David I. Walsh - Personal Life and Death

Personal Life and Death

Walsh was raised a Roman Catholic and throughout his life identified himself as a Catholic and practiced his religion both in public and in private. An altar boy as a youth, in his adult years he regularly attended retreats and participated in meetings of Catholic laymen. Senate colleagues recognized his Catholic faith and occasionally baited him by challenging him to defend himself as a partisan of Catholic interests, which Walsh did not hesitate to answer. Once when a senator accused the Catholic Church of attempting to involve the United States in the church's battle with the government of Mexico, Walsh defended the Church at length, saying in part:

I am unworthy to make any defense of the Roman Catholic Church but I want to remind every senator on this floor that everyone of them owes her an everlasting debt of gratitude. For fifteen centuries she alone held aloft the torch of Christianity in the world; she gave her blood to preserve it....I speak in the name of the large, tolerant and superb non-Catholic citizenship of my state. I speak also in the name of the forty percent of soldiers and sailors in the last war who were Roman Catholics. I speak not less confidently in the name of the nearly twenty million Roman Catholics in these United States; and I say that the sons of my Church are loyal and true, on this issue, not less than every other, always and at all times loyal and devoted to our country, its institutions and its high aims and objects.

Walsh never married. He and his brother Thomas, who died in 1931, supported their four unmarried sisters, two of whom outlived the Senator. Walsh's homosexuality has been accepted by historians. Writing in the 1960s, former Attorney General Francis Biddle hinted at the subject when he described Walsh in the mid-1930s as "an elderly politician with a soft tread and low, colorless voice...whose concealed and controlled anxieties not altogether centered on retaining his job." According to Gore Vidal, interviewed in 1974, "There wasn't anybody in Massachusetts...who didn't know what David Walsh was up to." Walsh's most recent biographer writes that "The campaign to destroy David I. Walsh worked because he could not defend himself....David I. Walsh was gay."

Upon his retirement from political office, Walsh resided in Clinton, Massachusetts until his death following a cerebral hemorrhage in Boston on June 11, 1947. Walsh is buried in St. John’s Cemetery, Clinton.

In his later years he received honorary degrees from Holy Cross, Georgetown University, Notre Dame, Fordham, Boston University, Canisius College, and St. Joseph's College (Philadelphia),

A bronze statue of him by Joseph Coletti was erected near the Music Oval on Boston's Charles River Esplanade in 1954. It bears the motto: "non sibi sed patriae", a tribute to his service to the U.S. Navy while in the Senate. Walsh's alma mater, Holy Cross, awards an annual scholarship in his name.