Katrina Lantos Swett
As a lucky member of the Lantos family, I have a distinct and daughterly perspective on the legacy of my father Tom Lantos. It is a perspective that is deeply personal but also closely interwoven with his extraordinary public record as a gallant warrior on behalf of human rights. Indeed, from my very intimate vantage point, I see his compassion and commitment to the rights of all people as a natural outgrowth of the love and devotion that he showed to his family.
A clear childhood memory was an occasion when my father sat his little girls down to share a lesson about our responsibilities vis a vis our family, our community and the world. He drew a small picture for us of an apple, with gradually growing concentric circles, spreading out from the center. Dad said that the small circle at the heart of the apple represented our family, and that is where our most important responsibility of love and support began. From there he pointed to the widening circles representing our school, our community, our country and finally the world. He told us that we had a duty to be concerned with the well-being of people in each of these circles but that it all began with the first circle of the family. He told us that if the center of the fruit wasn’t healthy and loving, none of the other circles would be good either. It was a simple but profound lesson—one that we never forgot.
Of course the power of my father’s example was always in front of me, inspiring me to look outward and it helped cultivate in me a desire to be part of making the world a more just and equal place. When I was very young, Dad served as President of our local School Board. In that position, he led the efforts for our small district to hire one of the first African-American teachers for the local schools. He absolutely reveled in the freedom he found in his adopted home and long before he became a notable American statesman, Dad was an active participant in American politics. As a toddler, my sister Annette was taken to meet the Democratic Presidential candidate, Adlai Stevenson- a moment that was charmingly memorialized in our local newspaper. Over the succeeding decades, Dad poured himself into the political life of our nation and in the process became a bi-partisan friend and confidante of political leaders as diverse as Jack Kemp and Tip O’Neill, John McCain and Nancy Pelosi, Madeline Albright and Condoleeza Rice and George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. They were all drawn to my father’s unique brand of patriotism and idealism that transcended the limits of partisanship. He would often remind his colleagues that despite the many political controversies that separated them, what bound them together was far more important than the issues that divided them.
But of course Dad had been born abroad—in Hungary—a country that he truly loved and admired, despite the persecution he endured there in his youth. He relished the utter uniqueness of the Hungarian story—a singular nation of Magyars, nestled between vastly larger Slavic and Germanic nations that somehow managed to not only preserve its distinct language and culture but also contributed to the scientific, artistic and cultural progress of civilization in ways that greatly exceeded Hungary’s small size.
My father’s deep love for the country of his birth, always signified something very admirable to me about his character. It said that although he did not forget for a moment, what he had suffered in Hungary, he nonetheless had a great capacity to forgive and move forward with good cheer. He did not allow the evil he had experienced to tarnish his love of all that was valuable and beautiful in the land of his birth.
However, when it came to love of country, nothing could equal the truly passionate devotion Dad had for his adopted country of America. Perhaps my father expressed it best when he announced that he would be retiring from Congress due to cancer. He said “It is only in the United States that a penniless survivor of the Holocaust, and 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.”
After Dad died he received numerous glowing tributes many of them referencing his exceptional erudition and articulateness. These generous remembrances warmed my heart. They also spoke to the power of his eloquent voice to cut to the heart of the matter and for Dad, the heart of the matter, always came down to honoring and protecting the rights of each precious individual.
Finally, despite the suffering of his early life, Dad was always a man of profound optimism and hope for the future. Whenever I faced personal setbacks or a much more consequential crisis in the life of our country he would say “Don’t worry Darling, we are just bending a windy corner of history and right around this corner will be bright blue skies and wonderful possibilities”.
When I was young the family joke was that Dad and I were actually twins- we both had rather unruly mops of blonde curls, the same bright blue eyes and very similar noses and smiles. As time has gone on, as daughters tend to do, I have come to look more like my beautiful mother—something for which I am very grateful. But I still cherish the idea that I am my father’s twin. I know I will never be able to equal his brilliance or his courage; his eloquence or the sheer force of his extraordinary personality, but so much of who he was still lives in me. He inspires me every day to remember the concentric circles of duty and love, to be my brother and sister’s keeper, to be a guardian of our fragile civilization and the rights it protects and to embrace the future with optimism and joy. These are precious gifts he has given me and I will forever be a grateful daughter.