September 12 2006, 4:00 p.m. - 5:30 p.m.
6th Floor Flom Auditorium
Woodrow Wilson Center
1300 Pennsylvania Ave, NW
Washington, DC 20004

with Dr Charles Gati, Author and Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies

Congressman Tom Lantos (D-CA)

Dr James G Hershberg, CWIHP Series Editor and Associate Professor of History and International Affairs, George Washington University

Charles Gati is a political scientist who fled his native Hungary during the 1956 revolt, and is now Senior Adjunct Professor of European Studies at Johns Hopkins University. His previous positions have included teaching Central and Eastern European as well as Russian politics and foreign policy at Union College and Columbia University. He served as a Senior Adviser on the Department of State's Policy Planning Staff in the early 1990s. His publications include The Bloc That Failed: Soviet-East European Relations in Transition (1990), and Hungary and the Soviet Bloc (1986).

Congressman Tom Lantos was born in Budapest, Hungary in 1928. As a teenager, he was placed in a Hungarian fascist forced labor camp. He succeeded in escaping and was able to survive in a safe house in Budapest set up by Swedish humanitarian Raoul Wallenberg. In 1947, he was awarded an academic scholarship to study in the United States on the basis of an essay he wrote about US President Franklin D Roosevelt. Just a few weeks after he left Hungary, the communist party seized control of the country. Lantos received his PhD in economics from the University of California, Berkeley. For three decades (1950-1980) he was a professor of economics, an international affairs analyst for public television, and an economic consultant to businesses. He also served in senior advisory roles to members of the United States Senate. Since 1981, he has been a Democratic member of the United States House of Representatives, representing California's 12th congressional district, located just south of San Francisco. He is the ranking Democratic member of the House International Relations Committee.