In Memoriam Rep. Tom Lantos
By Andrew McLaughlin, Google's Director of Global Public Policy and sometime Fellow of the Berkman Center
I first met Congressman Tom Lantos when I was a young lawyer on the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 1997-98. During Committee meetings, he made a deep impression on me as a forceful orator, a sharp questioner, and a committed defender of due process and the rule of law. On the handful of occasions when I accompanied senior staffers to brief him on an investigation or upcoming hearing, I witnessed a different side of him -- warm and gentlemanly, curious, incisive, skeptical. Flowing from his experience as a young Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by escaping from Nazi labor camps to a Budapest safe house protected by Raoul Wallenberg, Congressman Lantos's life's work was aimed at securing human rights and civil liberties for the oppressed and disenfranchised, both at home and abroad. In pursuit of that cause, he followed his conscience, full stop. He demanded that institutions with power over individuals -- governments, armies, corporations -- act not only out of crude self-interest, but true to a higher moral calling to protect the rights and interests of the people they affect.
Even when I disagreed with his criticisms (and goodness knows, at the risk of understatement, he was loudly and unswervingly critical of Google's decision to launch the Google.cn site subject to China's censorship rules), I always understood and respected where he was coming from, and what he was trying to accomplish.
There are many worthwhile retrospectives and tributes to Congressman Lantos today -- perhaps the most exhaustive are, aptly enough, those in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. CBS's Katie Couric offered a fitting remembrance during last night's newscast. (If you're interested, I'd also recommend an affectionate Chronicle piece on his skills as a storyteller published last year as he ascended to the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee).
I found myself deeply moved by one of the things Congressman Lantos said last month when he announced that this would be his last term in the House:
"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. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
In so many ways, Congressman Lantos's life and career embodied the highest ideals of the American Republic. Those fighting for human rights, civil liberties, and freedom for the forgotten have lost a powerful advocate.
I first met Congressman Tom Lantos when I was a young lawyer on the Democratic staff of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in 1997-98. During Committee meetings, he made a deep impression on me as a forceful orator, a sharp questioner, and a committed defender of due process and the rule of law. On the handful of occasions when I accompanied senior staffers to brief him on an investigation or upcoming hearing, I witnessed a different side of him -- warm and gentlemanly, curious, incisive, skeptical. Flowing from his experience as a young Hungarian Jew who survived the Holocaust by escaping from Nazi labor camps to a Budapest safe house protected by Raoul Wallenberg, Congressman Lantos's life's work was aimed at securing human rights and civil liberties for the oppressed and disenfranchised, both at home and abroad. In pursuit of that cause, he followed his conscience, full stop. He demanded that institutions with power over individuals -- governments, armies, corporations -- act not only out of crude self-interest, but true to a higher moral calling to protect the rights and interests of the people they affect.
Even when I disagreed with his criticisms (and goodness knows, at the risk of understatement, he was loudly and unswervingly critical of Google's decision to launch the Google.cn site subject to China's censorship rules), I always understood and respected where he was coming from, and what he was trying to accomplish.
There are many worthwhile retrospectives and tributes to Congressman Lantos today -- perhaps the most exhaustive are, aptly enough, those in the San Francisco Chronicle and the Washington Post. CBS's Katie Couric offered a fitting remembrance during last night's newscast. (If you're interested, I'd also recommend an affectionate Chronicle piece on his skills as a storyteller published last year as he ascended to the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee).
I found myself deeply moved by one of the things Congressman Lantos said last month when he announced that this would be his last term in the House:
"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. I will never be able to express fully my profoundly felt gratitude to this great country."
In so many ways, Congressman Lantos's life and career embodied the highest ideals of the American Republic. Those fighting for human rights, civil liberties, and freedom for the forgotten have lost a powerful advocate.