Joseph Godson

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A figure of arguably greater importance at the time earns no mention at all in Crewe and King. Joseph Godson, as US labour attache in London in the Fifties, had played a close supporting role in Gaitskell's battle with the Left. (His son, Roy, a close associate of both Stephen Haseler and former CIA director William Casey, married the daughter of Gaitskell's principal union ally in the same battle, Sam Watson.) Godson Snr. had stayed on in London after retiring from US government service and with money from the US Congress and NATO had set up the Labour Committee for Transatlantic Understanding with which both Rodgers and Owen had been involved, and whose treasurer for many years had been electricians' union(EETPU) leader Frank Chapple. (Chapple was the only prominent trade unionist to sign the fund-raising appeal for the embryonic SDP in the Guardian in February 1981.)
Joseph Godson, in an active retirement, was also organising European initiatives for the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), the proselytising think-tank which funded the author of the SDP/Liberals joint policy statement in 1987. He combined that with running US government-funded educational visits for British trade unionists and editing 35 Years of NATO (Dodd, Mead, 1984) a transatlantic symposium on 'the changing political, economic and military setting', funded by Rupert Murdoch's Times and introduced by its then editor Charles Douglas-Home and NATO secretary general Peter Carrington.
Godson's foremost British associate in this CSIS/NATO work was SDP founder member Alan Lee Williams, a former Labour MP and junior defence minister who was treasurer of the European Movement from 1972 and 1979. From his office as director of the English Speaking Union he had chaired Godson's Labour and Trade Union Press Service operation and, with the renewed rise of CND in the late 1970s, had become a central figure in the government-funded Peace Through NATO.[1]