Stephen Ambrose

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Stephen Ambrose, at the 2001 premiere of Band of Brothers
Stephen Ambrose, at the 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 Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He received his Ph.D. in 1960 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

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[edit] Biography

Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois, and reared in Whitewater, Wisconsin, having graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois.

Ambrose 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, he was driven  from his position at Kansas State University in Manhattan 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.

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. 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 on the movie Saving Private Ryan and was an executive producer on the television mini-series that was based on his book, Band of Brothers.

Eisenhower chose Ambrose as his biographer after admiring his work on Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff, which was based on his doctoral dissertation. The resulting Eisenhower biographies were generally enthusiastic, but contained many criticisms of the former commander in chief.

Ambrose also wrote a highly regarded three-volume biography of Richard Nixon, also generally positive, but his Band of Brothers (1993) and D-Day (1994), about the lives and fates of individual soldiers in the World War II invasion, catapulted him out of the ranks of academic history and into mainstream American culture. The mini-series 'Band of Brothers' (2001) lionized American troops and helped sustain the fresh interest in WWII that was stimulated by the 50th anniversary of D-Day in 1994, and the 60th anniversary of D-Day 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 the passages.[1] Mark Bando, a published historian of the 101st Airborne in World War II, maintains a Web site ("Trigger Time") that while often praising Ambrose, also notes numerous discrepancies and some apparent fabrications, many of which have disturbed other veterans of the 101st.

It is said that Ambrose organized his entire family into a sort of "history factory" and began turning out popular books of history like The Wild Blue. In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages which he footnoted but did not enclose in the required quotation marks.[2]

Ambrose also appeared as a historian in the landmark television history of World War II, The World at War.

Where he gave inaccurate information as to describing the war in Europe (WW2)as a 'Civil War'. Unfortunately the interviews he gave during the series were blatantly biased towards the American Ethos and Campaign.

In 1995, Ambrose urged that retired General Colin Powell seek the presidency. The historian said that he would back Powell on either major party ticket.[citation needed] Powell declined to seek the presidency.

Ambrose, a longtime smoker, was diagnosed with lung cancer in April 2002. The condition deteriorated rapidly, and six months after the diagnosis he died at the age of 66, leaving behind his wife Moira and children Andy, Barry and Hugh, Grace and Stephenie. Later that year, Ambrose was posthumously awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Public Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.[citation needed]

[edit] Criticism

[edit] Plagiarism

In 2002, Ambrose was found to have plagiarized several passages in his book The Wild Blue. 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. 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.[3][2]

While 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 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.[4]

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 works that had plagiarized at least 12 authors.[3]

[edit] Inaccuracies

Ambrose was also criticized by other historians and media critics for inaccuracies in his writings and for shoddy or missing research, particularly as it contributed to the perception of him as a writer of "popular" or "best-seller history". Among the criticism was that by California railroad historians for errors in Nothing Like it in the World. Reported by Matthew Barrows in the January 1, 2001, edition of The Sacramento Bee, they listed some 50 text pages and six photo captions in which Ambrose "erred, misstated the facts or used quotes that cannot be substantiated with facts". According to Barrows, Ambrose cited his son Hugh as the primary research assistant for the book and chose not to respond. On January 11, 2001, Lloyd Grove, in The Washington Post column "The Reliable Source," 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.[5]

Ambrose also 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 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.[1]

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. [1] 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 confirmed publicly that when his landing craft 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 further. [6] ``

[edit] Published Works

  • Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (1962)
  • Duty, Honor, Country: A History of West Point (Baltimore: John Hopkins 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)
  • Nixon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991)
  • Band of Brothers, E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne: From Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992)
  • D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (New York, Simon & Schuster, 1994)
  • 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 by Stephen E. Ambrose. 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)

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ a b c An Open Letter to the Airborne Community June 6, 1944
  2. ^ a b As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources January 11, 2002
  3. ^ a b How the Ambrose Story Developed June 2002
  4. ^ Ambrose Problems Date Back To Ph.D. Thesis May 10, 2002
  5. ^ Stephen E. Ambrose WWII Sins 2001
  6. ^ C-SPAN recording of Sgt Slaughter at the Eisenhower Center, New Orleans, May 1994

[edit] External links