Remembering Tom Lantos

Andrew McLaughlin has an excellent tribute to my late former congresman, Tom Lantos. A sample:

  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.

Quite a guy.



One response to “Remembering Tom Lantos”

  1. Last night I heard the opposite on NPR .. one of our Supreme Court Justices using the Jack Bauer excuse to condone torture.

    Ugh

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