a characterization Walsh resented. On November 2, just five days before the election, the President called Walsh at his home in Clinton, Massachusetts, and invited him to join the presidential party in Worcester, Massachusetts. Walsh accepted the invitation to the relief of the Democrats. The contretemps gave Walsh an opportunity to define his position, that he was no isolationist because he favored the war and seeing the war through to total victory. He also believed the troops should return home quickly, allowing only that some may be required to perform "police duties in enemy territory", and the reserves demobilized. He hoped for a "democratic peace ... free from the influences of political expediency which compromises with imperialism and surrenders to power politics". In 1945, demonstrating that his isolationism was not absolute, Walsh voted in favor of the United Nations Charter. He was one of a dozen senators who protested the failure of the United Nations to invite a Jewish delegation to its founding San Francisco Conference. Given his poor relationship with the White House, Walsh anticipated that the administration might even support an opponent in a Democratic primary when he next ran for reelection. He faced no such challenge, but was defeated in his 1946 race for reelection by Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. 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: Walsh never married. He and his brother Thomas, who died in 1931, supported their four unmarried sisters, two of whom outlived the Senator. Some biographers and historians believe Walsh to have been homosexual. 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