Edmund A. Walsh, S.J.
Jesuit diplomat-historian, founder of Georgetown's School of Foreign Service
Also known as: Father Walsh, Walsh, Edmund Walsh
Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. (1885–1956) was a Jesuit priest and diplomat-historian who founded the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in 1919 — the institutional home of Carroll Quigley's own teaching career. He is the subject of Quigley's dedicated short essay Father Walsh As I Knew Him, an unusually personal piece in a corpus otherwise dominated by structural and civilizational analysis.
Founder of the School of Foreign Service
Quigley opens his memorial essay by identifying Walsh's institutional creation: "The 1959 Protocol, the yearbook of the School of Foreign Service, School of Business Administration, and Institute of Languages and Linguistics of Georgetown University" (Father Walsh 1). His first impressions of Walsh emphasized "great energy and drive. When he became interested in a subject he threw himself into it, day and night, week after week, until he had got from it what he wanted. In this process he never spared himself" (Father Walsh 2). The essay reads more as the testimony of a junior colleague than as an academic biography; it is one of the few places in the corpus where Quigley writes from a position of personal acquaintance rather than archival research.
International experience and personal style
Walsh's stature as a Jesuit public figure rested on direct international experience. He "had lived, for extended periods, in Italy, Germany, Iraq, Mexico, Japan, and Russia" (Father Walsh 3) and conducted high-visibility public exchanges — including "newspaper controversy" with Bernard Shaw over deprecating remarks about the Irish. Quigley records an anecdote in which Walsh, having entrusted Quigley with an undocumented $1,500 of School funds, asked him to write a letter formalizing the arrangement so that "if I were to die suddenly there would be no record of it" — a glimpse, in Quigley's reading, of Walsh's combination of operational flexibility and scrupulousness (Father Walsh 4). The essay is short but central to understanding the Georgetown environment that shaped Quigley's own teaching.
Cited in
- father-walsh · p. 1 Quigley
Father Walsh as I Knew Him by Carroll Quigley, Ph.D. The 1959 Protocol, the yearbook of the School of Foreign Service, School of Business Administration, and Institute of Languages and Linguistics of Georgetown University.
- father-walsh · p. 2 Quigley
One of the first impressions which Father Walsh made on his faculty was one of great energy and drive. When he became interested in a subject he threw himself into it, day and night, week after week, until he had got from it what he wanted.
- father-walsh · p. 3 Quigley
He had lived, for extended periods, in Italy, Germany, Iraq, Mexico, Japan, and Russia and was at home with all kinds of people and intensely interested in them.
- father-walsh · p. 4 Quigley
'No one else knows about that $1500 so if I were to die suddenly there would be no record of it. Won't you write me a letter stating the arrangement as we agreed it, and I'll leave it among my papers for my successor?'