A Catholic Cold War: Edmund A. Walsh, S.J., and the Politics of American Anticommunism (review)

When the young Bill Clinton arrived at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in 1964, he tells us in My Life, he knew that its founder, Father Edmund A. Walsh, was a "staunch anti-Communist" and that its faculty, many of whom had fled Communist regimes in Europe or China, were still conservatives and "sympathetic to any anti-Communist activity by the U.S. government, including in Vietnam." To some degree the founders had the future Bill Clintons of America in mind when in 1918 they set out, as Patrick McNamara writes, to "exert a wider influence on society by producing future statesmen and financiers imbued with a sense of moral responsibility . . . to promote the common good."

McNamara's thorough and focused study of Walsh's anticommunism reveals that actually Walsh was more the publicist than founder of the School and that, contrary to various histories, although Walsh did have dinner with Wisconsin Senator Joseph R. McCarthy in 1952, he was probably not his mentor in McCarthyism's witch hunt. The final irony is that this Jesuit entrepreneur, who McNamara argues was the best-known, most influential American Catholic of his time, is already, only fifty years after his death, a forgotten man.

By any standards, Walsh's career dazzles. Born in Boston in 1885, he entered the Society of Jesus in 1902 in Frederick, Maryland, after attending Boston College High School. Ordained at Woodstock College, Maryland, in 1916, he was assigned to Georgetown University in 1918. Apparently because his diplomatic talents were evident, he was made director of the Papal Relief Mission to famine-stricken Soviet Russia in 1922 and went on to spend twenty months there, both distributing food and as an ambassador from the Holy See to the new communist government, which was persecuting the Christian religion. Over three decades, stunned by what he had witnessed, Walsh made himself the most outspoken critic of the Russian revolution, which he saw as a plot to enforce an immoral, godless system on an unwary world. After World War II he advised the American prosecutors at the Nuremburg trials. During the Cold War he lectured non-stop to the FBI, war colleges, thousands of Georgetown elite in his open-to-the-public evening course, and wrote books which got mixed reviews and soon disappeared. Of The Fall of the Russian Empire (1928), the New York Times praised his research and depiction of the Russian Revolution as a "long tragedy of mankind." The New Republic said, "stray facts float forlornly in a riot of fiction."

Though McNamara has cited a few too many authorities in his text to allow his narrative to flow (page 69 cites thirteen), he expertly blends an intellectual history of American and Catholic anticommunism into the national political climate from World War I to the mid-1950's, when both Joe McCarthy and his alleged mentor fell off the stage. His epilogue recounts how the Church of Vatican Council II moved beyond anticommunism to social and economic justice and the immorality of the war in Vietnam.

Psychologically, Walsh remains a mystery, though McNamara gives clues that his obsessions may have exceeded his wisdom. McNamara does not say this, but the months in revolutionary Russia may have frozen his judgment. He was convinced that the communist revolution had been engineered by Jews. He was not a scholar, but he attached Ph.D. to his title though it was an honorary degree from his own school. He favored obligatory military service for all, but did not believe that conscripts should be paid. He taught that America had the right of nuclear "first strike" against Russia. Ultimately his life had one message: we have moral values; Russia does not. Though Walsh is forgotten, some of his ideas survive.