WASHINGTON — Rep. Tom Lantos (D-Burlingame), the only Holocaust survivor ever to serve in Congress, died Monday of complications from cancer of the esophagus at Bethesda Naval Medical Center in Maryland, his staff said. He was 80.
A champion of civil liberties, Lantos founded the Congressional Human Rights Caucus and supported human rights struggles against both right-wing and left-wing regimes in China, Russia, Myanmar, Darfur and wherever official pressure could, as he put it, "prevent another Holocaust." He also was passionate about animal rights, working to stop seal hunts, dog killings in foreign countries, and horse slaughter, bear baiting and the operation of puppy mills at home.
He also used his post as chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee to highlight human rights violators. He argued that nations with bad records had no place on the U.N. Human Rights Commission, that Beijing should not be awarded the 2008 Olympics because of its human rights record, and that corporations had an obligation to protect individuals and press freedoms. When executives of Yahoo Inc. appeared before the committee last year to defend their role in the jailing of a journalist by Chinese officials, Lantos said, "While technologically and financially you are giants, morally you are Pygmies."
Vigilant against appeasement in foreign policy -- whether the culprit was Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin or Saddam Hussein -- Lantos was a supporter of the Iraq war even though his 12th Congressional District, stretching from southwest San Francisco down the peninsula to take in much of San Mateo County, was overwhelmingly opposed. Although he led the debate for authorization of the campaign to oust Hussein in 2002, he later became disillusioned with faulty prewar intelligence and called for an independent investigation into what went wrong.
"The American people have not sent us here just to be an amen cho- rus for this administration," he said when he finally rose to criticize the war. "There are serious problems and we should be debating serious solutions."
Last year he opposed the surge of extra troops in Iraq, telling Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was lobbying Congress for support: "Our efforts in Iraq are a mess, and throwing in more troops will not improve it."
