WASHINGTON — When his eyes seem to stare right through a witness, when his posture perks up and his speech takes on the formality of a scholar's, watch out. Rep. Tom Lantos (D-San Mateo) is getting mad.
His angry outbursts from the dais at last week's House campaign fund-raising hearings--injecting the Democratic viewpoint, or his own, amid all the Republican assertions--became a focal point of the proceedings.
If a GOP legislator exceeded his five-minute time limit, Lantos was ready with a bellow of "Regular order!"
If someone dared question the integrity of Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, Lantos let loose both a roar of condemnation against the attacker and sugary sweet praise of a woman he called a "paragon of public virtue."
The investigation itself, Lantos fumed more than once, is a "theater of the absurd."
Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Los Angeles), no pushover, is the ranking Democrat on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee. But Waxman was away at the global warming conference in Japan, so the courtly yet irascible Lantos went on as his understudy.
Lantos "made Henry seem like a statesman," one Republican complained.
With his eyes on the clock and his ears attuned to any affront to the party, Lantos unleashed his king's English--spoken in his native Hungarian accent--and his aplomb at stringing adjectives into spine-chilling invective.
"An irresponsible, politically motivated, tawdry, partisan request," the nine-term congressman labeled one GOP demand.
Lantos, 69, always outspoken but little known outside his district, found that television cameras were eating up his high-voltage sound bites. His rhetoric was so shrill that at times it left even some on his own side of the aisle squirming.
In an interview, the onetime economics professor with a doctorate in the subject from UC Berkeley said he would not call himself angry: "I would say 'outraged at the perpetration of injustice.' "
Lantos grew so outraged at one point that he compared an uncooperative witness to former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim, who misrepresented his Nazi-era war record. Those are fighting words, especially from Lantos, who escaped from a Nazi camp and is the only Holocaust survivor to have served in Congress.
Independent Counsel Donald C. Smaltz was not amused by the remark. "I take umbrage with being compared with anyone in the Nazi party," he said.
