Background
Grady was born on February 12, 1882 in San Francisco, California, the son of John Henry Grady and Ellen Genevieve Rourke.
Grady was born on February 12, 1882 in San Francisco, California, the son of John Henry Grady and Ellen Genevieve Rourke.
Grady went east for his undergraduate education, receiving a B. A. from St. Mary's University in Baltimore in 1907. He subsequently did graduate work at Catholic University (1907-1908) and the University of California (1915-1917). He later received a doctorate in international finance from Columbia University (1927).
Grady began early to combine three careers in one. He was teaching economics at Columbia when the United States entered World War I, and in 1918 he moved to Washington to work in the Bureau of Planning and Statistics of the U. S. Shipping Board. After the armistice he was sent to Europe as the first American trade commissioner to report on postwar economic conditions, and in late 1919 he assumed the post of commercial attaché at the London embassy. Six months later he resigned to resume his doctoral research on British wartime finances. Early in 1921 he was back in both the government, this time as acting chief of research in the U. S. Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, and in academia, lecturing at the Foreign Service School of Georgetown University. For a while Grady seemed to settle on teaching, and in the fall of 1921 he returned to California to teach at Berkeley, where in 1928 he became professor of international trade and dean of the College of Commerce. He remained at Berkeley until 1937. Grady's energies could not be confined to the classroom. He became involved in numerous civic enterprises in the San Francisco area, and he developed a reputation for getting things done. He also became a spokesman for improved trade relations with the Far East, a viewpoint he developed in a number of articles and speeches. He took a leave of absence from the University of California in 1934 to serve as chief of the State Department Trade Agreements Division, and he was the main figure in the drafting of the act that allowed the United States to enter into reciprocal trade agreements. In 1937 Grady was named vice-chairman of the United States Tariff Commission. In August 1939 he was appointed assistant secretary of state for general economic matters and trade agreements. Grady stayed in that office until January 1941, when he resigned to assume the presidency of the American President Line. He also made an extensive trip throughout the Far East as President Franklin D. Roosevelt's personal representative to determine the availability of strategic defense materials and the means for getting them to the Allies. Although Grady headed the shipping line until April 1947, he took on one special assignment after another, constantly traveling. By 1945 Grady had become the man to call on to handle difficult assignments. In October of that year President Harry S. Truman named him to head the American Section of the Allied Mission for Observing the Greek Elections. With the rank of ambassador, he went to Greece to supervise the 1, 400 Americans, Britons, and Frenchmen who composed the inspection teams for the March 1946 elections. He did an outstanding job in a sensitive role, winning plaudits for his own conduct as well as friends for the United States. President Truman next sent Grady to London as the American representative for the Committee on Palestine and Related Problems. In April 1947 Grady became the first American ambassador to India. A year later he returned to Greece, where he served as ambassador for two critical years, during which the Communist guerrillas were suppressed and economic life was restored to the country. Then in 1950 he went to another trouble spot, Iran, where State Department officials hoped he would be able to repeat his success in Greece. But the large amounts of foreign aid that Grady had utilized so effectively in Greece were denied him in Iran. Grady differed with Washington's views on how to handle the anti-British, anticolonialist sentiment then rampant in Iran. In September 1951 he sent in his resignation and retired from diplomatic service. In his remaining years, he led a quieter but still active life. He was a foreign policy adviser to Adlai Stevenson and headed a group working for the recall of Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the mid-1950's he spoke and worked for a freer American trade policy and for easing economic restrictions on trade with Communist nations. He died September 14, 1957, while on a cruise to the Far East on board the SS President Wilson, Pacific Ocean from heart failure and was buried in Holy Cross Cemetery, Colma, California.
President of the American President Lines (1941-1947); chairman of the American Technical Mission to India (1942); chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco (1942-1947); vice-president of the economic section of the Allied Control Commission in Italy (1943, 1944)
On October 18, 1917, Grady married Lucretia del Valle, the daughter of a prominent Los Angeles attorney. They had four children.