Extracts from a letter from Joseph P. Walshe to Robert Brennan (Washington)

Dear Bob,
I want to let you know generally the impression made by Fr. Donovan and his two companions during their recent visit to this country.
[matter omitted]

He told me in confidence, quite frankly, that he regarded David Gray as a disaster in his capacity as Minister of the United States in this country. What I told him about Gray's attitude to us and to everything Irish confirmed him in this view, and I agreed with him that in such a grave crisis of the fortunes of both countries it was essential that Gray should be withdrawn. Gray makes it his principal business to blacken the Government in the eyes of all visiting journalists. We do not understand his motive, unless it be mere pique at the absence of any response on our part to his early exhortations to go into the war and to give up the ports to the British for the Americans. I told Donovan that David Gray spent all his spare time (which is abundant) with the Protestant Ascendancy and took all his ideas from them. As Donovan knows, these people are fundamentally opposed to the State, which, in their view, usurped their privileges.

If Donovan succeeds in making an impression about Gray, you may be asked by the State Department for your views. Donovan believes that only a Catholic would have any real success here, and, from our experience of three failures and one relative success, we are obliged to agree with that view. Cudahy¹ was a success, but was not left here long enough to become a really reliable factor in our relations with America. No doubt, also, he was not the type, owing to a certain levity of character, to win the complete confidence of the State Department. Owsley and Sterling, like Gray, spent all their time with the Ascendancy, but the circumstances did not permit of their doing us any serious harm.

It is, however, as I told Donovan, a great misfortune that some good American Catholic, of broad human sympathies, is not selected for this post. He must be impervious to the attractions of titles and a big house, and he must be convinced that there is a definite community of interest between our two countries.

You will be interested to hear that the Cardinal, in a very frank but confidential talk with the visitors, told them that, in his intimate personal view, a victory for America and England would be worse for Christianity than a victory for Germany. He said he believed that Catholicism in Germany was strong enough to eliminate in time the doctrine of Nazism, but he was very much afraid of the effects on the world of Anglo-American materialistic humanitarianism.

He told them that they could not expect Catholic people in the Six County area to have any sympathies for a crusade against Hitlerism if they themselves were suffering from a persecution which was at least as bad. He assured them that the British Government was primarily responsible for all the narrow- minded persecution and injustice which characterised the governing of the Six County area. When asked by them if there was any remedy for this anti-British feeling, he told them that the restoration of justice was always a remedy, and he felt that, if the unity of Ireland were established, the attitude of his people towards Britain would very quickly change.

[matter omitted]