Stephen E. Ambrose

Stephen Edward Ambrose
2001 premiere of Band of Brothers

Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a long time professor of history at the University of New Orleans.

Early life

Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois and raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin, where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin. He attended college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was a member of Chi Psi Fraternity.

Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. He went on to receive his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1960. He served as a professor of history at several universities from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans. During the academic year 1969-70, he was Ernest J. King Professor of Maritime History at the Naval War College. In 1970 while teaching at Kansas State University, Ambrose was asked to resign after heckling President Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. He also taught at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge and the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore.

Career

Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue. Later he authored several bestselling books about the war, including D-Day, Citizen Soldiers, and The Victors. His other major books include Undaunted Courage about Lewis and Clark and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the transcontinental railroad. He was the founder of the Eisenhower Center and President of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. He was the military adviser for the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer of the Band of Brothers television miniseries, based on his book of the same name.

In 1964, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower. The origins of this commission are disputed. In later years Ambrose often claimed that he was solicited by Eisenhower after the former president had read and admired Ambrose's life of General Henry Halleck, which was based on Ambrose's doctoral dissertation. But according to Tim Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project. Ambrose stated he spent "hundreds and hundreds of hours" interviewing Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects. A close inspection of the former president's diary and telephone calls suggests, however, that the pair only met three times, for a total of less than five hours. Rives has suggested that a number of the dates of interviews Ambrose cites in his 1970 book The Supreme Commander cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule. Later, Ambrose was less specific when citing dates of interviews with Eisenhower.

Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography is considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency. His books Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), presented from the view points of individual soldiers in the World War II, brought his works into mainstream American culture. The mini-series Band of Brothers (2001) glorified American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that had been stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994 and the 60th anniversary in 2004. Ambrose also appeared as a historian in the ITV television series, The World at War, which details the history of World War II.

Ambrose turned out the popular book The Wild Blue that looks at World War II aviation.

In 2001, Ambrose was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Public Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.

Ambrose, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. His condition deteriorated rapidly and seven months after the diagnosis he died, at the age of 66. He was survived by his wife Moira and children Andy, Barry, Hugh, Grace, and Stephenie.

Criticism

The Eisenhower Controversy

Two of Ambrose's statements regarding his interaction with President Eisenhower have been questioned: that Eisenhower initiated the biography project and that he spent "hundreds of hours" with the former president in preparation of the manuscript. Recent evidence contradicts these statements.

The New Yorker reported in their April 26, 2010 issue that it was Ambrose, not Eisenhower, who initiated contact. Referenced in the article is a letter dated September 10, 1964 from the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas, indicating that Ambrose contacted Eisenhower. Only five hours can be shown where Ambrose met with Eisenhower and those were with other people present during three separate occasions.

Plagiarism controversy

In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages that he had footnoted but did not enclose in quotation marks. He was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue by Sally Richardson and others. Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard reported that Ambrose had taken passages from Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II by Thomas Childers (a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania). Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result. Ambrose had only footnoted sources and did not enclose in direct quotes significant passages taken from Childers' book.

Ambrose downplayed the incident stating that only a few sentences in all of his numerous books were the work of other authors. Forbes' investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving entire passages in at least six books and a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.

He offered this defense: Template:Quotation1

The "History News Network" web site of George Mason University, in a web article entitled "How the Ambrose story developed", detailed seven of Ambrose's works that plagiarized twelve authors.

Inaccuracies

Ambrose has received criticism from American veterans. Veterans of troop carrier units who transported paratroopers in the American airborne landings in Normandy have severely criticized Ambrose for portraying them as unqualified and cowardly in several of his works, including Band of Brothers and D-Day. He characterizing them as "cranks" when they asked that he make changes to passages in his books.

Ambrose has been accused of poor research and fact checking in his works. In 1995, US Army Air Corps veterans objected to his characterization of C-47 pilots as untrained and incompetent in the Normandy invasion. A letter-writing campaign asserted that Ambrose did not interview a single troop carrier pilot from among the 1,642 pilots who participated in Operation Neptune. He relied only on short quotes from some paratroopers critical of the jumps. He is accused of going back on promises to correct the record before his death.

Controversy also surrounds two separate accounts by Ambrose where he implied cowardice by British coxswains during the landings on Omaha Beach. One writer claims that the first account was drawn from a work by S.L.A. Marshall. The second accounts is considered to have been drawn from the oral history of an infantryman who claimed publicly that when the coxswain of a landing craft tried to lower the ramp 100 yards from shore and begin offloading, a sergeant held a gun to the coxswain's head and ordered him to go in farther.

On January 1, 2001, The Sacramento (CA) Bee published a front page article entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book" listing several dozen instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Ambrose's August, 2000, book, "Nothing Like It in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869"', which had been documented in a 25-page paper released on December 19, 2000, by three experienced Western railroad researchers who specialize in Pacific Railroad history. On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove also reported in his column The Reliable Source that a co-worker had found a "serious historical error" in the same book that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct in future editions. Although Ambrose had declined to comment on either the researchers' paper or the Sacremanto Bee article when offered the opportunity to do so by the newspaper prior to the article's publication, all of the corrections identified in the researchers' paper were subsequently incorporated without further acknowledgement of their origin in later revised printings of the book.

Works

• Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966)
• Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe (New York: W.W. Norton, 1967)
• The Supreme Commander: the War Years of General Dwight D. Eisenhower (New York: Doubleday, 1970)
• Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (New York: Doubleday, 1975)
• Ike's Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (New York: Doubleday, 1981)
• Eisenhower (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1984)
• Pegasus Bridge: June 6, 1944 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985)
• Eisenhower: Soldier and President (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991)
• Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, three volumes, culminating in 1991)
• Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
• Upton and the Army (Louisiana State University Press, 1993)
• D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994)
• Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (Louisiana State University Press, 1996)
• Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996)
• Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 - May 7, 1945 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997)
• Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy since 1938 (New York: Penguin Books, 1997)
• Americans at War (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1997)
• The Victors: Eisenhower and his Boys - The Men of World War II (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998)
• An Epic American Exploration: The friendship of Lewis and Clark (The James Ford Bell Lecture, no. 36. [Minneapolis]: Associates of the James Ford Bell Library, 1998)
• Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1999)
• Nothing Like it in the World: The Men who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000)
• The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B-24s over Germany (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001)
• To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2002)

External links

• PBS biography of Ambrose
• Stephen Ambrose at IMDb
• WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
• Stephen E. Ambrose at FantasticFiction.co.uk
• Obituary in The Independent
• Ambrose obituary at website of the American Historical Association
• New York Times article on the Ambrose controversy
• How the Ambrose story developed, an account of how the Ambrose controversies played out