[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 154 (2008), Part 2]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page 2792]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                    HONORING CONGRESSMAN TOM LANTOS

                                 ______
                                 

                          HON. ELIOT L. ENGEL

                              of new york

                    in the house of representatives

                      Wednesday, February 27, 2008

  Mr. ENGEL. Madam Speaker, I insert in the Congressional Record a 
statement by former Deputy Secretary of the Treasury Stuart Eizenstat 
in honor of our late Chairman Tom Lantos.

                     Statement of Stuart Eizenstat

       I first met Tom Lantos during the 1976 Jimmy Carter 
     presidential campaign for which I served as policy director, 
     when Tom took a leave of absence from his teaching position 
     in California to volunteer with the campaign. He was a great 
     asset in helping develop our foreign policy, particularly on 
     the Middle East. His brilliance, his intellectual integrity, 
     and honesty made an immediate impression on me.
       His Holocaust experience, as a Holocaust survivor, created 
     an indelible link between us. From our first meeting in 1976 
     throughout his public career, he was a passionate and 
     unwavering supporter of Israel and the need for peace between 
     Israel and its Arab neighbors. He saw Israel as a Jewish 
     State created out of the ashes of the Holocaust and the best 
     guarantor against threats to the Jewish people. During the 
     Clinton Administration, in which I held a number of senior 
     positions including Special Representative of the President 
     and Secretary of State on Holocaust-Era Issues, no Member of 
     Congress was a stronger supporter of my efforts on behalf of 
     the Administration to bring justice to survivors of the 
     Holocaust and to the families of its victims.
       Tom was also one of the earliest and strongest supporters 
     in Congress for freedom for Jews in the then Soviet Union.
       His Holocaust experience was reflected in a number of 
     additional activities. He was one of the strongest supporters 
     of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which we 
     created with bipartisan support at the end of the Carter 
     Administration. He was personally responsible for naming the 
     street on which the Museum sits as Raoul Wallenberg Place, 
     named after the person who saved his life and his wife 
     Annette's, following the Nazi occupation of their native 
     Hungary in 1944. He never forgot what Raoul Wallenberg had 
     done for them and for thousands of other Jews, and was an 
     indefatigable champion of trying to get the Soviet Union and 
     later Russia to provide an honest accounting of the 
     circumstances around Wallenberg's death.
       His Holocaust experience also taught him the importance of 
     human rights around the world. He was the founder and co-
     chairman of the Congressional Human Rights Caucus, shining a 
     spotlight on human rights violations around the world, most 
     recently in Darfur.
       Tom's legacy of support for human rights, his strong 
     opposition to regimes which threaten western values, the 
     numerous actions he took to strengthen U.S.-Israel relations 
     mark Tom Lantos as one of the most influential and important 
     Members of Congress in our generation. He was a dear friend 
     and a great and good man.

                          ____________________