What did Grant Stockdale know?

[Douglas Caddy]

Lee Shepherd posted this on Facebook today. He added to his posting that this came out of the Bobby Baker scandal.

 

Within months of taking office, President Kennedy appointed his friend Grant Stockdale ambassador to Ireland. Two years later, Stockdale, an administrative assistant to Senator George Smathers, became a major stock holder of Serv-U Corporation that had expanded into some major land holdings in Florida. Through these contacts, Stockdale was pulled into the inner circle of individuals surrounding JFK’s assassination. On November 26, 1963, Stockdale suddenly flew to Washington DC and talked secretly with Robert and Edward Kennedy. It is not known what he conveyed to them, but upon his return he told several of his friends, "The world is closing in." On December 1, Stockdale spoke to his attorney, William S. Frates: “He started talking. It didn't make much sense.” Frates recalled, “He said something about 'those guys' trying to get him. Then about the [Kennedy] assassination...he knew and was closely associated with almost all of the top figures in the cabal.” The next day the forty-eight-year-old Stockdale either “fell to his death,” or was shoved from the fourteenth floor (technically the 13th) of the DuPont building in downtown Miami. He did not leave a suicide note

 

 

 

 

 

All reactions:

5Keven Hofeling, Kelly Houckham and 3 others

 

[Guest]

This story always interests me. Thanks for posting, Doug. 

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Douglas Caddy said:

Lee Shepherd posted this on Facebook today. He added to his posting that this came out of the Bobby Baker scandal.

 

Within months of taking office, President Kennedy appointed his friend Grant Stockdale ambassador to Ireland. Two years later, Stockdale, an administrative assistant to Senator George Smathers, became a major stock holder of Serv-U Corporation that had expanded into some major land holdings in Florida. Through these contacts, Stockdale was pulled into the inner circle of individuals surrounding JFK’s assassination. On November 26, 1963, Stockdale suddenly flew to Washington DC and talked secretly with Robert and Edward Kennedy. It is not known what he conveyed to them, but upon his return he told several of his friends, "The world is closing in." On December 1, Stockdale spoke to his attorney, William S. Frates: “He started talking. It didn't make much sense.” Frates recalled, “He said something about 'those guys' trying to get him. Then about the [Kennedy] assassination...he knew and was closely associated with almost all of the top figures in the cabal.” The next day the forty-eight-year-old Stockdale either “fell to his death,” or was shoved from the fourteenth floor (technically the 13th) of the DuPont building in downtown Miami. He did not leave a suicide note

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

All reactions:

5Keven Hofeling, Kelly Houckham and 3 others

 

Please add some context. Which individuals did Stockdale become close to, through Serv-U?

[Guest]

17 minutes ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Please add some context. Which individuals did Stockdale become close to, through Serv-U?

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKstockdale.htm
 

A few familiar names there. 

[Ron Bulman]

Frank Olson also went out a 13th floor window.  President Ford apologized to the family on that one.  Along with authorizing a what was it $100,000 payment?

[Gerry Down]

I wonder if too much money was this guy's problem.

[Ron Bulman]

I don't think so.  If he went to RFK and Ted and they didn't want to go there, for the safety of themselves and their families, he knew the other they knew he knew too much.  Whether he jumped or was pushed. jmo

[Benjamin Cole]

1 hour ago, Chris Barnard said:

https://spartacus-educational.com/JFKstockdale.htm
 

A few familiar names there. 

Thanks

[Ron Bulman]

Looking for something I think I remember I came across the link below.  It's dated but gets deep, from Larry Hancock to Judy Baker.  But doesn't address my remembrance.  That after visiting RFK and Ted he briefly, 2-3 days, went into hiding in Washington at a friends house where he spoke of "them" being after him.  

 

[David Andrews]

There is quite a bit of past discussion on Stockdale in the Forum back threads, for those interested.

[Douglas Caddy]

17 hours ago, Benjamin Cole said:

Please add some context. Which individuals did Stockdale become close to, through Serv-U?

This was all that Lee Shepherd posted. He was asked by a Facebook member to expand on it, and he replied that it was a long story. I shall write him and ask him to tell the rest.

[Leslie Sharp]

On 2/4/2023 at 12:05 PM, Douglas Caddy said:

This was all that Lee Shepherd posted. He was asked by a Facebook member to expand on it, and he replied that it was a long story. I shall write him and ask him to tell the rest.

 

Doug, I believe Lee Shepherd has read Coup in Dallas and is aware that Grant Stockade appears in the records of Pierre Lafitte whose papers were critical to Albarelli's investigation into not only the Frank Olson murder but his subsequent pursuit of the assassination of John Kennedy.

 

On July 28, 1963, the project manager of the assassination of President Kennedy makes a note that George [Hunter-White] and/or Otto Skorzeny would talk to [Grant] Stockdale about P. [Phil] Graham and the prospects that Graham would end up at Chestnut Lodge, in a duplicate fashion of Frank Olson’s journey toward death some ten years earlier.

George / OS talk

to Stockdale about P. Graham

(George says Chestnut Lodge) - dupe –

 

Operation Mockingbird

 

Philip Graham, a wartime graduate of the US Army’s Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, served as an intel officer in the US Airforce in the Pacific theater during the war. In 1940, he married Katherine Meyer, the daughter of Eugene Meyer who owned The Washington Post. After the war, and following graduation from Harvard Law School, Graham replaced his father-in-law as publisher at WaPo and eventually became co-owner of the newspaper, serving as president and chief executive officer as well as chairman of the board of directors of Newsweek magazine. . . .

 

' . . . On the morning of December 2, 1963, ten days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Edward Grant Stockdale, a ruggedly handsome, forty-eight-year-old businessman and cohort of both Jack and Robert Kennedy, fell to his death from thethirteenth floor of the Alfred I. duPont Building in downtown Miami. 

 

            Stockdale tumbled eight floors from his business office window before his body struck and landed on a fifth-floor ledge. He was wearing a white dress shirt and gray suit pants. Miami police investigators determined Stockdale’s death to be an “apparent suicide.” Stockdale left no suicide note or letter, according to investigators, and despite their determination, it remains unclear as to how Stockdale went out the window of his office. It is uncertain whether the window Stockdale went out of was open or closed. Scant newspaper reports seem to indicate it was open. Requests from these authors, and others, for a copy of the police investigative file brought the response that the file was no longer available. One official, who declined to be named for this book, said he thought the file “had been either lost or misplaced years ago.”

The facts preceding his so-called “suicide” only serve to compound the difficulty of believing the investigator’s conclusion. Stockdale, as usual, arrived at his office at about 10:00 a.m. on the morning of Monday, December 2, 1963. His office was on the thirteenth floor of the office building in downtown Miami. Stockdale was unable to get into his office because it was locked, and he didn’t have a key with him. His administrative assistant, who usually opened the office each day, was at a dental appointment. She would arrive at about 10:30 a.m., ten minutes after Stockdale’s death.

Finding his office door locked, Stockdale had gone across the hall to a law office and asked Mary Ruth Hauser if anyone had a key to his office. Hauser told Stockdale that she would call the building’s manager to come with a key. Stockdale waited while Hauser made the call. 

She recounted the next day: “He followed me into my office and stood there while I called down for a key. He stood there very calmly. He didn’t seem at all agitated. . . . Somehow the subject of the President’s death came up. . . . He told me he was in his office when his wife called to tell him the President had been shot. He said he just got down on his knees and prayed.”

After this, a person with a key arrived and Stockdale and Hauser went across the hall, still talking. As Stockdale entered his now opened office, Hauser’s desk phone started ringing and she excused herself to answer it. 

Hauser told police that about “five minutes later” there “was this terrible thud.” It was the sound of Stockdale’s body striking the roof ledge of the top floor of the Florida National Bank and Trust, about seventy-five feet below his office.

Hauser said: “I just wondered if I had gone right behind him. . . . I don’t know, I guess it wouldn’t have made any difference. The whole world has just gone mad.”

Only minutes after Stockdale struck the fifth-story ledge, Dr. Sheffel H. Wright, who had an office in the duPont Building, rushed to the scene and pronounced Stockdale dead. A priest from a nearby Catholic church also arrived and administered the Last Rites. Newspaper accounts of Stockdale’s death featured interviews with a number of people who had seen Stockdale before he arrived at his office that fateful morning. All said he seemed to be in “good spirits.” Indeed, Stockdale even got a shoeshine just before coming to his office.

An article in the Miami Herald Reporter, however, by political reporter John B. McDermott revealed that Stockdale had attempted to talk to McDermott on Sunday, December 1. McDermott stated that Stockdale “wanted to tell me something—to talk things over.” Unfortunately, McDermott didn’t talk to Stockdale and seemed to have no clue as to what he had to say. McDermott’s article also stated that on Saturday, November 23, the day after the JFK assassination, Stockdale flew to Washington, D.C. after he received a telephone call from Attorney General Bobby Kennedy. McDermott apparently had no idea why Kennedy had summoned Stockdale. Stockdale returned from Washington late the same day, and then returned to Washington on November 26. On that day he met with Bobby Kennedy and Edward Kennedy and then flew back to Miami the same day. The next day, Edward Kennedy called Stockdale’s wife and told her he was concerned about her husband’s “mental health.” Again, McDermott provides no information about why Stockdale met with the Kennedys. 

Interviewed in June 2004, Grant’s daughter, Ann Stockdale—apparently acutely aware of the dangers of speaking candidly about her father’s alleged suicide even four decades later—made no reference to revelations that rocked D.C. politics in the fall of 1963, including the Bobby Baker scandal that had forced her family to leave Dublin, and the Ellen Rometsch Affair. Perhaps for Grant’s daughter, the safer explanation was the Military-Industrial Complex: 

 

[President] Kennedy asked Daddy to go to the Air Force Base south of Miami to see if (against Kennedy’s orders) bombs were being loaded on the planes. Bombs were being loaded on the planes! I believe one of the reasons Daddy was killed was because he knew that the Government was being run by the Military Complex. The Military Complex didn’t want the American people to realize (and still don’t) that they were calling the shots. Daddy knew he was being followed . . . and he told Mom that they were going to get him . . . and they did. There was an attempt on my life also several days after Daddy’s funeral. I realize now that this was a scare tactic to silence my Mother, i.e., if you speak about anything, your kids are dead. It worked! 

 

Author and publisher David Talbot writes that Stockdale “flew to Washington and talked with Robert and Edward Kennedy about the assassination of their brother. On his return [to Miami] Stockdale told several of his friends that ‘the world was closing in.’ On December 1, he spoke to his attorney, William Frates, who later recalled: ‘He started talking. It didn’t make much sense. He said something about “those guys” trying to get him. Then about the assassination.’”

As intriguing as Ann Stockdale’s and David Talbot’s revelations are, few were aware at the time of Stockdale’s acquaintanceship with Otto and Ilse Skorzeny in Ireland, and the possible impact that may have had on his untimely death. 

Wolves on the Prowl

Stockdale was a well-known and respected businessman in Miami, as well as in St. Petersburg, Florida, where he and his brother Julian owned and operated a real estate investment and sales firm, Grant Stockdale and Associates. Stockdale, a former US Marine during World War II, serving in the Pacific, was also a very close friend of John F. Kennedy, having become so in 1949 when Kennedy was a young Congressman from Massachusetts. Stockdale’s friendship with JFK frequently involved visits by Kennedy to Stockdale’s Coral Gables home that he shared with his wife and five children. Kennedy, Stockdale, and Stockdale’s children often played touch football on Stockdale’s expansive lawn, and then afterwards everyone would swim in the warm Florida ocean waters.

As a Democrat, Stockdale was also a close friend to George Armistead Smathers, who, with Stockdale’s strong support, was elected to represent Florida in Congress in 1946. Stockdale served briefly as Smathers’ congressional aide, and then served in the Florida Legislature from 1948 to 1950. In 1951, Smathers won one of Florida’s US Senate seats. Stockdale joined Senator Smathers in 1960 in efforts to nominate JFK for the presidency. As a member of the National Democratic Party Finance Committee, Stockdale campaigned hard and widely for Kennedy’s election. Both Stockdale and Smathers were close to Philip Graham, publisher of The Washington Post, who also worked diligently for JFK’s and LBJ’s election, and who Smathers had known since early childhood in Florida. 

Apparently, George Smathers shared JFK’s exuberant fondness for members of the opposite sex. CBS reporter and journalist Roger Mudd recalls Smathers spending time on the presidential yacht in the early 1960s. “Smathers was probably John Kennedy’s best friend in the US Senate,” said Mudd. “Together or singly, they were wolves on the prowl, always able to find or attract gorgeous prey. . . . It was a joke, our pretending to be covering the president, bobbing around in the ocean, squinting through binoculars to find out who was coming and going but always having our view blocked by a Secret Service boat just as another long-legged Palm Beach beauty climbed aboard.” 

Despite their close friendship, Smathers often acted as a right-wing Democrat, frequently disagreeing with Kennedy on policy and legislation, including his opposition to early civil rights efforts and JFK’s backing of Medicaid. A virulent anti-communist, he proposed an embargo against Cuban tobacco and legislative bar against travel and trade with Castro’s Cuba. The senator had the president’s ear to a degree. Of note, Smathers also served as a covert CIA channel for a number of CIA assets in Florida, including wealthy Miami businessman William Pawley who was close to Allen Dulles and financed a number of covert paramilitary actions against Castro. 

In 1975, former Sen. Smathers testified before the congressionally created Church Committee investigating the CIA’s covert and assassinations programs. Smathers told the committee:

 

[President Kennedy] asked me what reaction I thought there would be throughout South America were Castro to be assassinated * * * I told the President that even as much as I disliked Fidel Castro that I did not think it would be a good idea for there to be even consideration of assassination of Fidel Castro, and the President of the United States completely agreed with me, that it would be a very unwise thing to do, the reason obviously being that no matter who did it and no matter how it was done and no matter what, the United States would receive full credit for it, and it would work to his great disadvantage with all of the other countries in Central and South America * * * I disapproved of it, and he completely disapproved of

the idea. [asterisks in original document]

 

 

 

[Leslie Sharp]

On 2/3/2023 at 6:10 PM, Benjamin Cole said:

Please add some context. Which individuals did Stockdale become close to, through Serv-U?

 

On July 28, 1963, the project manager of the assassination of President Kennedy makes a note that George [Hunter-White] and/or Otto Skorzeny would talk to [Grant] Stockdale about P. [Phil] Graham and the prospects that Graham would end up at Chestnut Lodge, in a duplicate fashion of Frank Olson’s journey toward death some ten years earlier.

George / OS talk

to Stockdale about P. Graham

(George says Chestnut Lodge) - dupe –

 

Operation Mockingbird

 

Philip Graham, a wartime graduate of the US Army’s Intelligence School at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, served as an intel officer in the US Airforce in the Pacific theater during the war. In 1940, he married Katherine Meyer, the daughter of Eugene Meyer who owned The Washington Post. After the war, and following graduation from Harvard Law School, Graham replaced his father-in-law as publisher at WaPo and eventually became co-owner of the newspaper, serving as president and chief executive officer as well as chairman of the board of directors of Newsweek magazine. 

[Douglas Caddy]

Leslie: I shall contact Lee Shepherd on Facebook and call his attention to your extensive posting above and ask him if he would be agreeable to supplementing your posting with any additional information he may have. Thank you for all that you do on this and other aspects of the assassination of JFK. I never met Hank but corresponded with him and was shocked at his passing. He was a brilliant man.

[Guest]

I am just going off the deep end here and I could be mistaken, as my mind is awash with names at this point. Is this roughly correct?  
 

Smathers was a supposed friend of JFK. 
Smathers is part of that group mixed up with Baker, Stockdale, Giancana etc.

Stockdale says people are after him/meets with RFK and Teddy. 
Stockdale jumps/thrown off a building.

Smathers also a supposed friend of Stockdale, says that Stockdale had become depressed.

Do we think Smathers is a Quisling/traitor? 
 

Did Smathers encourage JFK to goto Dallas or was he one of the ones who warned him against it? 
 

Was Smathers senator of Florida when the potential Miami JFK plot was thwarted? 
 

Did he have any contact with Mary Jo Kopechne or do any work for Smathers again after RFK dies?