Edward Grant Stockdale was born in Greenville, Mississippi, on July 31, 1915. When he was sixteen, his newly widowed mother found herself, in the midst of The Great Depression, no longer able to feed the family by herself. She took her two young daughters, Grant’s little sisters, to live with kin in Calera, Alabama. The relatives could not also feed a growing boy, and Grant was left in Mississippi to fend alone.
He distinguished himself as a high school football player and won a scholarship to the University of Miami, where he played for the Miami Hurricanes. Grant would become the University’s first United States Ambassador. It was at the University where he met his future wife, Alice Boyd Magruder, from Canton, Ohio. As a college student, Alice Boyd was already a published and award-winning poet.
Grant enlisted in the US Marines during World War II, then earned his commission through Officer Candidate School. He and Alice Boyd developed a code: If Grant wrote in a letter, “The food is good,” he was headed for Okinawa. He wrote her: “The food is good.” Grant served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific, briefing Marine night fighter squadrons for their missions. After Japan’s unconditional surrender, he walked the ground of Hiroshima.
Returning to Miami, Grant ran the Congressional campaign of his friend George Smathers who, after winning, asked Grant to serve as his Administrative Assistant in Congress. It was there that Grant met and began his lifelong friendship with John F. Kennedy. Returning to Florida, Grant was elected to the Florida legislature where he passed the first Anti-KKK bill in the South, as well as other progressive legislation. After legislative service, Grant founded a successful commercial real estate business.
Grant worked on Jack’s campaign for President, headed the Florida campaign, and served on the national finance committee. Only days after winning the election, Jack came to stay at Grant’s home in Coral Gables, Florida, where the President-Elect offered Grant the ambassadorship to Ireland, Kennedy’s ancestral home. Grant, Alice Boyd, and their five children moved to Dublin.
As Jack’s reëlection campaign geared up, and two months before the Cuban Missile Crisis, Grant left the ambassador post, and the family returned to Florida. On a trip with Jack to Western States, the President urged Grant that Alice Boyd should write a book of poems “for Ireland.” From Jack’s urging was born her book, “To Ireland with Love.”
On November 22nd, 1963, Alice Boyd phoned Grant at his office in Miami’s DuPont Building with news that Jack had been shot in Dallas. Grant would tell a journalist, “I got on my knees and prayed.” Bobby Kennedy sent Grant a telegram inviting him to view Jack’s body the next day in The White House. Grant flew up, returned to Miami, then flew back to Washington for Jack’s funeral, when he met privately with both Jack’s brothers, Bobby and Teddy, together.
On the morning of December 2nd, 1963, ten days after Jack’s assassination, Grant jumped or was pushed to his death from his office in the DuPont Building.