Stephen E. Ambrose | |
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2001 premiere of Band of Brothers |
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Born | January 10, 1936 Lovington, Illinois, U.S. |
Died | October 13, 2002 Bay St. Louis, Mississippi, U.S. |
(aged 66)
Occupation | Historian, Author |
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 and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history. Beginning late in his life and continuing after his death, however, evidence and reports have continued to surface documenting long time patterns of plagiarism, falsification, and inaccuracies in many of his published writings and other work. In response to one of the early reports, Ambrose said he was not "out there stealing other people's writings."
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Ambrose was born in Lovington, Illinois[1] to Rosepha Trippe Ambrose and Stephen Hedges Ambrose. His father was a physician who served in the U.S. Navy during World War II. Ambrose was raised in Whitewater, Wisconsin,[2] where he graduated from Whitewater High School. His family also owned a farm in Lovington, Illinois and vacation property in Marinette County, Wisconsin.[3][4] He attended college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he was a member of Chi Psi Fraternity and played on the University of Wisconsin football team for three years.[5]
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. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history.[6] While at Wisconsin, Ambrose was a member of the Navy and Army ROTC. He graduated with a B.A. in 1957. He also married his first wife, Judith Dorlester, in 1957, and they had two children, Stephenie and Barry. According to Ambrose, Judith died at age 27, when he was 29.[7] A year or two later he married his second wife, Moira Buckley, and adopted her three children, Hugh, Grace, and Andrew.[8] Ambrose received a master's degree in history from Louisiana State University in 1958, studying under T. Harry Williams.[6] Ambrose then went on to obtain a Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1963, under William B. Hesseltine.[6][9]
Ambrose was a history professor from 1960 until his retirement in 1995, having spent the bulk of his time at the University of New Orleans, where he was Boyd Professor of History.[9] 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 participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus. Given pressure from the KSU administration and having job offers elsewhere, upon finishing out the year Ambrose offered to leave and the offer was accepted.[7][10] Ambrose also taught at Louisiana State University, Johns Hopkins University, Rutgers University, U.C. Berkeley, and a number of European schools.[6]
He was the founder of the Eisenhower Center at the University of New Orleans and President of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana. The National Geographic Society provided Ambrose with an Explorer-in-Residence position.[11]
Ambrose's earliest works concerned the Civil War. He wrote biographies of the generals, Emory Upton and Henry Halleck, the first of which was based on his dissertation.[12]
Early in his career, Ambrose was mentored by World War II historian Forrest Pogue.[13][14] In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed.[15] Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe.[16]
In 1964, after Eisenhower had read Ambrose's biographies of Halleck and Upton and his history of West Point, Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of former president and five-star general.[16] This resulted in a two-volume work, published in 1970 and 1984, that is considered "the standard" on the subject.[17] 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.[18]
His books, Band of Brothers (1992) and D-Day (1994), presented from the view points of individual soldiers in World War II, brought his works into mainstream American culture. His Citizen Soldiers, and The Victors became bestsellers. He also wrote the popular book, The Wild Blue, that looked at World War II aviation. His other major works include Undaunted Courage about the Lewis and Clark Expedition and Nothing Like It in the World about the construction of the Pacific Railroad. His final book, This Vast Land, an historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
The HBO mini-series, Band of Brothers (2001), for which he was an executive producer, 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 detailed the history of World War II. He was the military adviser for the movie Saving Private Ryan. In addition, Ambrose served as a commentator for Lewis & Clark: The Journey of the Corps of Discovery, a documentary by Ken Burns.[11]
In addition to his academic work and publishing, Ambrose operated a historical tour business, acting as a tour guide to European locales of World War II.[12] He was a founder of the National World War II Museum in New Orleans, Louisiana.[19]
In 1998, he received the National Humanities Medal.[2] In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians.[11] In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.[20] Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers.[11] Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.[11]
After retiring, he maintained homes in Helena, Montana and Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.[12][21] A longtime smoker, he 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.[2]
In 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing several passages in his book, The Wild Blue, by Sally Richardson and others.[22][23] Fred Barnes reported in The Weekly Standard 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.[24] Ambrose had footnoted sources, but had not enclosed in quotation marks, numerous passages from Childers' book.[23][25] Ambrose and his publisher, Simon and Schuster, released an apology as a result.
Ambrose asserted that only a few sentences in all his numerous books were the work of other authors. He offered this defense:
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 went 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.[23]
A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going all the way back to his doctoral thesis.[26] The History News Network lists seven of Ambrose's works--The Wild Blue, Undaunted Courage, Nothing Like It In the World, Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, Citizen Soldiers, The Supreme Commander, and Crazy Horse and Custer--that copied twelve authors.[25]
In the 1973 ITV television series, The World at War, episode 35, From War to Peace, Ambrose made basic factual errors. He said:
"Manpower losses were almost insignificant; compared to the other combatants, insignificant. Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war. America was the least mobilized of all the nations, of all the major combatants in World War II. Altogether, we had an army and navy and air force of 12 million men out of a total population of 170 million. And of that 12 million, probably less than six million ever got overseas."[27]
The population of the United States during the war was 131 million, of which nearly 16.6 million served in the armed forces during World War II, including 241,093 in the Coast Guard, and 243,000 in the Merchant Marine. Military deaths were 416,800, the most of any Allied country except the Soviet Union.[28] According to U.S. census data, 73 percent of military personnel served abroad during World War II.[29] The United States did not create the United States Air Force as a separate branch until passage of the National Security Act of 1947 (Pub. L. No. 235, 80 Cong., 61 Stat. 496, 50 U.S.C. ch.15), two years after the end of World War II.
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. Among the numerous errors he asserts in an open letter posted on the War Chronicle website, Randy Hils notes that Ambrose did not interview a single troop carrier pilot. This becomes highly relevant in light of Ambrose's assertion that the pilots sped up while the paratroopers were trying to jump. Hils hypothesizes that if Ambrose's only sources were inexpert witnesses whose only indication of airspeed were the sound of the engines, the maneuver of using the propellers as an airbrake would have sounded like power being applied.[30]
In the HBO series, Band of Brothers, as well as Ambrose's book, a certain Private Albert Blithe is said to have been shot in the neck while scouting a farmhouse. Ambrose states that Blithe never recovered from his wound and died in 1948, when in actuality, Blithe recovered from a wound to his right shoulder and rejoined Easy Company for Operation Market Garden. Blithe appears to have left Europe shortly after that due to his wound but later continued a career in the Army until his death in 1967.[31]
Two Ambrose accounts in D-Day, of alleged cowardice by British coxswains, have also been challenged as inaccurate. One, in which Sgt. Willard Northfleet is portrayed as drawing his gun on a coxswain when he tried to offload the men 400 yards from shore,[32] is corroborated by Sgt. John Slaughter (who was on the boat) in a C-SPAN video recording veterans' D-Day experiences.[33] It was disputed by Kevan Elsby, however,[34] on the basis of a contemporary debriefing which stated: "Four hundred yards from shore the British coxswain insisted that he could take the craft no farther so the men must swim for it. He started to lower the ramp but Platoon Sgt. Willard R. Norfleet blocked the mechanism and insisted that the boat was going farther."[35] The other, in which Capt. Ettore Zappacosta was portrayed as drawing his gun on a coxswain to make him go in when he protested he could not see the landmarks, was challenged by Pvt. Bob Sales as untrue.[36] Both Ambrose and Sales assert that Sales was the only survivor from that landing craft.[37]
Ambrose asserts, in several works, that the German Panther tank used an 88mm gun. It instead used a 75mm gun. The German Tiger I and King Tiger tanks used the 88mm gun as did the Jagdpanther ("Hunting Panther"), a turretless tank destroyer version of the Panther.
A front page article published in The Sacramento (CA) Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book,[38] listed more than sixty instances identified as "significant errors, misstatements, and made-up quotes" in Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad, 1863-1869, Ambrose's non-academic popular history published in August, 2000, about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska via Sacramento, California and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland which were documented in a detailed December, 2000, fact checking paper compiled by three long time Western US railroad historians, researchers, consultants, and collectors who specialize in the Pacific Railroad and related topics.[25][39][40]
On January 11, 2001, Washington Post columnist Lloyd Grove 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.[41] A number of journal reviews also sharply criticized the research and fact checking in the book. Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins,[42] while Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'."[43]
Two of Ambrose's statements regarding his interaction with President Eisenhower have been proven false: that Eisenhower initiated the biography project and that he spent "hundreds of hours" with the former president in preparation of the manuscript.
Ambrose often claimed that he was solicited by Eisenhower after the former president had read and admired Ambrose's life of General Henry Halleck. But Tim Rives, Deputy Director of the Eisenhower Presidential Center, says it was Ambrose who contacted Eisenhower and suggested the project,[44][45] as shown by a letter from Ambrose found in the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum.
After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, for instance, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours" interviewing Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life."[7] Rives has stated, however, that a number of the interview dates Ambrose cites in his 1970 book, The Supreme Commander, cannot be reconciled with Eisenhower's personal schedule. The former president's diary and telephone show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours.[16][44] Later, Ambrose was less specific when citing dates of interviews with Eisenhower.[44][45]