Left Flank

Lantos was driven by a belief that the United States government could serve as a force for good in the world. That drove him to spearhead some extremely productive, often pragmatic programs…

…his humanitarianism wasn't pandering, and his militarism wasn't politically-minded. As such, Lantos was uniquely positioned between Democratic doves and hawks by being unlike other Democratic hawks who by and large sought to move the party to the center more broadly and, in contrast to the Joe Liebermans and Hillary Clintons of Congress, he did not eschew controversial positions for the sake of coalition building on other issues.

This distinguished him from both sets of his allies. He was pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and pro-medical marijuana use in a much more clearly articulated way than his war allies in the center, many of whom speak in couched terms about any of these issues--when they bother to speak at all. At the same time, though, he, as a Bay Area congressman, supported the war--and voted for its reauthorization time and time again--for reasons that distinguished him from liberals (like, perhaps, John Kerry in the Senate or John Murtha in the House) who were either cowed into their votes or voted as they did because, at the time, it was the politically easiest way forward. On the merits, he was wrong--and being wrong for decent reasons doesn't undo damage. But it does help one maintain respectability, and therefore influence.

By the end of his life, he'd grown a bit more gun-shy--not because any political winds favored such a shift (those winds blew past him years ago) but because he was able to accept certain realities. It was that shift that made him uniquely suited to heal the lingering rift between the party's doves and hawks. His committee successors--among them Howard Berman of California and Gary Ackerman of New York--do not share those qualities. Both of them are, like Lantos, humanitarians, and both of them, vis-à-vis Israel and elsewhere, are hawks. But they lack much of the elements--his Holocaust experience and his age, but more importantly, his staunch activist streak--that gave him unique leverage on the left and on the right.

Lacking a comparable figure to assume his mantle, liberals will have to learn from Lantos' example on their own: to maintain a belief that justice is worth a fight. But they should do so without a sense that real-time consequences can be ignored. Those consequences, after all, can create just the sorts of calamities that Lantos made a career of opposing.

Hawkeye: The legacy of Tom Lantos's vision for a Democratic Party still torn between doves and hawks