It’s not often that you meet someone who expands your mind, shapes your soul, and inhabits your heart completely, but that was Tom Lantos.
For me, knowing Tom was that rare blessing in life—a relationship that grew deeper and stronger with each passing year; a relationship that enriches my life to this day, nearly a decade after Tom’s passing.
I first met Tom when I had the good fortune to hire him to work for me. He may have started out as my staffer in the Senate, but how quickly he became my counselor and, more than once, my co-conspirator; my teacher and inspiration; and most importantly, my friend.
He opened his heart to my boys, Beau and Hunter. He helped welcome Jill into the Biden family. In fact, it was Tom who suggested that Jill and I marry at the United Nations chapel. And it was Tom who came to me later that year in the Senate and said, “We’re going on a honeymoon”—meaning he had planned a trip for us to visit his home country of Hungary.
I remember so well, standing with Jill on the bridge in Budapest, listening to Tom recount for us memories from his youth under the fascist Arrow-Cross regime. He told us how Jews would be lined up along the banks of the Danube, and how Raoul Wallenberg would walk the river to bring them under Swedish protection, saving thousands of lives, including Tom and Annette Lantos.
Since those early days, the Lantos and Biden families have been there for one another. I can still hear that rich baritone of his during all the late nights we sat up talking, or listening to Tom share his stories with each of my sons and my daughter, Ashley.
Tom saw the pull of evil in our world so clearly. He witnessed profound horrors as a teenager. Almost everyone he cared about in the world was ripped away from him. But rather than allow suffering to shutter his heart or blunt his capacity to care—a choice that would have been completely understandable given everything that he endured—Tom made it his life’s work to defend others from brutality. Tom always understood that because his life was saved, it must be filled with purpose, and he didn’t waste a single moment.
He came to the United States and got his education—not only a bachelor’s degree, but his master’s and then his doctorate. He soaked up the opportunities his new homeland afforded to him. He became the very embodiment of American values, and it’s no surprise that the people of California recognized that by sending him to represent them in Congress.
The first piece of legislation he wrote as a member in his own right was, in true Tom fashion, a memorial to the man who saved his life. Tom proposed the
From the first day he took office until his final day in the House, Tom felt a duty to represent those beyond the borders of his district. It only took him two years to co-found the bipartisan Congressional Human Rights Caucus—now a permanent Congressional Commission that bears his name.
Tom had always been a powerful voice for human rights. I remember the second time he took me to his homeland, we met in secret with Refuseniks in Budapest who were being persecuted by the former Soviet Union. He taught me how to speak out on their behalf. So of course, as Tom continued to serve in Congress, he reached out to educate more and more people, as he had done for me. By the time he became Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, it was his moral compass that helped point us in the right direction as a nation.
Perhaps the most powerful example of this, and one of the achievements of which I am most proud in my own Senate career, is the work Tom and I did together to stand up against the ethnic cleansing that took place in the Balkans under Slobodan Milosevic.
Tom had seen the horrors of that kind of violence before. He recognized all the old tricks. There was no doubt in his mind what was happening, and he helped inspire me to speak out as well.
At the time, I was the ranking member on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Tom and I spear-headed the efforts on both sides of the Hill to hold hearings and bring light to the atrocities taking place in the former Yugoslavia. And when I was invited by the regime to come to Serbia and see for myself what was happening, it was with courage learned from my many years of knowing Tom that I looked Milosevic in the eye and told him that I thought he was a war criminal and deserved to be prosecuted as such.
I firmly believe that, together, we helped accomplish the very thing Tom had been training for the entirety of his adult life—stopping another genocide in Europe.
I was proud to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Tom in so many fights throughout our careers. I remember one trip I took in the Senate in 2005 to visit a refugee camp in eastern Chad. I spent time with the women who had been brutalized at the hand of the murderous Janjaweed and the children who were fleeing from unspeakable suffering. When I got back, Tom sent me a note praising me for taking the risk of going. I just told him, “Tom, you taught me so much.”
Even as he got older, Tom’s passion continued to burn bright. He never slowed down. He was in his late 70s when he was arrested outside the Sudanese
No one could have loved the United States and all that it stands for more than Tom Lantos. His astounding life—from being placed in a forced labor camp, to joining the anti-Nazi underground in Hungary, to serving for nearly three decades in the United States House of Representatives—is an “only in America” story. Tom used to tell how he arrived in the United States in 1947 with only seven dollars and a salami to his name—and the salami was confiscated.
He survived that first summer on the generosity and goodwill of those who embraced him and offered help. So to Tom, American values were always synonymous with the respect and care we show to one another. It was why he was so fiercely insistent that every single person on the planet is entitled to be treated with basic human dignity.
In complete keeping with his character and sensibilities, before his death, Tom wrote a long letter to his grandchildren. In it, he spoke of the journey he and Annette had made—how they had escaped tyranny so that future generations could enjoy the freedom and rights of citizens of the United States. But he also charged his grandchildren to be “ever alert and work diligently to preserve that freedom.”
Amidst today’s political discord and division, his prescience of mind is particularly striking: “In this country, there are troubling signs that similar ethnic and religious enmities threaten to erupt again. These must be calmed and rational solutions reached … That is our American dream—that you and your children and your children’s children remain forever a vibrant, living part of a nation where all races, creeds and religions are able to live together in harmonious freedom.”
For Tom, the work was never done, and his lifetime of work and achievements remind us that our work is not done either.
“Never again” is not just a slogan to repeat during the annual Days of Remembrance. It’s a living vow—one that we must affirm over and over again. That’s what Tom did every day of his life. It’s why, in the final weeks of his battle with esophageal cancer, he asked that a non-profit be founded to carry on his lifelong mission. Now his memory and the ongoing work of the Tom Lantos Foundation challenges us still to never be complacent in the face of evil.
When injustice is on the march anywhere around the world, we must speak out—for silence quickly becomes complicity. We must be careful to avoid the temptation to rationalize, excuse away, or turn a blind eye to any act that violates the humanity of any man, woman, or child on this earth. Wherever evil seeks to hide in this world, we must stand sentinel—for Tom, and for all those children who never got the chances that Tom had.
Joe Biden
47th Vice President of the United States