Padmore: US held cocktail parties to get info on Dr Eric Williams

United States diplomats would select guests to attend their cocktail parties as a way to exert influence in TT including gaining information to help keep tabs on the then prime minister Dr Eric Williams.

This was the allegation made by his former cabinet colleague Overand Padmore in an interview with Newsday yesterday.

This was a key reason that Williams did not attend such functions, and why he kept many of his thoughts to himself, Padmore added.

Padmore thus refuted claims in just-declassified documents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that had accused Williams of having anti-white sentiments against local whites and American whites, constituting an inferiority complex that led him to be socially awkward at functions.

Padmore said, at such functions the US diplomats would be alert to any tidbits of information that might slip by guests.

He said such details could then be painstakingly pieced together for later use in a manner of inter-State relations that the likes of TT does not practice.

Such practice was mild compared to what he otherwise called “the ugly hand of the US” in parts of Latin America where leaders were dispensed with by the Central Intelligence Agency.

Padmore said rather than Williams being anti-white, he was standing up for TT’s national interest especially on the leasing of Chaguaramas for a US Naval base. More so, Padmore said Williams had been subject to much hostility from local whites who branded him a communist, and from the Roman Catholic Church upset he had divorced his wife.

He said local whites were used by the Americans to try to undermine Williams.

Even as a 1958 Joint Chiefs of Staff document had said “(CLR) James and Williams rarely make a move without consulting the other”, Padmore confirmed to Newsday that the Americans were terrified of James as a Marxist.

“The eventual settlement on Chaguaramas saw a severing of the relationship between Williams and James, that had been a very strong and tight alliance.”

Padmore suggested that this break-up was because the Americans (with their naval base in TT) feared James imposing Marxism onto the People’s National Movement and not wanting James advising Williams as TT moved towards Independence.