Hamilton Fish, R I P

National Review, Feb 11, 1991 by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Hamilton Fish, R I P

HAMILTON FISH, age 102, is dead. At 86 he stopped speaking to me. He was mad. I had come out for the resignation of Richard Nixon and he made it clear to me that what I had suggested was unpatriotic, unconstitutional, cowardly, and unforgivable. Two or three times in the ensuing decades our paths crossed. He made it clear that I was still, and ever would be, in Coventry. This was a minor disappointment to him in a lifetime crowded with disappointments. When I was a schoolboy of 15 I was the head of the America First Committee at my boarding school, and Hamilton Fish was the congressional representative of Dutchess County, which regularly sent him, and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, his neighbor, to Washington. Hamilton Fish was one-third of the anti-doxology of St. Franklin the New Dealer: "Martin, Barton, and Fish." In the late Thirties, Congressman Fish emerged as among the leading isolationists. In 1940 he accepted a challenge to debate with Lewis Mumford, the big-think sociologist who lived in the area, and the debate was held at the Amenia, New York, movie theater, with Mrs. Roosevelt seated in the second row. I had been introduced to him as a principal in the isolationist contingent at school, and he told me I would go a very long way. When a photographer showed up to snap a picture of the congressman and the teenage acolyte, Hamilton Fish, height six foot three, former all-American fullback from Harvard, hero in World War I, pushed me gently out of the way and moved into the camera's sight Hamilton Fish IV, also age 15.

I don't know when Congressman Fish stopped talking to H. Fish IV, whose sins, as a moderate Republican now occupying the congressional seat from which his father was removed in 1944, were legion by contrast with my craven sins against Richard Nixon. I cannot imagine what the atmosphere must have been if ever Mr. Fish consented to meet with his grandson, H. Fish V, who-God save his eternal soul-was publisher of The Nation magazine, which has a higher opinion of Alger Hiss than of Martin, Barton, or Fish.

His sense of humor was limited, as also his political intelligence. He was, just the same, a fine figure of a man, unambiguously the patriot; unambiguously, in an ambiguous age, unambiguous. He worshipped such as George Washington, and Marshal Lafayette, and strict construction, and isolationism, and those of his wives he did not divorce (a majority). It was easy to make sport of him, but he was a man of character, courage, and conviction, and there is much one wishes one could leach from Hamilton Fish to endow on modern statesmen. - WFB