A ‘Mensch’ for Human Rights

On the late congressman Eliot Engel.

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Jay Nordlinger is a senior resident fellow at the Renew Democracy Initiative and a contributor at The Next Move.

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For a stretch of years, there was a group of US congressmen who could be depended on to speak up for human rights—human rights anywhere in the world.

There are always people who will speak up for human rights in this country or that. And who will oppose this dictator or that. But human rights for everyone, and opposition to dictators everywhere?

That’s another story.

In April 2005, I wrote a story titled “Congressional Champions.” These were champions of human rights.

Among them were two Cuban-American Republicans from Miami: Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart. Other Republicans included Frank Wolf and Chris Smith. Democrats included Tom Lantos, Gary Ackerman, and Eliot Engel.

Referring to this group, Ros-Lehtinen quoted Shakespeare: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers.”

Of that band, only Smith remains in Congress. The others are either retired or deceased. Eliot Engel died last week at 79. He served in Congress from 1989 to 2021.

Engel was a “Cold War liberal,” or a “JFK Democrat,” as he said to me. He also said that he was just about the last of the breed.

“I have always felt strongly about democracy,” he said. “We should promote basic freedom in the world. I have throughout my career been consistent in opposing both right-wing and left-wing dictatorships.”

The record proved it.

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Engel was born in the Bronx, New York, in 1947. He was a month shy of 14 when John F. Kennedy was sworn in as president. Engel’s parents were working-class and Jewish. He was always aware of the Holocaust—it influenced his work.

Engel was alarmed by the “ethnic cleansing” of Albanians in Kosovo. And at the wholesale slaughter of Syrians, by the Assad regime and its allies. And at the targeting of the Uyghur minority by the Chinese government.

For him, the Holocaust hovered in the background.

Out of college, Engel became a schoolteacher and guidance counselor. Then he was elected to the New York State Assembly, where he served for 12 years, before going to Washington.

He wanted to sit on the Foreign Affairs Committee. Most congressmen, especially new ones, shun that committee, because it does them no favors. You can’t “bring home the bacon” to your district, and you can’t enhance your reelection. In fact, you may hurt it.

“He spends all his time on other countries and ignores folks right here at home!”

Engel, however, was different. As Josh Rogin noted in a 2020 column, the freshman congressman was presented with a questionnaire, asking him to list his three preferred committee assignments. On all three lines, he wrote, “Foreign Affairs.”

“I figured they would get the hint,” he said.

Throughout his years in Congress, he was opposed by the “activists,” as he called them. He meant activists and critics to his left. Engel provoked their wrath by supporting the Patriot Act of 2001, for example. And by opposing the Iran deal worked out by the Obama administration in 2015. He provoked and earned their wrath in multiple ways.

“If the activists aren’t happy with me, they’re not happy with me,” he told me. “So be it.”

They were really unhappy with him over Cuba. He was a staunch opponent of the Castro dictatorship, and a staunch supporter of Cuba’s democracy movement. “My party has a blind spot on Cuba,” he told me. “And the Republican Party has its own blind spots.”

(For The Next Move last January, I wrote an article titled “Blind Spots: On selectivity in human rights.”)

“Castro is a dictator,” Engel said, “and to me he’s no different from Saddam Hussein or any of those other guys.” Whether “it’s Somoza or Castro or that jerk in Venezuela, dictators should be opposed, and opposed vigorously.”

The “jerk in Venezuela” was Hugo Chávez.

Ileana Ros-Lehtinen began a program whereby congressmen “adopted” a Cuban political prisoner, in order to call attention to that prisoner’s fate—and “Eliot was one of the first to respond,” she told me, “even though he doesn’t have any Cubans in his district.”

“He’s such a mensch, such a great guy,” she said.

This congressman from the Bronx—barely known in America—became well-known throughout the Albanian world: in Albania itself, and also in Macedonia, Montenegro, and Kosovo. That was because he stood up for their rights—not least the right not to be killed.

In the summer of 2005, I traveled with him and his party to Albania and elsewhere, reporting on their activities and the region at large. In the Kosovar town of Peja, they named a street after him: “Eliot L. Engel Boulevard.”

After the 2018 midterm elections, he finally got the seat he wanted: the chairmanship of the Foreign Affairs Committee. He held it for only two years, however, as he was defeated in a Democratic primary in 2020. His opponent and successor, Jamaal Bowman, was very different from a JFK Democrat. Engel seemed like a last gasp of history.

Who today, in either house of Congress, in either party, is concerned about freedom, democracy, and human rights, all over the world? Who has taken the place of Engel and the rest? Precious few. Fewer than the “happy few,” the “band of brothers,” that Ros-Lehtinen spoke about, back in ’05.

Engel told me, “I have always felt strongly about America’s role in the world. We, as a country, aren’t perfect. We’re all human, we all make mistakes. But I think our vision—what we want to share, what can be taken from our experience—is overwhelmingly positive. I don’t agree with the Blame America crowd.”

He also said, “You can be progressive and still understand that the United States is a force for good. We don’t always get it right, but we try to. And when we have the ability to save lives, we ought to use that ability.”

Last week, after he died, I contacted Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, to ask whether she wanted to say anything about her onetime colleague. She did.

“Eliot was almost an extinct animal in the public arena: a bipartisan and principled statesman who was unafraid to call out oppressors no matter their political bent. To Eliot, an oppressor on the left was as dangerous as one on the right.”

He “sought out compromise and did not consider it heresy or treason to see issues from another person’s point of view.”

This “did not mean that he was easily manipulated. Quite the contrary. Eliot knew where he stood on issues and was always a reliable voice and vote in behalf of freedom, human rights, and democracy in every corner of the world.”

To me, Eliot Engel stood for an Americanism that barely exists in our country anymore. I look forward to a revival.

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