Edmund A. Walsh

The Reverend Edmund A. Walsh SJ
Walsh with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo in 1948
Born	(1885-10-10)October 10, 1885 South Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Died	October 31, 1956(1956-10-31) (aged 71) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Alma mater	Georgetown University (AB) Woodstock College (MA)
Orders
Ordination	June 28, 1916

Edmund Aloysius Walsh SJ (October 10, 1885 – October 31, 1956)^[1] was an American Roman Catholic priest of the Society of Jesus and career diplomat from South Boston, Massachusetts. He was also an author, professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, the first school for international affairs ever founded in the United States. He founded the school in 1919, six years before the U.S. Foreign Service existed, and served as its first regent.^[2]

After experiencing Soviet anti-religious persecution through his role as the head of the American and Papal humanitarian missions during the Russian famine of 1921, Walsh became widely known as a public intellectual who both spoke and wrote extensively about intolerant Marxist-Leninist atheism, the Gulag, Soviet war crimes, and other human rights abuses, and as a rhetorician who supported global religious freedom and the rule of law.

In addition to his role as an investigator of Nazi war crimes and religious persecution while working as an assistant to Robert H. Jackson during the Nuremberg trial, Walsh played a major role in raising public awareness of human rights abuses under both Far Left and Far Right police states.

So great was his reputation that Fr. Walsh was a confidant of multiple Presidents and other senior members of America's traditionally anti-Catholic White Anglo-Saxon Protestant elite, at a time when both Catholics and Americans of White ethnic ancestry were still being denied social acceptance in the United States.

More than a decade after his death, Walsh became famous once again, when he was alleged by Roy Cohn to have been the man whose opinion Senator Joseph McCarthy from Wisconsin had first sought before going public with allegations provided by U.S. counterintelligence that the Soviet Union's KGB and the GRU had recruited moles throughout the U.S. Federal Government and propagandists throughout the entertainment industry. Cohn denied knowing anything further about the alleged conversation between Senator McCarthy and Walsh, or what advice if any Walsh provided.^[3]

Some historians claim that Walsh, rather than Senator McCarthy, deserves to be remembered as the greatest American Catholic anti-communist of the 20th-century.^[4]