Godfrey Hodgson has worked as a newspaper and magazine journalist; as a television reporter, documentary maker and anchor; as a university teacher and lecturer; and as the author of half a dozen books about U.S. politics and recent history. He has divided his life between his native Britain and the United States.He worked for The Times of London, the London Observer and the London Sunday Times. As the Observer's Washington bureau chief he covered the Cuban missile crisis, the civil rights movement, martin Luther King, the Kennedy assassination and the Johnson Administration. As "Insight" editor at the Sunday Times he was responsible for a number of investigative stories, including the first expose of the crooked British MP, Robert Maxwell, and of the birth deformities caused by the drug thalidomide. He was also responsible for two word exclusives, the full story of the My Lai massacre and the 1971 civil war that led to the independence of Bangladesh.
In television, he was a reporter for the major British news magazine, This Week. In 1972 with director Leslie Woodhead he made a documentary about the Democratic convention at Miami, How to Steal A Party, which came second in its class at the Cannes film festival, and in 1975 in When In Rome he was the first to reveal Italy's prime minister Giulio Andreotti as corrupt. From 1975 to 1981 he was the anchor of The London Programme and from 1982 to 1984 he was one of the original anchors of Channel Four News. In 1988 he researched and reported Reagan on Reagan, a three-part TV biography of Ronald Reagan. His radio credits include being the chief commentator on NPR's coverage of the U.S. elections in 1972. He is a frequent commentator on BBC World, the BBC's 24-hour digital TV news service.
He has been three times a visiting fellow at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington. He has taught for a semester at the University of California at Berkley and also for a semester at Harvard. He is a visiting journalism professor at the City University in London, and has just retired as director of the Rueter Foundation Programme at Oxford University, where for eight years he was a Fellow of Green College. In 2000 he was selected to give the British Academy's Phillips lecture on the American presidency.
His books include An American Melodrama (co-authored with Lewis Chester and Bruce Page), an account of the U.S. presidential election of 1968; America in Our Time, a history of the U.S. in the 1960s; The World Turned Right Side Up, a history of American conservatism the 20th Century; and most recently a biography of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, The Gentleman from New York. His next book will be a biography of Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy adviser, Colonel Edward House.
Godfrey Hodgson was born in Sussex, England, and now lives near Oxford, England. He is married with a wife, Hilary, two sons and two daughters, all grown up. He was born in 1934.
