Not Fish, But Foul

A Federal Court in Washington found Representative Hamilton Fish's old friend and secretary, slight, nervous, bespectacled George Hill, guilty of lying like a trooper. He had told a grand jury, falsely, that he had had nothing to do with Nazi agents.

Ham Fish (from Franklin Roosevelt's district) met Trooper Hill 25 years ago on the battlefields of France. They have been thick ever since. One day last autumn a grand jury, investigating the activities of Nazi agents in the U.S., sent its agents to the Washington headquarters of an anti-British organization, the Islands For War Debts Committee, to seize eight bags of franked Congressional mail containing speeches by isolationist members of Congress. They found that George Hill had sent a House truck for the mail before they got there, had whisked it away to Ham Fish's storeroom.

The jury summoned George Hill to explain: 1) why he had been so solicitous about the Islands For War Debts Committee's mail; 2) what he knew about George Sylvester Viereck, the Nazi agent (now under indictment) who is accused of having subsidized the committee. Hill said he had not sent for the mail, said he did not know George Sylvester Viereck. The jury promptly indicted George Hill on a charge of perjury.

At Hill's first hearing, last October, Attorney John J. O'Connor appeared with him, said in the injured tone of a martyr: "I am here to plead Congressman Fish not guilty." Said Congressman Fish himself: "George Hill is 100% O.K., and I'll back George Hill to the limit on anything."

But on the night before another jury brought in its verdict last week, Mr. Fish discovered that he had urgent business in New York. He dictated a hasty statement for the press. Said Mr. Fish: "I am very sorry to learn that George Hill, a disabled, decorated veteran of the World War and a clerk in my office, has been convicted of perjury. . . . Mr. Hill is of English ancestry. . . . He had an obsession against our involvement in war. ..."

When the jury actually did find George Hill guilty of perjury, some 20 hours later, his old friend and employer Ham Fish was far away.

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