Historians and biographers like to play the parlor-game of finding a single small action or decision which, seen in retrospect, affects the future of men and women in public life - and may thereby change the course of history.
Trying to pinpoint such a fateful moment in advance is foolhardy. Still, I'll now play the fool and hazard a wild guess: That what happens in the 12th Congressional District of California within the next 200 days could eventually touch the affairs of nations.
First, in the interests of "transparency" (what us old-timers used to call Truth) I should admit that, in writing this, I wear two hats. With my old politician's fedora covering my bald spot, I take more than a personal interest in what may happen in the 12th CD. It's an open secret that former State Senator Jackie Speier is strongly considering running for that seat. I know and like Jackie and have long admired her legislative accomplishments. Yes, I would like to see her in Congress.
But switching to the silk topper of diplomatic historian and Professor of International Relations, I offer the following thoughts on the future of the man who currently represents the 12th in Washington.
Thirty years ago, when Henry Kissinger left office as Secretary of State, there was much idle talk of his running for the US Senate in New York. I recall chatting about this, at the time, with one of Kissinger's close friends. I pointed out that the former Harvard Prof had no experience at all in electoral politics and no knowledge of domestic legislation. "But", the Kissinger loyalist insisted, "he could be an elder statesman, offering words of wisdom about international relations from the Senate's bully pulpit."
I wasn't convinced and neither, apparently, was Dr. Kissinger, who never threw his hat into the Senatorial ring. Probably he found the prospect of low-down-and-dirty partisan political combat not to his elegant taste. But my reservations had more to do with what he might - and, more likely, might not - have accomplished in the halls of the U.S. Congress.
Washington legislators, sometimes called "representatives", are paid to represent the voters who elect them by proposing and enacting legislation. No matter how globally astute, they are not sent to Washington to pontificate on world affairs. No Congressman (or even Senator), in my half-century memory, has had a significant and lasting impact - while in Congress - on the course of American foreign policy. Legislators can talk, they can make headlines, they can get momentary attention, usually by decrying some current policy of a sitting President. But they are in the wrong arena for exerting real influence on global affairs. To do that, they must move into the rarefied Kissinger-like circles of diplomacy.
It has been done. After 24 years in the US Senate, 16 of those as Democratic Majority Leader, 74 year-old Mike Mansfield accepted President Carter's appointment as US Ambassador to Japan. He stayed on in Tokyo (reappointed, in a surprising spirit of bi-partisanship, by Republican President Reagan) until he was 85, and during those years did much to cement what he called "the most important bilateral relationship in the world".
Democrat Lee Hamilton, leaving Congress after 34 years, with reservoirs of respect from both sides of the aisle for his knowledgeable chairmanship of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, has since served in many advisory roles on national security issues, most recently as leading Democrat on the Iraq Study Group, which did much to force the Bush Administration to reassess its course in the Iraqi conflict. Hamilton is renowned as a master negotiator and an advocate of that now-rare foreign policy bi-partisanship that prevailed in Washington after World War II. But he has put that renown to greatest use by saying farewell to Capitol Hill.
This is the reality which may soon face Hamilton's Democratic successor at the Foreign Affairs Committee, the veteran Congressman from northern California, Thomas Peter Lantos.
On February 1st of next year, Lantos will celebrate his 80th birthday. For more than a third of those eighty years, he has been a Member of Congress, re-elected 13 times without serious opposition. Next March, he is expected to file papers asking the voters of his district to make it 14.
Like Kissinger, Lantos came to America as a Jewish immigrant from Europe, and began his career as an academic, teaching Political Science and Economics in San Francisco. But, unlike the former Secretary of State, Lantos first lived through the Holocaust, miraculously surviving the horrible fate of the Six Million while working in the anti-Nazi underground in his native Hungary.
What sets Lantos apart in the Washington of today, what earns him unique political "clout" within the Democratic Party is that he is a political anomaly: A "progressive" (once known as "liberal") on most domestic questions, but a "hard-liner" on foreign policy; a self-described anti-Communist "old hawk" during the Cold War; at first, a unrepentant supporter of the Iraqi War and now a tough talker about the Iranian nuclear threat - and yet, unlike so many other American Jewish politicians of identical views who have long since thrown in their lot with Republican neo-conservatism, still a loyal Democrat.
With a kindred spirit, Joe Lieberman of Connecticut (whose still-born campaign for the Presidency was co-chaired by Lantos' daughter) now "gone Independent", Lantos, in this unswerving Party loyalty, now stands virtually alone. That fact is not lost on Democratic Party bigwigs, who are keenly aware that Lantos may be the very last Jewish liberal hero of AIPAC, the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful "pro-Israel lobby".
More than half of the million dollars in campaign funds Lantos has raised in his last shoo-in congressional races came from outside his District - far more from New York and Chicago than from less-glamorous 12th District Redwood City, Pacifica and Burlingame, or even the San Francisco portion of his District, which adjoins that of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi.
No doubt Speaker Pelosi believes that Lantos still draws some reluctant support to the Democratic Party from national Jewish contributors who are, at heart, more in tune with the conservative Republicans who have dominated AIPAC during the Bush years. His renown is not merely because of his adamant support of beleaguered Israel, but because he has also dedicated much of his congressional energy to speaking out loudly for the "human rights" of political dissenters and oppressed underdogs throughout the world, whether in Russia, Tibet, Darfur, El Salvador or Burma - symbolic rhetoric that greatly appeals to the humanitarian Jewish soul.
But now, in the next 200 days, all of this - the awareness, the anomaly and indeed Lantos' own self-perception at age 80 - will be re-examined because for the first time in decades, Lantos is likely to have a challenger: Jackie Speier, fellow progressive Democrat and a much-respected and admired state legislator with a dramatic personal history, who is every bit as well-known and popular in the 12th Congressional District.
More than twenty years younger than the Congressman, Jackie also knows something of the evil of blind hatred, being of Armenian descent, as well as having a Jewish grandfather who fled Nazi Germany. And she herself is also a survivor of tragedy and trauma and the violence of religious fanatics: In 1978, when Lantos was still the little-known member of a local school board, Speier, then a twenty-something legislative aide, accompanied her boss and political mentor, Congressman Leo Ryan, on a trip to the South American country of Guyana, where the Rev. Jim Jones had established a religious cult colony. Ryan wanted to investigate allegations that some of Jones' one thousand followers, many Californians, were being held at "Jonestown" against their will.
The aftermath shocked the world: Jones ordered his blindly-obedient gun-toting disciples to kill Ryan and his entourage. Jackie Speier saw the Congressman murdered before her eyes. She too was shot several times at close range and left for dead, while Jones and 900 of his followers, men, women and children, committed mass suicide.
Jackie Speier survived, and with bullets still in her body, embarked on what has been a brilliant political career - six years as County Supervisor, ten years in the California State Assembly and eight in the State Senate, championing legislation for women's rights and consumer protection and health care.
If Speier does indeed run for Congress against Lantos in next June's Democratic Primary, she will make no pretense of being a foreign policy "expert". Without denigrating Lantos' expertise in that field, she may point out that the Congressman has begun to short-change his constituents, being out of touch with their mundane domestic concerns while he makes acerbic newsworthy comments about the Prime Ministers of France and Germany, holds hearings on the political future of Russia, and introduces symbolic legislation to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear bomb that would threaten Israel.
If Lantos remains determined to run for re-election, no matter what, he will dwarf Speier in campaign expenditures. He already has a million-dollar war chest and, if that's not enough, AIPAC-solicited contributions will flow in to his coffers from all over America.
But the voters of the 12th District, who have overwhelmingly good feelings about both Lantos and Speier, have reportedly begun to question whether their long-time Congressman still truly represents their interests - and may wonder if all this money from outside the State - is a brazen attempt to win their acquiescent silence about ineffective representation.
AIPAC, which has had much adverse publicity recently, even enmeshed in a forthcoming espionage trial, remains secure in its power and influence, and may not care. But it should. Because, in the final analysis, such a Lantos victory, after a hard-fought electoral battle which will certainly draw national attention, may not be "best for Israel". Not merely because of potential non-Jewish backlash, but, more importantly, because Tom Lantos is miscast as a Member of Congress.
Looking ahead to his last decade of public life with true introspection, Lantos may wonder if those causes in which he so passionately believes can be better served by his leaving Congress now - and moving as senior statesman into the arena of diplomacy.
Were Lantos to bow out gracefully, the chairmanship of the House Foreign Affairs Committee would probably pass to ranking Democrat Howard Berman of Los Angeles. Berman is 66, smart, able and progressive on virtually every political issue, foreign and domestic. He too is Jewish and like Lantos, he originally voted to authorize American military action in Iraq, and is passionately supportive of Israel. But he is a far more effective nuts-and-bolts legislator than Lantos - and might be more in sync with the younger Democratic foreign policy wonks who would flock to Washington if Senator Clinton were to be elected President.
At the same time, a future President Clinton might find Tom Lantos a diplomatic godsend - provided he leaves Congress with his repute undiminished, unsullied by a bitter electoral battle.
There has been much talk of Hillary Clinton's waffling on foreign policy and national security - which, say some pundits, stems from her need to appear "tough" on such issues. But there are hazards for liberal Democratic Presidents trying too hard at the outset to prove their fortitude and militancy - recall John F. Kennedy and the ill-conceived disaster of the Bay of Pigs.
In a nuclear world, Presidents must have the luxury of maximum policy flexibility. If there are "tough" words to be spoken, better they should come from the mouths of appointive "hard-liners" - as Bill Clinton concluded when making some of his first national security appointments.
For such a role, Tom Lantos would be ideal, because for all his "hawkishness", he is no sort of conservative, neo- or otherwise, but more the Democratic legatee of his own World War II generation and the Cold War foreign policies of Truman and Kennedy.
Imagine Ambassador Lantos at the United Nations Human Rights Council (or even the UN General Assembly) - verbally shooting from the hip when appropriate, speaking out boldly for universal human rights without fear or favor, and some of the tartness of a John Bolton - but, unlike Bolton, never doubting the fundamental importance of global organization and multi-national consultation.
Or imagine Special Envoy Lantos at a Middle East Peace Conference. Welcomed by the Likud-niks who may soon regain political power in Israel - yet knowing in his heart that, ultimately, Israel's survival will require negotiating some complex formula for mutually-acceptable peaceful co-existence with the sane among its neighbors.
Such diplomatic achievement would be a fitting historical legacy for a former Congressman from California.
Meanwhile, newly-elected Congresswoman Speier would give the voters of the 12th Congressional District the meticulous and effective legislative representation they deserve.