Edmund A. Walsh

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Father Walsh with General Douglas MacArthur in Tokyo, 1948

Fr. Edmund Aloysius Walsh, S.J. (October 10, 1885–October 31, 1956) was an American Jesuit Catholic priest, professor of geopolitics and founder of the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, which he founded in 1919–six years before the U.S. Foreign Service itself existed–and served as its first dean. His motivation for doing so came as a result of his experiences at the Versailles Conference of 1919, where he believed U.S. diplomats to have been inadequately trained.

He directed the Papal Famine Relief Mission to Russia in 1922, worked on behalf of the Vatican to resolve long-standing issues between Church and State in Mexico in 1929, negotiated with the Iraqi government to establish an American College in Baghdad in 1931, and served as Consultant to the U.S. Chief of Counsel at the Nuremberg Trials.

Notably during the last task, he interrogated the German geopolitician General Karl Haushofer after World War II to determine whether or not he should stand trial at Nuremberg for war crimes, eventually finding that Gen. Haushofer ought not stand trial. He wrote a book discussing the interrogation and related thoughts:

Walsh, S.J., Edmund A. Total Power: A Footnote to History. Doubleday & Company, Inc., Garden City, New York: 1949.

Strongly anti-Communist, it is alleged that Walsh was the man who first suggested to Senator McCarthy that he use this issue in order to gain political prominence. Walsh vigorously promoted anti-Communist thought throughout his career.

[edit] Legacy

President Eisenhower sent a letter to Georgetown University when Father Walsh died in 1956, which read in part:

The death of Father Walsh is a grievous loss to the Society in which he served so many years, to the educational and religious life of the United States and to the free people of the Western world. For four decades, he was a vigorous and inspiring champion of freedom for mankind and independence for nations... at every call to duty, all his energy of leadership and wisdom of counsel were devoted to the service of the United States.

Walsh's most obvious legacy is the School he founded, which has become an incubator of leadership in the United States and internationally. Graduates of the School have included U.S. President Bill Clinton and the leaders of the U.S. intelligence community (George Tenet), the American labor movement (AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland), and the American Catholic Church (New York Archbishop John Cardinal O'Connor). Heads of state educated at the School have included King Abdullah of Jordan and Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo of the Philippines.

The School has also been home to legendary faculty members including the historians Carroll Quigley, and Jules Davids, the political scientist and World War II hero Jan Karski, and the first woman Secretary of State Madeleine Albright.