[2] After briefly practicing law in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, O'Connell accepted an appointment as the civilian director of physical training for the U.S. Third Air Force in Tampa, Florida, and thereafter entered active duty service with U.S. Army Air Corps when the United States entered World War II after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

[2] During the war, he served with the U.S. Fifth Air Force in Brisbane, Australia and as executive officer of the 312th Bombardment Group in the western Pacific, and completed his war-time service as a major.

[2] He also became an active member of the Broward County Democratic Party, and participated in the gubernatorial and senatorial campaign organizations of Dan McCarty, George Smathers and LeRoy Collins.

[1] When O'Connell assumed the presidency of the university in 1967, the student protest movement was peaking nationwide, and numerous demonstrations, both peaceful and militant, were held on the Florida campus during his six-year term.

[7] O'Connell's critics accused him of obvious racial and political animus in his sometimes hard-line decisions, many of which were documented in the student newspaper and other media.

When thousands of UF students went on strike following the Kent State killings by National Guardsmen, O'Connell sought confrontation rather than communication.

Heavily armed police and state law enforcement were deterred from attacking student demonstrators only by the intervention of UF football players, who had also joined the strike.

(Sitting in and Speaking Out: Student Movements in the American South, 1960-1970, by Jeffrey A. Turner, p. 160) O'Connell's greatest long-term impact may have been the reorganization of the University of Florida Alumni Association and the creation of an Office of Development staffed by professional fundraisers.

[1] O'Connell began a reversal of policy and attitudes among many state legislators and academics who had previously opposed large-scale private fund-raising and endowment of the Florida's public universities.

[10] He was survived by his second wife, Cynthia Bowling O'Connell, three children, Denise Marcum, Stephen O’Connell Jr, Ann Stuart, and eight grandchildren.