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CALIF. REP. TOM LANTOS DIES
By Erica Werner
The Associated Press
Feb 11 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) - Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped
from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only
Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80.
Spokeswoman Lynne Weil said Lantos, a Californian, died early Monday
at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland. He was
surrounded by his wife, Annette, two daughters, and many of his 17
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband's life was
"defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his
principles and to his family."
Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the
esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term
but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district,
which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to
the south including Lantos' home of San Mateo.
White House press secretary Dana Perino announced the news of Lantos'
death to reporters at a morning briefing and flags were lowered to
half-mast at the White House and U.S. Capitol.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Tom Lantos was a true
American hero. He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one's
freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand
for spreading freedom and prosperity to others."
Speaking to reporters at the State Department, she said, "He was also
a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Lantos "used his
chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to empower the
powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world."
The timing of Lantos' diagnosis was a particular blow because he
had assumed his committee chairmanship just a year earlier, when
Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense
his whole life had been a preparation for the job - and it was.
Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was
born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf
Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the
labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg,
the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing
powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.
That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress
and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues,
sometimes courting controversy. Lantos was outspoken on human rights
in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere, and in 2006 was one of five members
of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over
the genocide in Darfur.
He joined the Bush administration in strong support of Israel and was
a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the
Iraq invasion, though he would become a strong critic of President
Bush's handling of the war.
"Tom Lantos was a leader and a friend to all those around the world
who fought for democracy and human rights," said Ronald S. Lauder,
president of the World Jewish Congress. "His hand guided every
landmark in our recent history, from the fight against Nazi tyranny
during the Holocaust to the championing of Soviet Jewry. His voice
was never silent until today."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Lantos offered "a particular
voice that understood what had happened in this world back in the
30s and 40s."
"We should make sure we learn from that and teach our children so it
never happens again, and where it is happening around the world do
something to stop it," Bloomberg said. "It's our obligation, I've
always thought, and Tom really, I think, did understand that."
Lantos was a frequent visitor to Hungary, meeting with political
leaders and holding recurrent news conferences which were widely
covered in the Hungarian press. He was widely recognized there for
his calls for the respect of the human rights of the millions of
ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, especially Romania
and Slovakia, whose cultural identity was a common target of those
countries' communist regimes.
"Although we had differing views in various political issues, we
clearly understand that we have lost a true friend of Hungary,"
Fidesz, the main center-right opposition party, said in a statement.
"Tom Lantos contributed greatly to the understanding and support in
the United States for the Hungarians living beyond our borders and
their ongoing struggle to maintain their identity."
The governing Socialist Party also paid tribute to Lantos.
"With his life, Tom Lantos proved that democracy, freedom and humanity
are able to defeat dictatorship and inhumanity," the Socialists said
in a statement.
Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the
first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting
personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to
show "good faith" to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon
his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted
sanctions against Libya.
In October 2007, as Foreign Affairs chairman, Lantos defied
administration opposition by moving through his committee a measure
that would have recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians
as a genocide, something strongly opposed by Turkey. The bill has
not passed the House.
Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary,
but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make
in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.
"Morally, you are pygmies," he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc.
at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their
company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.
"This is about as believable as Elvis being seen in a Kmart," was
his retort to a witness testifying before a subcommittee he headed
in 1989 that led a congressional investigation of Reagan-era scandals
at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Lantos was elected to Congress after spending three decades teaching
economics at San Francisco State University, working as a business
consultant and serving as a foreign policy commentator on television.
He challenged GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer in 1980 and won narrowly,
subsequently winning re-election by comfortable margins.
"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," Lantos
said upon announcing his retirement last month. "I will never be able
to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
Lantos came to the United States in 1947 after being awarded a
scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle. In
1950 he married Annette, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he'd
managed to reunite after the war. The couple moved to the San
Francisco Bay area so Lantos could pursue a doctorate in economics
at the University of California, Berkeley.
The first major bill Lantos passed in Congress was to give honorary
American citizenship to Wallenberg, whom he called "the central figure
in my life." But Lantos sometimes shied away from talking about his
experiences in the war. When he joined a lawsuit in 1984 to seek
Wallenberg's release from the Soviet Union - Wallenberg was captured
and imprisoned by Soviet troops after World War II - Lantos told
The Associated Press that he "didn't want to dwell on the details"
of the dangers he faced from the Nazis.
Lantos joined the Hungarian Underground after the Nazi occupation
but was captured and sent to a forced labor camp 40 miles north of
Budapest, according to the biography on his congressional Web site.
He was beaten severely when he tried to escape, but feeling he had
nothing to lose he made another attempt. This time he made it back to
Budapest and to one of the safehouses that Wallenberg had established.
Lantos credited Wallenberg's protection, his own Aryan appearance -
blond hair, blue eyes - and a good measure of luck with helping him
survive the war. But he said that at the time he didn't think he had
much of a chance of staying alive.
"I was sixteen, but I was very old," he said in an interview for
"The Last Days," the 1999 book accompanying the Steven Spielberg
documentary of the same name that focused on the experience of
Hungarian-American survivors.
"The bloodbath, the cruelty, the death that I saw, so many times
around me during those few months between March of 1944 and January
of 1945 made me a very old young man."
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette and Katrina, who
between them produced 18 grandchildren, one of whom died young.
According to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise
to produce a very large family because his and his wife's families
had perished in the Holocaust.
By Erica Werner
The Associated Press
Feb 11 2008
WASHINGTON (AP) - Rep. Tom Lantos, who as a teenager twice escaped
from a Nazi-run forced labor camp in Hungary and became the only
Holocaust survivor to win a seat in Congress, has died. He was 80.
Spokeswoman Lynne Weil said Lantos, a Californian, died early Monday
at the Bethesda Naval Medical Center in suburban Maryland. He was
surrounded by his wife, Annette, two daughters, and many of his 17
grandchildren and two great-grandchildren.
Annette Lantos said in a statement that her husband's life was
"defined by courage, optimism, and unwavering dedication to his
principles and to his family."
Lantos, a Democrat who chaired the House Foreign Affairs Committee,
disclosed last month that he had been diagnosed with cancer of the
esophagus. He said at the time that he would serve out his 14th term
but would not seek re-election in his Northern California district,
which takes in the southwest portion of San Francisco and suburbs to
the south including Lantos' home of San Mateo.
White House press secretary Dana Perino announced the news of Lantos'
death to reporters at a morning briefing and flags were lowered to
half-mast at the White House and U.S. Capitol.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said, "Tom Lantos was a true
American hero. He was the embodiment of what it meant to have one's
freedom denied and then to find it and to insist that America stand
for spreading freedom and prosperity to others."
Speaking to reporters at the State Department, she said, "He was also
a dear, dear friend and I am personally quite devastated by his loss."
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said that Lantos "used his
chairmanship of the Foreign Relations Committee to empower the
powerless and give voice to the voiceless throughout the world."
The timing of Lantos' diagnosis was a particular blow because he
had assumed his committee chairmanship just a year earlier, when
Democrats retook control of Congress. He said then that in a sense
his whole life had been a preparation for the job - and it was.
Lantos, who referred to himself as "an American by choice," was
born to Jewish parents in Budapest, Hungary, and was 16 when Adolf
Hitler occupied Hungary in 1944. He survived by escaping from the
labor camp and coming under the protection of Raoul Wallenberg,
the Swedish diplomat who used his official status and visa-issuing
powers to save thousands of Hungarian Jews.
Lantos' mother and much of his family perished in the Holocaust.
That background gave Lantos a moral authority unique in Congress
and he used it repeatedly to speak out on foreign policy issues,
sometimes courting controversy. Lantos was outspoken on human rights
in Sudan, Myanmar and elsewhere, and in 2006 was one of five members
of Congress arrested in a protest outside the Sudanese Embassy over
the genocide in Darfur.
He joined the Bush administration in strong support of Israel and was
a lead advocate for the 2002 congressional resolution authorizing the
Iraq invasion, though he would become a strong critic of President
Bush's handling of the war.
"Tom Lantos was a leader and a friend to all those around the world
who fought for democracy and human rights," said Ronald S. Lauder,
president of the World Jewish Congress. "His hand guided every
landmark in our recent history, from the fight against Nazi tyranny
during the Holocaust to the championing of Soviet Jewry. His voice
was never silent until today."
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg said Lantos offered "a particular
voice that understood what had happened in this world back in the
30s and 40s."
"We should make sure we learn from that and teach our children so it
never happens again, and where it is happening around the world do
something to stop it," Bloomberg said. "It's our obligation, I've
always thought, and Tom really, I think, did understand that."
Lantos was a frequent visitor to Hungary, meeting with political
leaders and holding recurrent news conferences which were widely
covered in the Hungarian press. He was widely recognized there for
his calls for the respect of the human rights of the millions of
ethnic Hungarians living in neighboring countries, especially Romania
and Slovakia, whose cultural identity was a common target of those
countries' communist regimes.
"Although we had differing views in various political issues, we
clearly understand that we have lost a true friend of Hungary,"
Fidesz, the main center-right opposition party, said in a statement.
"Tom Lantos contributed greatly to the understanding and support in
the United States for the Hungarians living beyond our borders and
their ongoing struggle to maintain their identity."
The governing Socialist Party also paid tribute to Lantos.
"With his life, Tom Lantos proved that democracy, freedom and humanity
are able to defeat dictatorship and inhumanity," the Socialists said
in a statement.
Lantos, who was elected to the House in 1980, founded the
Congressional Human Rights Caucus in 1983. In early 2004 he led the
first congressional delegation to Libya in more than 30 years, meeting
personally with Moammar Gadhafi and urging the Bush administration to
show "good faith" to the North African leader in his pledge to abandon
his nuclear weapons programs. Later that year, President Bush lifted
sanctions against Libya.
In October 2007, as Foreign Affairs chairman, Lantos defied
administration opposition by moving through his committee a measure
that would have recognized the World War I-era killings of Armenians
as a genocide, something strongly opposed by Turkey. The bill has
not passed the House.
Tall and dignified, Lantos never lost the accent of his native Hungary,
but his courtly demeanor belied the cutting comments he would make
in committee if the testimony he heard was not to his liking.
"Morally, you are pygmies," he berated top executives of Yahoo Inc.
at a hearing he called in November 2007 as they defended their
company's involvement in the jailing of a Chinese journalist.
"This is about as believable as Elvis being seen in a Kmart," was
his retort to a witness testifying before a subcommittee he headed
in 1989 that led a congressional investigation of Reagan-era scandals
at the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
Lantos was elected to Congress after spending three decades teaching
economics at San Francisco State University, working as a business
consultant and serving as a foreign policy commentator on television.
He challenged GOP incumbent Rep. Bill Royer in 1980 and won narrowly,
subsequently winning re-election by comfortable margins.
"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," Lantos
said upon announcing his retirement last month. "I will never be able
to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
Lantos came to the United States in 1947 after being awarded a
scholarship to study at the University of Washington in Seattle. In
1950 he married Annette, his childhood sweetheart, with whom he'd
managed to reunite after the war. The couple moved to the San
Francisco Bay area so Lantos could pursue a doctorate in economics
at the University of California, Berkeley.
The first major bill Lantos passed in Congress was to give honorary
American citizenship to Wallenberg, whom he called "the central figure
in my life." But Lantos sometimes shied away from talking about his
experiences in the war. When he joined a lawsuit in 1984 to seek
Wallenberg's release from the Soviet Union - Wallenberg was captured
and imprisoned by Soviet troops after World War II - Lantos told
The Associated Press that he "didn't want to dwell on the details"
of the dangers he faced from the Nazis.
Lantos joined the Hungarian Underground after the Nazi occupation
but was captured and sent to a forced labor camp 40 miles north of
Budapest, according to the biography on his congressional Web site.
He was beaten severely when he tried to escape, but feeling he had
nothing to lose he made another attempt. This time he made it back to
Budapest and to one of the safehouses that Wallenberg had established.
Lantos credited Wallenberg's protection, his own Aryan appearance -
blond hair, blue eyes - and a good measure of luck with helping him
survive the war. But he said that at the time he didn't think he had
much of a chance of staying alive.
"I was sixteen, but I was very old," he said in an interview for
"The Last Days," the 1999 book accompanying the Steven Spielberg
documentary of the same name that focused on the experience of
Hungarian-American survivors.
"The bloodbath, the cruelty, the death that I saw, so many times
around me during those few months between March of 1944 and January
of 1945 made me a very old young man."
Lantos and his wife had two daughters, Annette and Katrina, who
between them produced 18 grandchildren, one of whom died young.
According to Lantos, his daughters were following through on a promise
to produce a very large family because his and his wife's families
had perished in the Holocaust.