Godfrey Hodgson, who has died at the age of 86, was one of the most distinguished journalists of his generation. After an impressive early academic career – Magdalen College, Oxford and the University of Pennsylvania – plus some reporting experience on the Times, he joined the Observer in 1960, and was soon recruited to be one of the proprietor/editor David Astor’s team to increase foreign coverage.
Becoming the paper’s Washington correspondent at 28 was a rapid promotion, and Godfrey lived up to it. There was no shortage of “events”. He covered the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy assassination, the early phase of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency and the buildup of the civil rights movement. He later worked on the Sunday Times Insight team and for ITV. He was immortalised in sociologist Jeremy Tunstall’s book Newspaper Power: “A youthful Godfrey Hodgson covered three big stories in the single year of 1968 – the Prague Spring and the Soviet tanks; the Paris ‘events’ of May 1968; and the US Presidential election.”
Much of his later career was devoted to a series of well-received books, including The Myth of American Exceptionalism (2009).
Godfrey could be a fiery character, and encountered difficulties with colleagues as a director of the Reuters Foundation (1992-2001). But both there and in his work for the Green Templeton College, Oxford, and City University he encouraged the training of young journalists and was widely admired. He had been a good friend of that other Observer luminary Anthony Sampson, and raised the money for the Anthony Sampson chair of investigative journalism at City University.
As recently as last year, Hodgson was mentoring a young trainee journalist I know and encouraging him with an investigation into the mysterious business affairs of one Dominic Cummings.
William Keegan is an Observer columnist
