"Jesuit priest Edmund Walsh, a founder and longtime director of the influential Georgetown University School of Foreign Service, is remembered primarily as the man who allegedly suggested to Senator Joseph McCarthy in early 1950 that the latter take up anticommunism to win his forthcoming reelection race. McNamara (St. Francis College) casts doubt upon the McCarthy story, but argues that Walsh was the "most important and influential Catholic anticommunist in the United States" concerning US foreign policy toward Russia for 30 years, beginning in the mid-1920s. In his well researched and documented (footnotes and bibliography constitute over one third of this volume), if rather plodding, account, McNamara demonstrates that Walsh, primarily as the result of his experience in directing Vatican famine relief efforts in Russia in the early 1920s, developed a black-and-white "evil empire" view of the Soviet Union, contrasted with a "city on the hill" interpretation of the US. Stressing the need for a religious-moral basis for US policies and even advocating preemptive nuclear attack on Russia, Walsh propounded his views in numerous publications and an estimated 1,500 lectures, and was often called upon by high executive and legislative officials to share his views. Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students/faculty." -Choice "A major contribution to our knowledge of a man whose well-deserved reputation as one of America's foremost experts on Soviet communism made him an influential voice in shaping American public opinion [on] the American response to Soviet foreign policy...Walsh, rather than the lamentable Senator Joseph McCarthy, deserves to be regarded as the most important American Catholic anticommunist of the twentieth century."
-Richard Gid Powers Author of Not without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism "Patrick McNamara's thoroughly researched and crisply written biography is an important contribution to American political history."
-Charles R.Morris Author of American Catholic: The Saints and Sinners Who Built America's Most Powerful Church "...[McNamara] expertly blends an intellectual history of American and Catholicc anticommunism into the national political climate from World War I to the mid-1950's..." -The Catholic Historical Review " ...[a] scrupulously researched book..." -American Catholic Studies