Why Lantos Mattered

by the editors

There’s no other way to say it: Congress will be irrevocably changed by the absence of Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Calif.), who died on Monday only a month after announcing he would leave the House at the end of the year because of esophageal cancer. He was 80, and had served almost three decades, most recently as chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

Testimonials from Jewish groups and politicians in both parties all said the obvious: that he was a go-to guy on Israel, and that as founder of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, he championed that issue in a way none of his colleagues could match because of his own experiences as a Holocaust survivor — the only survivor to have served in Congress.

The obituaries also talked about his old-world courtliness — he was born in Budapest — and willingness to talk and listen to those with different views, an anomaly in this age of bitter partisanship. Congress will be an angrier, less productive place without Tom Lantos.

But his passing also reflects a more gradual erosion of perspective in Washington. Lantos was one of a dwindling cadre of lawmakers with personal memories of World War II, a time when the nation united and sacrificed as one to fight overwhelming evil, and he alone experienced the horror of the Holocaust. That firsthand memory was burned into his character and shaped his politics.

Congress is now filled with younger men and women who came to awareness under gentler conditions. They talk glibly about global war, but few have experienced war’s horrors. Many express sympathy for today’s genocide victims, but often their words ring hollow: it’s just one more issue, one more crisis.

This week people were talking about Lantos’ “gravitas.” What they really meant was a perspective shaped by hard-won experience and survival, not abstract ideology or mere politics.

So Lantos’ departure is a loss on multiple levels. It is a loss for a Jewish community that benefited greatly from his lifelong fight against anti-Semitism and for a safe and secure Israel; it is a loss to endangered populations around the world who had in Lantos an advocate who understood deep down what it means to be a victim.

Finally, his death is a loss for the nation that sorely needed the qualities he brought to bear in his decades of public service: a keen intelligence, a sensitivity to suffering and a gut-level understanding of the events that shaped our modern world.

Gravitas indeed.

Westchester Jewish Conference

Westchester’s Jewish Community Relations Organization

Jerusalem Hotel

Dan Panorama Hotel in Jerusalem