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

Ambrose originally wanted to get his major in pre-med, but decided to switch his major to history after hearing his teacher's first lecture in his U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" which he took his sophomore year in college. Ambrose 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. For 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 having heckled President Nixon during a speech that 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. He was the author of 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 in the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.

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 would often claim that he was solicited by Eisenhower directly after the former president had read and admired Ambrose's life of General Henry Halleck, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. But according to Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, it was Ambrose who first made contact with Eisenhower and suggested the project. Ambrose claimed to have 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. In later works Ambrose was less specific when citing the dates of interviews with Eisenhower.

Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a vehement critic of Nixon, the biography was lauded as being fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency. His Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, placed his works into mainstream American culture. The mini-series "Band of Brothers" (2001) lionized American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in World War II that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary in 2004.

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

It is said that Ambrose organized his entire family into a sort of "history factory" and began turning out popular books such as The Wild Blue. In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages that he footnoted, but did not enclose in quotation marks.

Ambrose also appeared as a historian in the 25th episode, "Reckoning," of the ITV television series, The World at War, which details the history of World War II.

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 repeated statements about his interaction with President Eisenhower, chiefly the assertions of Eisenhower's solicitation in 1964 of the historian to write a biography and the claim of Ambrose spending "hundreds of hours" interviewing Eisenhower, have been called into question. Newly discovered evidence has since contradicted these statements.

Evidence reported in the April 26, 2010 issue of The New Yorker shows that it was Ambrose, not Eisenhower, who initiated the contact. This was shown in a letter dated September 10, 1964 found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas. As for the hours spent with Eisenhower, only five hours can be found where Ambrose met with Eisenhower, and those were with other people present on three separate occasions.

Plagiarism controversy

In 2002, Ambrose 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.

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

He offered this defense to the New York Times:

"I tell stories. I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation."

"I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't. I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I want to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from."

The "History News Network" web site of George Mason University, however, in a web article entitled "How the Ambrose story developed", detailed seven of Ambrose's works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.

Inaccuracies

In addition to evidence of plagiarism, misrepresentation about interviews and relationships with subjects, and the manufacturing of quotations and accounts of events, Ambrose has also been accused of shoddy research and poor fact checking in his works. He became the target of controversy in 1995 from U.S. Army Air Forces veterans who objected to his characterization of C-47 pilots as untrained and incompetent in the Normandy invasion. A letter-writing campaign noted that Ambrose did not interview a single troop carrier pilot among the 1,642 participating in Operation Neptune, nor did he consult official records, relying instead only on anecdotes of some paratroopers critical of the jumps. It also accused him of "reneging" on promises to correct the record before his death.

A similar controversy ensued when Ambrose, in two separate accounts, implied cowardice by a British coxswain of a landing craft during the landings at Omaha Beach. One writer claims that the first account, involving a Capt. Zappacosta from B Company, was apparently drawn from a writing by S.L.A. Marshall. The second of Ambrose's two accounts may have been drawn from the oral history of Sgt. J.R. Slaughter, D Company, 116th Infantry, 29th Division, who claimed publicly that when his landing craft was 100 yards from shore, the coxswain said he was going to lower the ramp and begin offloading, and only continued on to shore after another sergeant in the craft held a gun to the coxswain's head and ordered the coxswain to go in farther.

In December, 2000, a small group of experienced long time Pacific Railroad history researchers documented in a detailed 25-page fact checking review entitled "The Sins of Stephen E. Ambrose" of his book Nothing Like It in the World published in August, 2000, about the men who built the First Transcontinental Railroad, that his text contained dozens of "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes". On January 1, 2001, the The Sacramento Bee published a front page article entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book" by Matthew Barrows listing the more than 50 text pages and six photo captions cited in the review in which the author had "erred, misstated the facts, or used quotes that cannot be substantiated with facts." (When Ambrose was offered the opportunity by the newspaper to review and comment on the article before it was published, his son and primary research assistant for the book, Hugh Ambrose, responded on his father's behalf that: "He's thought it over and has decided to say that he would have no comment'") In addition in his Washington Post column "The Reliable Source" dated January 11, 2001, Lloyd Grove reported that a co-worker found a "serious historical error" in the same book, and that "a chastened Ambrose" promised to correct the error in new editions.

While Ambrose had declined pubic comment about either the researchers' review or the Sacramento Bee article based on it, corrections of all the factual errors documented therein were subsequently incorporated by the publisher in later printings of the book although the review's authors were neither credited for identifying them, nor was their document cited for providing the original sources supporting the factual changes made to the book's revised editions.

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

• New York Times article on Ambrose's "borrowings" and "history factory"
• PBS biography of Ambrose
• Obituary in The Independent
• Stephen Ambrose at IMDb
• Stephen E. Ambrose @ FantasticFiction.co.uk
• WorldCat search of works by Stephen Ambrose
• How the Ambrose story developed listing the 12 books Ambrose plagiarized and the 7 works in which it appeared
• [1] Perspectives outlines Ambrose life in this obituary