights". In 2007, in his effort to help the people of China and Tibet, he presented the Dalai Lama with the Congressional Gold Medal.
Darfur
On April 28, 2006, Lantos and four other Democratic U.S. Representatives, along with six other activists, took part in a civil disobedience action in front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington, D.C. They were protesting the role of the Sudanese government in carrying out genocide in the Darfur conflict and were arrested for disorderly conduct.
Hungarian minorities
Lantos was an activist for the rights of Hungarian minorities; as a member of the US House of Representatives. In a 2007 letter he asked Robert Fico, the Prime Minister of Slovakia to distance themselves from the Beneš decrees, a reasonable process in the Hedvig Malina case, and to treat members of the Hungarian minority as equal.
The American Hungarian Federation recognized Congressman Lantos for his "Leadership in Support of Democracy, Human Rights and Minority Rights in Central and Eastern Europe", awarding him the organization's highest award, the "Col. Commandant Michael Kovats Medal of Freedom", at the October 19, 2005, Congressional Reception commemorating the 49th Anniversary of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution.
Lebanon
On August 27, 2006, at the Israeli Foreign Ministry building in Israel, Lantos said he would block a foreign aid package promised by President George W. Bush to Lebanon unless and until Beirut agreed to the deployment of international troops on the border with Syria and Lebanon takes control of its borders with Syria to prevent arms smuggling to Hezbollah guerrillas.
Morocco and Western Sahara
Lantos supported Morocco's demand to gain sovereignty over Western Sahara, and criticized the Polisario Front, which demands independence for the disputed region. In 2007, he backed Morocco's proposal to make the region autonomous under Moroccan rule, saying: "I urge the leadership of the Polisario to realize that they will never again get such a good deal for the population they purport to represent."
Death and legacy
thumb|Lantos's grave in [[Congressional Cemetery, Washington, D.C. The letters at the bottom are a Hebrew acronym for May his soul be bound up in the bond of eternal life.]]
On January 2, 2008, after having been diagnosed with esophageal cancer, Lantos announced he would not run for a 15th term in the House, but planned to complete his final term. In his statement, he said: