Father Walsh As I Knew Him
Quigley's personal essay on the Jesuit diplomat-historian Edmund A. Walsh, S.J.
Also known as: Father Walsh
Father Walsh As I Knew Him is a short personal essay by Carroll Quigley on Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. — founder of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service and the formative institutional figure in Quigley's Georgetown career. Published in the 1959 Protocol, the School of Foreign Service yearbook, the piece is brief and elegiac, focused on Walsh's energy, loyalty, cosmopolitanism, and the personal kindness Walsh extended to Quigley as a young faculty member.
Scope
Eleven pages, framed explicitly as a junior colleague's recollection rather than a full portrait: 'It would be presumptuous for any of us who were his juniors to write of Father Walsh except in the limited sense indicated in the title of this essay. He was far too broad, too versatile, and too subtle for us to attempt a full portrait' (Father Walsh 2). The essay opens with the young Quigley's first impressions of Walsh's drive and concentration, surveys Walsh's serial enthusiasms — Russian Revolution, geopolitics, Washington society, Washington real estate, maps, speech, the Institute of World Polity, the Nuremberg trials, the Institute of Languages and Linguistics — and closes with a personal vignette about Walsh's intervention to help Quigley buy a house in war-crowded Washington in 1943.
Structure
Eleven short pages of continuous prose, without formal sectioning. The essay is organized thematically: first Walsh's energy and drive; then his loyalty (to faculty, Church, Ireland, family, mankind); then his cosmopolitanism; then his serial intellectual enthusiasms; then specific anecdotes — the Doberman Prince, the 1943 house purchase — that illustrate the larger qualities. Published in The 1959 Protocol, the yearbook of the Georgetown School of Foreign Service, School of Business Administration, and Institute of Languages and Linguistics.
Method — A Memorial in Quigley's Hand
Unlike most of Quigley's writing, Father Walsh As I Knew Him is openly personal — a memorial sketch, written for a yearbook, not for an academic journal. Quigley's prose is warmer than usual: he calls Walsh's serial enthusiasms 'a searchlight shining on a dark, complex, and fascinating world,' compares Walsh to 'some of the clerical figures of the Renaissance of the Sixteenth Century,' and speaks plainly about Walsh's loyalty 'to his intellectual beliefs and spiritual values, to his associates and faculty, and to his own past.' The methodological discipline of Quigley's longer works is largely absent here, replaced by direct first-person testimony from a former student turned colleague.
Significance — Walsh as Institutional Patron
Edmund A. Walsh, S.J. (1885-1956) founded the Georgetown School of Foreign Service in 1919 — the institution at which Quigley taught from 1941 until his death in 1977. The school was named for Walsh after his death in 1956. Walsh's career as Jesuit diplomat and educator — Russian Revolution relief work, geopolitics teaching, Nuremberg interrogator — placed him at the intersection of the American Catholic intellectual tradition and twentieth-century U.S. foreign affairs. For Quigley, Walsh was a personal benefactor (Walsh helped the Quigley family acquire a home in 1943) and an institutional patron whose vision of a comparative, internationally-oriented graduate school of foreign service was the institutional condition for the kind of historian Quigley became. The essay is the best single biographical record of that relationship in Quigley's hand.
Cited in
- father-walsh · p. 1 Quigley 1959-01-01
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 1959-01-01
It would be presumptuous for any of us who were his juniors to write of Father Walsh except in the limited sense indicated in the title of this essay. He was far too broad, too versatile, and too subtle for us to attempt a full portrait.
- father-walsh · p. 2 Quigley 1959-01-01
In this way Father Walsh lived through a series of lives associated with the Foreign Service School: the Russian Revolution, geopolitics, Washington 'society,' Washington real-estate, maps, speech, The Institute of World Polity, the Nuremberg trials, and the Institute of Languages and Linguistics.
- father-walsh · p. 3 Quigley 1959-01-01
The loyalty to which I refer included a profoundly convinced allegiance to his own country, to his Church, to his Irishness, to his family, and to mankind.