James D Hodgson

For most of his career he was a behind-the-scenes negotiator for the Lockheed Aircraft Corporation, hammering out labor contracts in the 1950s and ’60s. After landing in Washington as the deputy to Labor Secretary George P. Shultz in 1969, he remained all but unknown, even to organized labor, as he quietly ran the department’s day-to-day affairs for more than a year. But when Mr. Shultz became White House budget director in July 1970, Mr. Hodgson was thrust into the spotlight, and for the next two and a half years he was an important figure in the administration’s political and legislative fights in Congress on labor issues. Mr. Hodgson stepped down in February 1973, early in Nixon’s abortive second term, and was replaced by Peter J. Brennan, a construction trades union leader who had been a major Nixon political supporter. In June 1974, Nixon’s nomination of Mr. Hodgson to be ambassador to Japan was approved by the Senate. Less than two months later, Nixon resigned in the Watergate scandal, and Mr. Hodgson served in Tokyo for the next three years under President Gerald R. Ford. His father owned a chain of lumber yards. James attended public schools in Dawson and studied sociology and anthropology at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1938. He was a supervisor for a state youth employment program for two years, and in 1941 joined Lockheed in Burbank, Calif., as a personnel clerk. In 1943, he married Maria Denend, who survives him. A son, Frederic, and a daughter, Nancy Nachman, are also among his survivors. After returning from his ambassadorship in Japan, Mr. Hodgson was chairman of the Pathfinder Mines Corporation, a uranium mining company, from 1977 to 1982, and served on other corporate boards as well. He also taught at Harvard, Stanford and other universities.