By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (209.245.239.169 - 209.245.239.169) on Saturday, December 08, 2001 - 05:59 pm:
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (209.245.239.169 - 209.245.239.169) on Saturday, December 08, 2001 - 05:59 pm: |
Dr. Stephen Ambrose, historian and founder of the National D-Day Museum, gestures as he thanks former President George W. Bush during ceremonies at the museum Friday, Dec. 7, 2001, in New Orleans. The museum opened a new wing honoring Americans who fought in the Pacific in World War II, a campaign that began 60 years ago with the attack on Pearl Harbor. Behind Ambrose is actor Tom Hanks, far left. (AP Photo/Bill Haber)
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Saturday, February 23, 2002 - 03:40 pm: |
Ambrose plans career in nature conservation next
By MIKE DUNNE
Advocate staff writer
Advocate staff photo by Bill Feig
Author and historian Stephen E. Ambrose told the annual awards luncheon of The Nature Conservancy’s Corporate Council for Conservation that he will focus on conservation after he finishes his current book project.
Stephen E. Ambrose, the University of New Orleans historian whose World War II books have sold millions, said he plans to finish one last war book before devoting the rest of his life to conservation issues.
He has already put his money where his mouth is -- donating millions of dollars in royalties from his books to conservation and environmental causes, such as preservation of the Pascagoula River system in Mississippi and destruction of a 102-year-old dam in Montana.
"I've got grandchildren and there will be great-grandchildren and great-great grandchildren … and I want them to be able to see what I have been able to see. And that is what you are doing," Ambrose told those attending The Nature Conservancy's Corporate Council for Conservation's annual awards luncheon.
ExxonMobil's Grand Isle operations were honored with an award for a reforestation effort, and Dow Chemical Co. was recognized for its efforts to create a greenbelt around its Plaquemine plant site.
The Nature Conservancy, which came to Louisiana 15 years ago this year, has helped preserve about 500,000 acres of unique habitat in the state, ranging from a diverse region called "Copenhagen Hills" in north Louisiana to a wading bird rookery on Lake Martin to bird sanctuaries along the Gulf of Mexico coastline.
The Nature Conservancy often works with corporations to donate land or help it buy sensitive areas. Often, the group buys land while it is on the market and holds it while federal and state wildlife agencies get funding approved to buy them.
Ambrose said he became rich in his mid-50s, after his children were grown, and said he learned -- thanks to tax deductions -- that "It only costs you 50 cents to give away a dollar. I can spend money twice as effectively as the federal government."
He said by giving $1 million, he can get a $500,000 tax break so the donation only really costs him $500,000. He encouraged others -- not only the corporations represented by executives attending the luncheon but individuals representing them -- to contribute to conservation causes.
"The tax deduction is one of the things that sets the U.S. apart" from other countries, Ambrose said. "We are far ahead of the Europeans in philanthropy."
Ambrose also said one cannot tell the future by looking at the past.
The coming century "is going to be different. I can't tell you how it will be different." But he offered some thoughts.
The best minds of the 19th century worked to discover the world and describe the life found on it, Ambrose said, and the 20th century was devoted to controlling nature, typified by dams that have ruined rivers and creation of the atomic bomb.
"In the 21st century, our best minds are going to work on how to restore nature," he said.
"It is going to be expensive, first of all. It is going to be hard emotionally and mentally because we are going to have to undue some of the advances our fathers made," he said.
The technology to create electricity from the sun, wind and tides will increase and make reliance on oil less important, he said. "You ask what is the solution of Iraq or Saudi Arabia? Electricity produced by the tides."
More natural medicines will be found, and science will develop food crops that will require less water and pesticides, Ambrose said.
"And no more (shopping) malls," he said, generating laughter. People will buy nonfood items over the Internet, he predicted.
The annual awards luncheon recognizes corporations that make a contribution to the environment. Companies nominate their own projects for consideration.
ExxonMobil and Dow are this year's winners.
ExxonMobil preserved existing stands of oak and hackberry on Grand Isle and planted more than 4,000 oak, hackberry and red mulberry seedlings on 20 acres of land previously cleared by the company. It developed educational materials on migratory birds and used them in schools.
The other nominee in the "large-scale operation" category was Willamette Industries for its sustainable forestry programs.
The winner in "small-scale operations" was Dow, which has planted a greenbelt and worked to enhance it by planting native trees and vegetation, creating a arboretum, habitat for birds and a 1-mile walking track.
Other nominees were: DuPont/DuPont Dow Elastomers for enhancement of 900 acres of habitat around the plant, Georgia-Pacific's Port Hudson Operation for educational programs in Zachary-area schools, and Cleco Corp.'s reforestation of former bottomlands on Bayou Jean De Jean in Rapides Parish.
The group also recognized former chairman Tommy Coleman with the Chairman's Leadership Award, which usually goes to a corporation.
The group also announced CC's Coffee has joined The Nature Conservancy as an international partner by helping protect critical migratory songbird habitat in the area of Vera Cruz, Mexico, where Community Coffee, CC's parent company, buys coffee.
The songbird annual migration flyway goes through both Louisiana and the Vera Cruz area. The company plans to foster habitat protection and conduct educational programs. It also buys coffee that is grown in the shade to reduce the pressure to deforest the land.
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Sunday, April 07, 2002 - 03:19 pm: |
Ambrose does American history
Best-selling historian and hero worshiper sings love song to America
By Nicole Greco
Hillsdale College
Collegian Staff Writer
September 13, 2001
More than a century has elapsed since Walt Whitman first exalted the beauty of American democracy in his national epic “Leaves of Grass,” but historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues to hum Whitman’s most-celebrated song.
Photo courtesty of Sarah Kensler
Through more than 20 candid books which cover events in American history from the settlement of the American West to presidency of Nixon, Ambrose not only recounts the chronicles of America’s most well-known figures, but equally as important, he commemorates the unsung heroes who also have stories.
When Ambrose, who spoke Sunday at the CCA, began his academic career at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he intended to major in pre-med and follow the legacy of his father, an M.D. However, it was one session of an American history class taught by William B. Hesseltine that changed the course of Ambrose’s entire life.
“After the first lecture, I went straight down to the registrar and changed my major,” Ambrose said. “I wasn’t doing too well in physics and chemistry then either,” he added.
Ambrose eventually returned to his undergraduate campus to complete his doctorate dissertation under the guidance of Hesseltine.
“He was a Civil War scholar and I wanted to be like him,” Ambrose said. “I told him that I wanted to do what he did for a living; he told me to stick around.”
After establishing himself as a Civil War historian with the publication of his first book–at the age of 28, no less–on President Lincoln’s Chief of Staff Henry Halla, Ambrose received a phone call that led to the beginning of a new chapter in his life.
“After he read my first book, General Eisenhower called and asked if I would write his biography. I said ‘Yes, Sir,’ and that’s what started my work with World War II: full-scale biographies, politics, Nixon and the Cold War.”
Ambrose wasn’t exceptionally eager to answer those calls of duty, though.
“I’d just finished Eisenhower when my editor called and asked me to write on Nixon,” Ambrose said. “I said, ‘I don’t even like Nixon,’ to which she told me, ‘Then nowhere else are you going to find a greater challenge.’”
Ten years, three volumes and 2,500 pages later, Ambrose finished the biography that he was reluctant to begin.
Some of Ambrose’s book ideas arose from his own curiosity. While celebrating the bicentennial by camping throughout the Black Hills and following the trail of Lewis and Clark with his five kids, labrador retriever and a few cats, he stumbled upon one such theme.
“We were in the Black Hills on our way to Minnesota to go fishing when we came up to a long hill,” Ambrose said. “On the rise of the other side, Mara (his wife) saw a sign that read ‘Wounded Knee, 12 miles.’ We were in a momentum and I wanted to keep going, but she turned left.”
That night the Ambrose family camped out on an Indian Reservation. Soon after, Ambrose began writing the history that would become Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors.
One exhilarating aspect of his research is hearing memories that many of the veterans whom he interviews have shared for the first time. “Sometimes, I’ll go to an interview and a man’s wife will ask if she can sit in, he’ll say, ‘sure’, and she’ll usually sit where he can’t see her. Then, the guy gets up after an hour or two for coffee, to take a break or to use the bathroom. And when he leaves, his wife will say ‘I never heard him tell that.’”
According to Ambrose, genuine curiosity and some knowledge of the past, are the most important elements in getting veterans and others to talk about the past.
“I encourage all readers to get out there and interview anyone over 75,” Ambrose said. “Do some reading and know what the hell you’re talking about. It never works to go to a GI and ask what did you do during the war, he’s going to tell you about the all the drinking, carousing, and bad things that went on. Ask, ‘What happened to you?’ Everyone over 75 has a story of what they were doing during World War II.”
Ambrose’s success in recording the histories of World War II, has not only provided research for his books. He served as the historical consultant for Stephen Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning Saving Private Ryan.
“It’s the best war movie Hollywood ever made,” Ambrose said. “Even if it has Hollywood’s dramatic license, General M never sent a squad out for one guy, and the Omaha beach was broader than the one piece of work.
Ambrose’s history on the Easy Company 506th Airborne Division of the U.S. Army was turned into an HBO miniseries, Band of Brothers, produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg that began Sept. 9.
“They took no dramatic licenses,” Ambrose said. “Everything you see happened as much as it could have possibly happened.”
Despite the fact that six of his books have become New York Times’ bestsellers and Band of Brothers was adapted into a cable mini-series, Ambrose still sees room for improvement.
But beyond improving his own writing, Ambrose is dedicated to sharing the loss of lives and the sacrifices of uncountable, unrecognized heroes.
“America is the freest and richest country that there ever was,” Ambrose said. “But it didn’t happen because God pointed his finger and said, ‘U.S.A., you’re it.’ It happened because of those who went before us. But most of all, for us today, it happened because of the men and women of World War II.”
Although he was only a child when World War II was fought, the greatest sacrifice of the 20th century is a memory that comes from his heart.
“I’ve come to sing of America and the legacy of World War II,” Ambrose said. “And how democracy won and what it has meant to the world; this is my love song to America.”
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Wednesday, May 01, 2002 - 01:30 pm: |
Historian Stephen Ambrose diagnosed with lung cancer
Wed May 1, 2002
NEW ORLEANS - Historian Stephen Ambrose has been diagnosed with lung cancer.
Ambrose, 65, a longtime smoker, learned of his illness Friday and said he will discuss treatment options with doctors soon.
"I have spent a good part of my career studying men and women who faced uncertainty about the future," Ambrose said Tuesday in a prepared statement. "Now I find myself facing a great challenge, and I am focusing on a course of action based on a balance of good sense and cautious optimism."
Ambrose has written more than 25 books, including best sellers "Citizen Soldiers," "Band of Brothers," and "Undaunted Courage," a history of the Lewis and Clark expedition.
He has come under scrutiny recently after at least six of his books have been questioned for failing to properly credit source material. Ambrose has apologized for lifting passages from other authors.
Ambrose recently started writing an autobiography with the working title, "A Love Song to America."
Ambrose will have to pull back from some work commitments but hasn't decided which ones, said his son, Hugh Ambrose, who works with his father as a researcher, editor and agent.
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Friday, May 03, 2002 - 11:40 am: |
(Foreground, from left) Hans von Luck, John Howard (retired major, British 6th Airborne Division), and American historian Stephen E. Ambrose, with the proprietors of the Pegasus Bridge Café, 1989. Luck and Howard, whose divisions opposed each other in the Orne River area after D-Day, became frequent lecturers and tour guides on the Normandy campaign.
Courtesy of Ronald J. Drez
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Friday, May 03, 2002 - 11:49 am: |
Transcript for: Victory in Europe: Fifty Years Later
Aired 5/5/95
David Fromkin - Chairman of the department of international relations at Boston University
Martin Blumenson - author of "Patton: The Man Behind the Legend"
Stephen Ambrose - director of the Eisenhower Center, professor of history at the University of New Orleans, author of "D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II"
Daniel Boorstin - Pulitzer-prize winning historian, librarian of Congress emeritus, author of "The Discoverers"
MR. WATTENBERG: Hello, I'm Ben Wattenberg. Fifty years ago this week, the war in Europe ended. Liberation and celebration sweptthrough Europe and America. What was at stake? Are there lessons forus today?
Joining us to remember the conflict and its aftermath are Stephen Ambrose, director of the Eisenhower Center and professor of historyat the University of New Orleans and author of 'D-Day, June 6, 1944:The Climactic Battle of World War II'; historian Daniel Boorstin,Librarian of Congress Emeritus and Pulitzer-prize-winning author of'The Americans: The Democratic Experience' and 'The Discoverers';Martin Blumenson, author of 'Patton: The Man Behind the Legend,' anda World War II veteran who served in General George Patton's ThirdArmy; and David Fromkin, chairman of the department of internationalrelations at Boston University and author of the recent book, 'In theTime of the Americans, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Marshall, MacArthur:The Generation that Changed America's Role in the World.'
The topic before this house: Victory in Europe 50 years later. This week on 'Think Tank'.
The American entry into World War II in December of 1941 came nonetoo soon for the British and for occupied Europe. Soon Americansoldiers and equipment began flooding into a beleaguered Britain. By1943, American airplanes were bombing Nazi Germany by day while theBritish bombed by night.
On June 6, 1994, American, Canadian and British forces hit thebeaches of Normandy in what remains the largest amphibious assault inhistory. During the next year, the allied forces pounded Germany fromthe west, while the Soviet allies fought bloodily from the east.American and allied troops liberated not only the French, theBelgians and the Dutch, but also the victims of Nazi death camps atDachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald.
In May of 1945, in the rubble of Berlin, the Germans surrenderedand the war in Europe was over. Nearly 40 million civilians andsoldiers died in the struggle against Nazi Germany, making it thebloodiest conquest in the bloodiest war in history.
Gentlemen, thank you for joining us here today. I wanted to beginby reading a quote from Winston Churchill which is what he said whenAmerica entered the war after the bombing by the Japanese at PearlHarbor. And Prime Minister Churchill said this: 'Hitler's fate wassealed. Mussolini's fate was sealed. As for the Japanese, they wouldbe ground to powder. All the rest was merely the proper applicationof overwhelming force.'
You get the feeling from that statement, Dan Boorstin, thatvictory was inevitable. Did you sense it that way at the time?
MR. BOORSTIN: You know, Ben, I'm wary of statements like that,even though they're so eloquently put, because I think that historyis the cautionary science. And I think it's -- the only inevitabilityin history, I think, is the force of individual women and men. Allthe other simplifications are things to be cautious of.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay. David Fromkin.
MR. FROMKIN: General de Gaulle, too, said at the time that itseemed to be inevitable, but I, too, disagree. I think nothing isinevitable until it happens, and there were several points along theway where the war could have gone the other way.
MR. WATTENBERG: All right, we'll come back to what they might havebeen. Martin Blumenson.
MR. BLUMENSON: It was inevitable only afterwards, it seems to me.At the time, we could have lost the war. For example, on D-Day, if wehad not gotten ashore, we might have lost the war right there. Sothere is no inevitability, as David said, until something happens.
MR. WATTENBERG: All right, Stephen Ambrose, via satellite in NewOrleans, do you agree with your confederates here?
MR. AMBROSE: It's four for four, yes. Nothing is inevitable.Another what if to add to Martin's, what if Hitler had gotten thosejet airplanes into serial production in 1943, as Willy Messerschmittwas ready to do. I think Germany would have won the war then.
MR. WATTENBERG: When you were with the Patton headquarters, as youwere executing that sort of mad dash across Europe, did you and yourcolleagues and the troops then feel, at that point, that victory wasinevitable?
MR. BLUMENSON: Yes, we had the feeling that the war was coming toan end and victoriously for us. But this is after the Battle of theBulge, and it wasn't until after the Battle of the Bulge that webegan to feel certain that victory was just around the corner. And itwas a matter of time, whatever that means, because a matter of timemeans also all sorts of bad things that can happen, too.
MR. WATTENBERG: Stephen Ambrose, World War II produced what we nowsense are larger-than-life heroes, General Patton being one,Eisenhower, Marshall, some of the much publicized heroes like AudieMurphy. Was that a product of momentous times or of remarkable humanbeings?
MR. AMBROSE: It was a nice combination of both. That was aremarkable generation, especially I think in the U.S. Army, thoseguys that stuck it out in the '20s and the '30s. Eisenhower was amajor for 14 years. These were men of great talent and ability. Theycould have gone off in any walk of life and gone right to the top,but they stuck with it. And when the time came, they were ready andthey created that miracle that was the United States Army of WorldWar II.
They also had opportunities. Men born earlier than they were orborn later never had the kind of chances that Patton or Eisenhower orMarshall had.
MR. WATTENBERG: Dan, you're a student of this argument of whethermen make the times or times make the men.
MR. BOORSTIN: Well, I don't think that's a discussable question asyou put it. But I do think that there were heroes, and among them Iwould count Winston Churchill, whose foresight and eloquence werewhat saved Western civilization, I think. And also I admire FDR.
The problem nowadays, though, is that heroes are overshadowed bycelebrities. And celebrities -- that's long been the case, but it'smore so now than ever, when people who are celebrities are the peoplewho are known for their well-knownness and not for their achievement.And the people who are accused of committing horrible crimes arepushing off the front page the people who are leading us in importantconquests.
MR. BLUMENSON: It seems to me that one of the great things aboutAmerican society is that it has produced heroes in times of crisis,and these wonderful people that come up and do the things that needto be done. This is a wonderful function that American society hasproduced in the past, and there is no reason to believe why itshouldn't continue into the future.
MR. WATTENBERG: David Fromkin, you have written a book about thoseheroes, about President Roosevelt and Eisenhower and GeneralMarshall, and so on. How do you -- were they remarkable human beingsin any age, or did they sort of come out of the process?
MR. FROMKIN: I think they would have been remarkable human beingsin any age. I think that we were especially lucky to have thatgeneration in place when these crises arose.
MR. WATTENBERG: So much of our viewership -- I mean it is 50 yearsafter victory -- really did not live through this even as children,or as very young children. And I wonder if the distinguished panelhere could describe what the United States was like here on thehomefront.
MR. AMBROSE: My father was in the Navy in the Pacific. I had anolder brother and younger brother. My mother held the familytogether. We lived at various parts of the United States. We feltvery strongly what I think everyone in this country felt, that we areall in this together. There was a marvelous sense of teamwork duringWorld War II. As kids we were participants. We were collecting tincans, we were saving tin foil from the gum wrappers. We were growingvictory gardens. We were buying war bonds with our pennies. We werefollowing the war.
And we had shortages, there was rationing. It was nothing like therest of the world, but there were shortages. And anytime anybodycomplained in World War II about this or that shortage or hardship,the answer invariably was, 'We are all in this together.' And thatwas a marvelous feeling that doesn't come along very often in ademocracy.
MR. WATTENBERG: I remember as a kid growing up frying a wholepound of bacon in order to save the fat to put in that can that youthen gave to the butcher, which would then allegedly go to themunitions factory. How about anybody? You were in service in Europe,Martin.
MR. BLUMENSON: Yes. I was in service here in this country first.
MR. WATTENBERG: Right.
MR. BLUMENSON: But what I wanted to say is that despite thiswonderful unity that Steve Ambrose speaks about, there was someconcern on the higher levels, military and political levels, and thewonder was whether the young men of America, who had a good life andan easy life and were spoiled by the American way of life, there wasconcern about whether the young American men would fight.
And this persisted, I think, through the maneuvers of 1941. And Ithink it was George Patton who more than anyone proved that Americanyoung men would fight and fight well under him, and if they wouldfight well under him, they would fight well under other goodgenerals.
MR. WATTENBERG: If we had this kind of a crisis today, would westill be able to respond in that fashion, in your collectivejudgments? Steve Ambrose.
MR. AMBROSE: Yes, I think so, absolutely. I believe that ademocracy produces the kind of people who spend most of their timesquabbling and fighting with each other over political matters, whichis what's supposed to happen in a democracy, but when a crisis comes,people pull together in a voluntary teamwork that is the mostpowerful force in the world. There is just nothing that can stand upto it.
The totalitarians cannot stand up to the fury of an arouseddemocracy. So I have great confidence that if we ever have a crisislike this again -- it's hard for me to imagine one of this magnitude,of course we'll pull together.
MR. WATTENBERG: That was one of the great lessons of World War II,as was mentioned here, that democracies are not decadent. They onlyseem to be decadent for a while.
MR. BLUMENSON: They seem to be disorganized, but they are not. Andthey are far more efficient than totalitarian states are. And theutilization of people and resources in World War II, I think, provedthat.
It seems to me that yes, we are capable of meeting a crisis in thefuture, depending on the issues. If the issues are fundamentalenough, Americans will certainly make the sacrifices required.
MR. FROMKIN: I think we would respond -- we would respond in thesame way if we were attacked, as we were in the Second World War. Andthe problem for us, I think, as a country is the sort of thing thathappened to us in Korea, where it's more complex, where we have notbeen physically attacked ourselves.
I think we only respond well, really, when we have been attacked,when everyone in the country can see that we have no alternative butto fight.
MR. WATTENBERG: Dan, how about you? Would we respond in that sortof heroic fashion?
MR. BOORSTIN: Yes, I think so. I think we must remember, andProfessor Blumenson has suggested it, that a free society is a kindof creative chaos, and we must put up the with the turbulence inorder to have the creativity.
I think also that we mustn't forget that a characteristic of freesocieties, unlike totalitarian societies, is that totalitariansocieties exaggerate their virtues. Free societies, because they arefree, tend to exaggerate their vices. And that is something -- Ithink if we had to choose between the two, it wouldn't be difficultto make the choice.
MR. AMBROSE: Totalitarians rule by terror. Democracy rule is bypersuasion. One example from the combat zone, in the Second WorldWar, Hitler executed 50,000 Wehrmacht soldiers for cowardice or fordesertion. The United States Army in northwest Europe executed onesoldier for desertion, Private Eddie Slovak. They felt an example hadto be made. Americans stayed in the front line not because of terror,but because they were concerned about what kind of a world am I goingto live in when this war is over? And if I desert my post and let mybuddies down and if they desert others, we're going to live in aworld that I don't want to live in.
And so they stayed because they wanted to. German soldiers, whofought bravely and in many cases magnificently, stayed because theyhad somebody standing behind them with a pistol at the back of theirhead.
MR. WATTENBERG: Former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara'srecent book has sort of forced the Vietnam veterans to ask thathaunting question, was it worth it? And this has sort of put forth afirestorm. Was there a moral quandary amongst the GIs at that time?Was anybody saying, what am I doing here, you know, this is silly?MR. BLUMENSON: I don't think so. I never came across anything likethat. Everyone was quite unified and everybody knew what it was wewere doing, and I think everybody was happy to be doing it.Obviously, we'd rather have been home or have been somewhere else,but it was something that had to be done and I think that was fine.
MR. BOORSTIN: But there was another element I think in it, whichwe mustn't forget in relation to World War II. The First World Warappeared to be the result of the tangle of European diplomacy andimperial forces at war with one another. But the Second World War hada plain moral objective, to exterminate the most powerful force ofbarbarism in modern history. And I think that people were aware ofthat, and I think that gave a strength to the cause. And I think wemustn't forget that.
We must also not forget, while we assess the horrible losses inthe war, that it was peace, it was Nazi peace that exterminated sixmillion Jews and others. And Stalin's war against his own peoplekilled between 20 and 30 million people. So that we must assess thesethings in the perspective of our time, and it's shocking that in ourcivilized century, so many people have died for ideological andracist reasons, more than in any previous -- more even than in thereligious wars of the 17th century.
MR. WATTENBERG: Surely World War II was relevant to deal with anysubsequent perceived global tyrannies, such as the Soviet Union. Itwas -- like Nazi Germany, it was totalitarian, it was expansionist,it threatened us directly. But we are some years beyond the Cold War.Are the lessons of World War II, such as they may be, still relevanttoday, and if so, what are they? Stephen, you have something for us?
MR. AMBROSE: I think that the lesson of World War II is -- we'vebeen discussing it. It is that an aroused democracy is the mostpowerful force in the world. And I think that what is relevant todayabout World War II to young people, who are so cynical, and to somany others is, don't ever despair of democracy. For all of itsfaults and all of its weaknesses and all the politicians about todrive you crazy, don't ever give up on democracy.
It's also the nature of democracy that it doesn't deal well with anon-crisis situation. And thank God, most of the time in human life,we are not in a crisis situation. But when a crisis comes along, thatdemocracy will pull together. When you don't have a crisis, that'swhat a democracy is supposed to be about, people fighting with eachother, people squabbling in their parliaments, people arguing aboutthis or that policy.
MR. BOORSTIN: I agree with Professor Ambrose, but I would add onemore perhaps larger lesson. And that is the lesson of the two worldwars is that the last war has never happened and probably never willhappen. The First World War, of course we remember, was fought as thewar to end wars, and within a couple of decades, why, the world wasback at war again. And I think it's very important to remember thatin the presence of people who have had considerable militaryexperience. But I think we mustn't pretend that the last war hashappened, and there is the menace -- there is always a new menace. Ifyou believe in original sin and believe that human nature is notperfect, there are always causes for war.
MR. WATTENBERG: What's the menace now?
MR. BOORSTIN: Well, I think fanaticism, ideology and fanaticism.The idea of a jihad, of a holy war against -- and all kinds -- allreligious fanaticisms I think are equally evil. But when people arewilling to fight for their religion against people who don't agreewith them, just because they don't agree with them, because theydon't have that faith, that is a menace to civilization, no matterwho holds it.
MR. FROMKIN: I think that one of the lessons that we can draw fromthe World War II experience is about the mistake that we Americanstypically make in not being able to think about politics in itsrelationship to war, to force and to power. In the '30s, manyAmericans, though of very civilized and liberal disposition, werepacifists. They were so much against war that they did not see thatthe only way to stop something as evil as Hitler's aggression was tooppose force with force.
And when the war was over, we made the same mistake we had made inthe First World War. There France in effect won the war and thereforedictated the peace. And when Roosevelt came to Yalta, he seemed to bealone perhaps in seeing that the logic of the war was that since theSoviet Union had overrun vast portions of Eastern and Central Europe,they were going to keep it and they were going to dictate the futureof those areas.
As Americans, that was very hard for us to accept, but that meantthat in waging war, we always have to think about the effect of howwe wage war on peace.
MR. WATTENBERG: Could Franklin Roosevelt have done anything aboutthat? I mean, after all, there were the Soviets in Eastern Europe. Imean, what could he have done?
MR. FROMKIN: Nothing. He saw the choice. He saw that if we wantedto get the Russians out of there, we'd have to be prepared to go towar to do it. And we weren't prepared to do that.
MR. WATTENBERG: Martin, what are the lessons looking forward?
MR. BLUMENSON: I'm not one much for lessons, and I'm not sure thatthere are any lessons at all in history. If everything is a uniqueexperience, it never happens again. There are no such things aslessons.
And I think that we learn the wrong lessons. And I think what welearned in World War II was the strength of the United States, and Ithink that led us places we ought not to have gone in subsequentyears. I think that this lesson that we are so strong took us intoVietnam, for example. So I -- MR. WATTENBERG: But the same lessonthat took us into Vietnam also won the Cold War for us. I mean, youknow, the fact that that generation McNamara now criticizes says thatthe appeasement at Munich was the formative experience of thatgeneration, which in addition to getting us into Vietnam, also wonthe Cold War. I mean, would you buy that?
MR. BLUMENSON: You can say, too, that appeasement came from thefact that if the statesmen in World War I had permitted Austria totake over Serbia, there would not have been a World War I. And sothat's the wrong lesson, it seems to me -- or perhaps the rightlesson, but we're talking about things that really haven't -- MR.BOORSTIN: There is another way of putting this perhaps, and that isthat, to follow Professor Ambrose's eloquent description of theAmerican tradition, which I agree with, is that perhaps our influencein world affairs ought to be the power of example and not the powerof power. Our long-term influence in the world is not throughAmerican power, it's through the example of American institutions.
MR. AMBROSE: I would like to point out that after World War I, thegreat lesson the American people took from that war was, don't getinto any entangling alliances and don't arm yourself, and you'll beable to stay out of the next war. So our policies in the 1930s wereneutrality in a world that had gone mad and unilateral disarmament tothe point that our army was 175,000 men in 1940, when Hitler hadoverrun France. That meant it ranked 16th in the world.
Now, we learned from World War II to get into alliancesbeforehand, and we learned from World War II that we've got to stayarmed. And we learned a third lesson from 1919 and then 1945. Andthat was to extend our hand to the defeated.
In 1919, we kicked them in the teeth. In 1945, we extended ourhand to the Germans and to the Japanese and helped them back ontotheir feet and brought out the best in a people who had had the worstbrought out from them in the preceding 12 and 15 years.
I think we learned some valuable lessons and I think we've appliedthem, and I think that these lessons apply today, very much so. We'vegot to have alliances, we've got to stay militarily strong, and weneed to extend our hand to the defeated. I wish we would do more withregard to Russia today, for example.
MR. FROMKIN: I agree entirely with what Professor Ambrose justsaid. And I think we were very fortunate in our timing in the sensethat the generation that was young enough to fight in the First WorldWar was the generation that led us in the Second World War. They knewthose lessons because they had lived it. The timing was just right.
MR. BOORSTIN: If we are defining an American tradition, I think wecan take up Professor Ambrose's suggestion and Professor Blumenson'salso, that the Civil War and World War II are exemplars of theAmerican approach to the world, I think, and to our relationship. Andthat is, the Civil War is the only war, the only civil war of amodern country fought, at least in large part, for the liberation ofsome of its citizens. And World War II, of course, had a strong moralingredient.
Woodrow Wilson inspired us into the First World War with slogansof democracy, but the result, of course, was not what was intended.Nevertheless, that is the American tradition, to believe that we arean exceptional country, we are here to affirm the opportunity ofpeople from all over the world. And I think that we've had manyfaults, but nevertheless we still are in a position to affirm that,and I hope we continue to be.
MR. WATTENBERG: Okay, on that note -- on that celebratory notewith my celebratory tie, thank you, Stephen Ambrose, David Fromkin,Martin Blumenson, and Daniel Boorstin.
Please send your comments and questions to: New River Media, 115017th Street, NW, Suite 1050, Washington, DC, 20036. Or we can bereached via E-mail at thinktv@aol.com.
For 'Think Tank,' I'm Ben Wattenberg.
http://www.pbs.org/thinktank/transcript206.html
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Friday, May 03, 2002 - 12:02 pm: |
CITIZEN SOLDIERS
December 8, 1997
NEWSHOUR TRANSCRIPT
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Gergen, editor-at-large of U.S. News & World Report, engages Stephen Ambrose, author of Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany.
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DAVID GERGEN: Steve, in recent years this country has twice celebrated the heroics of the men who took the beaches at Normandy in 1944, and appropriate celebrations. But now you come along and say that there’s a fascinating story about what happened after D-Day in the 11 months until the Germans surrendered.
The battle of the hedgerows.
STEPHEN AMBROSE, Author, Citizen Soldiers: Well, we got ashore on D-Day, and that was the big thing. It was a very tenuous hold, however, on the beachhead, and now the job was to expand it. It went very slowly because we had not recognized how tough those hedgerows are going to be to clear out of Germans.
DAVID GERGEN: What was a hedgerow?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: A hedgerow is a mound of earth about six feet wide and four to six feet high, with trees and brambles and rosebushes, and et cetera, growing up, and it’s impenetrable. And it encloses little, tiny fields. Now, each one of those little fields is a fortress, and the Germans were in the corners of the field with their machine guns dug in, and they had dug tunnels through the dirt at the base of the hedgerow to site their panzer fausts, their anti-tank rockets, and so--and the Americans had had no preparation for this. We hadn’t seen the hedgerows in an intelligence sense and hadn’t done any training of men on how to fight there, so everything had to be improvised--the use of tanks. Those tanks would get into the hedgerow country and drive up a hedgerow and expose their belly like this, and the German with a panzer faust over there would boom into that unarmored belly, and there goes that Sherman tanks.
The solution to this problem came from a kid who had been a mechanic in Boston before the war. Joe Cullen was his name. He was a sergeant in one of the armor divisions. He said, Let’s take steel rails and weld them to the front of that tank, and they’ll dig into that hedgerow, and it won’t go belly up, and then those big Chrysler engines are powerful enough that it can go right through the hedgerow, and then at that point they can start turning the cannon on the corners where the Germans are with their machine guns, and they can start spraying the hedgerow with their 50 cals. And you can work your way forward in that way.
Now, Rommel didn’t have a suggestion box outside his office door. It’s not the way the Germans fight a war. Bradley did. Cullen had that idea on a Monday. By Tuesday afternoon it had gotten to Bradley, and by Wednesday morning they were putting those steel rails onto the tanks, and it worked. So that kind of improvisation finally got us through the hedgerows. And at the end of July, the German line broke on the far right at Saint Lo. They did trap most of the German army in Normandy. A lot of individuals got out, but the Germans were now disorganized; they had lost their unit cohesion; and they left their equipment behind. And so now from mid August on there was no opposition left in France. The battle of France was over. The Germans were in full retreat back Eastward, with the allies coming as close behind them as they could.
The Allies run out of gas.
DAVID GERGEN: But they stopped them at the Siegfried Line.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, then two things happened. The Germans got back to a prepared defensive position, the Siegfried Line, all kind of fortifications. Hitler loved poured concrete. He thought poured concrete could stop anything. So they got back into prepared positions, and they pulled off what they called the miracle of the West, the German army did, in getting itself reorganized, in coming back together, and getting units to take positions in the line. The other thing that happened was that we ran out of gas, literally. The tanks were getting less and less--the lines stretched out from the channel coast, and as more and more Americans in Britain came on to the continent, the supply situations became critical. So we ran out of gas just at the point that the Germans got behind their fortifications. And now a stalemate ensued.
The Battle of the Bulge.
In fact, Hitler was gathering reserves and reinforcements, and drawing them from the Eastern front over to the Western front, and preparing for the last great German offensive of the 20th century. And now the Battle of the Bulge was underway. In the first few days of the Battle of the Bulge the American Army, which had become very cocky--it was full of hubris--and thought of itself as the best army in the world, and had the best intelligence in the world, had been badly fooled, and had been attacked where the men were spread out far too wide, because nobody thought there would be an offensive in the Ardennes. And the result was we lost two divisions on the first two days, big losses, and the result was there were breakthroughs, and the result was there German tanks on the loose, behind the front lines. And the result was a humiliation for American generals. And the result was a lot of GI’s went into POW camps, and a lot of them got killed. So Hitler launched this attack with great initial success, and something close to panic set in on the allied side.
But the real story of the Bulge is the one that captures everybody’s imagination is Bastogne and the 101st Airborne being surrounded there, and rightly so, but it’s a bigger story than that. It’s an American lieutenant with a platoon over here, and an American corporal with a squad over here saying, I ain’t gonna retreat no more. We’re going to stand and fight here. And they held up German columns all across the front and threw the German timetable completely out of kilter, and eventually some clear weather arrived, and with clear weather trucks could move on the road, planes could fly and hit at the Germans, and it was done, and the Germans were hurled back from the Battle of the Bulge, so that by January of 1945, the end of January, the lines were back to where they had been in September.
Capturing the Ludendorff Bridge.
Then they get to the Rhine River in March of 1945, the greatest river in Europe, and it looked like it was going to be a very, very tough proposition to get across this river and any bridgehead over it was going to be pure gold. An American lieutenant named Carl Timmerman spotted the biggest bridge over the Rhine River. It was a railroad bridge--the Ludendorff Bridge--and Timmerman saw it, and without hesitating, he took a squad that was a really wonderfully American squad. There was a Polish sergeant and an Irish corporal and a couple of Germans and an Indian in it, and--American. And Karl Timmerman, a German, of course, German-American, saw that bridge, and he said, "Let’s go." And he led his men across that bridge in one of the greatest actions of the Second World War, machine gun fire cutting everywhere. They knew the bridge was scheduled to be blown up; they expected it to be blown in their faces. What apparently happened, David, was a stray bullet cut the wire leading out to the demolition charges. Timmerman got across, took the bridge. Now we were over the Rhine, and then it was the time for the exploitation and rolling across Germany till we met with the Red Army at the Elbe River in April of 1945. Whew!
Life in foxhole.
DAVID GERGEN: (laughing) This is a remarkable story. What did you learn about the American character in this story of warfare from D-Day on?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Well, you know, the fathers of the young men who fought World War II had fought World War I, and they had a feeling that people of our age have about the young; they’re not as tough anymore. They couldn’t do what we did. And that was very much the feeling in 1940, ‘41, ‘42. And it was certainly Hitler’s feeling. Now, you take these young Americans, 1943, they graduated high school; 1944, they graduated high school; 18 and 19 year olds--drafted, given insufficient and inadequate training, not well clothed for the rigors of what they were going to face, sent into the line as individual replacements, in a foxhole in Belgium. Now a foxhole in Belgium in the winter of 1944/45 meant down to 10 below in the Fahrenheit scale at night, about 40 degrees in the daytime. That meant that your foxhole was alternating between three and four feet of water and ice. It meant your--the boots they had were all leather, so the boots froze at night on them. They did not have adequate overcoats. They didn’t have adequate sleeping bags. They weren’t getting any hot food, and it was dark starting at about 4:15 in the afternoon, and it didn’t get light again until about 8:30 in the morning. And they had to stay up all night, and they couldn’t move around, couldn’t exercise, couldn’t smoke a cigarette, couldn’t eat anything, had to be watching always for Germans coming on.
"The GI of World War II was a child of democracy."
DAVID GERGEN: So they--
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Now, how did they do this?
DAVID GERGEN: How did they do it?
STEPHEN AMBROSE: How did they do this? The strongest motivating factor was their buddies, the unit cohesion, the guys that they had trained with, gone overseas with, fought with. And what was unacceptable to the GI in that foxhole was letting his buddies down. Now, they went into this combat with this fear--that they were going to be afraid. Every combat veteran I’ve ever interviewed tells me his biggest fear on going into combat was that--that I’m going to be afraid. What every one of them found out was I’m afraid. Fear is inevitable. It’s the natural reaction. The point is you’ve got to learn to control that fear and work with that fear and conquer that fear and act. And these guys were able to do it. And in the end, for me, the GI of World War II was a child of democracy, who had grown up knowing the difference between right and wrong. And, you know, I had a lot of them tell me, Steve, I was 19 years old, I was 20 years old, I had my life ahead of me, I didn’t want to live in a world in which Hitler ruled Europe and was threatening the United States; I knew that if I were going to have a good life, we had to win this war, and I had to do my part to see to it. They knew the difference between right and wrong, and they didn’t want to live in a world in which wrong prevailed.
DAVID GERGEN: Stephen Ambrose, fascinating story, fascinating men. Thank you very much.
STEPHEN AMBROSE: Thank you.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/gergen/december97/ambrose_12-8.html
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Monday, May 20, 2002 - 12:25 pm: |
For Historian Ambrose, It's Time for a 'Love Song' He's been hurt by plagiarism claims. Now he's at work on a new book as he battles his toughest foe: lung cancer.
By MEGAN K. STACK
L. A. TIMES STAFF WRITER
May 11 2002
NEW ORLEANS -- Before the sunlight leaked over the horizon to the clapboard beach house, Stephen E. Ambrose slipped from his bed, padded to his word processor and pecked out the day's first paragraph. Before breakfast, another chapter was finished--not perfect, maybe, but at least he'd gotten the words on paper.
He's always been a quick writer. The relentless speed is a much-hyped feature of the Ambrose mystique; the former history professor has cranked out an astonishing 34 tomes. But pace has never been so crucial. That Sunday morning would be his last ordinary day. On Monday, Ambrose would ride to town for his first chemotherapy session.
After struggling with an on-again, off-again penchant for Marlboro Lights, the swashbuckling historian has come down with advanced lung cancer. Without treatment, the doctors told him earlier this month, he'd be lucky to live six months. "I'd give anything to have a year," Ambrose says. "Two years would be.... " He doesn't finish the sentence. His wife and daughter blink and stare resolutely ahead. The thought is there: Two years is a long time for a bad case of lung cancer.
So Ambrose, 66, is writing like a man against the wall. He wakes up at 4 a.m. "and I can't wait to get to the word processor." He has shoved projects to the side, abandoned a much-awaited book on the Pacific theater of World War II, put lectures and ribbon cuttings on hold. He is enthralled with a new book, a manuscript more personal than anything he's ever tried. He's already picked the title: "A Love Song to America."
Its genre isn't easily defined. Ambrose bristles at the notion of memoir--"I'm not talking about my sex life." The book is part interpretive history, part recollection, part grandfatherly musing. There is a chapter on race in America, a chapter on George Washington, a chapter on Ambrose's experience as "a Yankee in Dixie."
He has two examples in mind: Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Both men used their last days to pen eloquent memoirs. And both men are longtime Ambrose role models.
"After I got through the shock, the outrage, the how-can-this-be-happening, I got to thinking: Screw it," Ambrose said this week. "In the time I've got left I'm going to write my love song."
b{'My Brother Is Such a Fan'}
The tourists recognize the ruddy man in the flowered shirt who paces restlessly in the shadows of warplanes.
They sidle shyly to his side in the lobby of the D-Day Museum he helped create, clutching copies of his books. "My brother is such a fan," a middle-age man begins, and Ambrose accepts a pen. "Who's it to?" he mutters absently.
He's a new breed in the eclectic zoo of U.S. iconography and popular culture: Stephen E. Ambrose, historian-as-celebrity. By virtue of sheer, soaring popularity, the gravel-voiced, hard-drinking scribe has turned himself into a brand name, built a multimedia franchise out of military history and raked in millions for his troubles. He is part professor, part pop star, a man who begins sentences with "I said to [Richard B.] Myers [chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff] the other night, I said ... " and "Now, Stephen [Spielberg], Tom [Hanks] and I ...."
From a Mississippi beach house just up the coast from New Orleans, he presides over a vast, family-run industry of guided tours, movie deals and historical consultation.
This hasn't been an easy year in the quixotic universe of Ambrose. The grim medical news comes just as the author was picking up his old momentum--collecting awards, swilling his nightly martinis, grunting out condemnations of long-forgotten war atrocities. It comes just as the talk of plagiarism was finally fading.
This winter, the revelation that Ambrose neglected to give proper attribution to scattered paragraphs in his books scandalized publishing houses and university faculties. But Ambrose refused to be cowed: He gritted his teeth, ignored the headlines and disappeared into the Philippines to research the battles of the Pacific.
"The people decide," a defiant Ambrose said last month, planting his loafers on an antique table in his suite in Washington's Jefferson Hotel. He had come to town to lobby for money for a Lewis and Clark commemoration. "If they decide I'm a fraud, I'm a fraud. I don't know that I'm all that good at academics. I'm a writer."
He was a reverent kid who played basketball with the returning soldiers more than half a century ago.
Ambrose likes to talk about growing up a doctor's son in scenic, sleepy Whitewater, Wis.--"the kind of town Hollywood would drool over"--in the calm years after World War II.
Those towering soldiers, who slept in boarding houses and studied fervently at the Whitewater teachers' college courtesy of the GI Bill, made a deep impression. Even now, although in a way he knows better, Ambrose waves his big hands and says the men who get to test themselves in war are profoundly fortunate.
"Every man that's ever born wants to know about combat, and it all depends on when they are born," he says. "Those men were just lucky."
The veterans are dying fast all around him--1,200 World War II survivors every day. Ambrose has collected thousands of their battlefield memories, lived vicariously through their stories, traveled exhaustively to stomp over their old paths.
"It's a genuine, wonderful, warm affection the veterans have for Steve," said Gordon H. "Nick" Mueller, president of the D-Day Museum. "More than anybody else in America, he opened these guys up to talking about their experiences. He's unlocked thousands of stories that would have been lost forever."
Son a Sometimes Rock 'n' Roll Roadie
Andy Ambrose flops onto a bench outside the offices of Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours, taps his sandals on the concrete and squints out over the dilapidated New Orleans side street. "First of all, I have nothing to do with my dad ... that historian ... what he does officially." He lights a smoke, collects his thoughts. "My dad is the president of the company, but he's not here ever."
Andy is a 38-year-old sometime rock 'n' roll roadie, a singer and percussionist whose conga drums adorn the tourism office. Before he hit on the clever marketing ploy of adopting his father's name, he ran an unremarkable Big Easy tour company. He sold the gin joints of the French Quarter and the plantations on the outskirts of town to a parade of sightseers, and it paid the bills. But in a crowded tourism market, Andy Ambrose wasn't seeing much room for growth. Until....
"One day my Dad and I kind of looked at each other and he said, 'Think you ought to,' and about the same time I was saying, 'Would it be all right if we....'"
And just like that, Stephen Ambrose Historical Tours was born. Vacationers pay thousands to roam Civil War battlefields, float up the Missouri River or stroll Omaha Beach on "Ambrose-designed historical adventures." A year ago, the company concocted the notion of "A Weekend With Stephen E. Ambrose."
About 45 eager readers ponied up $1,500 and flocked to New Orleans for a three-day romp of cocktails at the Ritz-Carlton, a riverboat cruise and a speech by "Dr. Ambrose himself."
The appearance of the history guru was a rare exception. Although Ambrose's hand molded his trademark tours, he steered clear of the outings. "He lays it out," Andy says. "Where we're going to go, what we're going to talk about, what we're going to do."
The Ambrose kids grew up in moccasins and thrift shop jeans, sported long hair and spent summers on the Sioux and Blackfoot reservations in the Dakotas. Ambrose children boycotted grapes, did their book learning in New Orleans public schools and spent two years tromping the westward trail of Lewis and Clark.
Their father was patriotic--but not jingoistic. Ambrose openly adored the military but marched against the Vietnam War. With five children to feed, he quit his teaching job at Kansas State in protest over a campus visit from Richard Nixon during the bombings of Laos and Cambodia. "Those are the acts that stuck with us kids," Hugh Ambrose said.
As adults, four of the children work as historians or perform some auxiliary function for the lucrative machine known as Ambrose-Tubbs Inc.
Night after night, Moira Ambrose listens to her husband read the pages he has coaxed from the word processor. A former English major and schoolteacher, Moira is her husband's most trusted editor.
From the clan's Montana offices, youngest son Hugh oversees his father's publicity, globe trots at his side and helps gather research. Daughter Grace teaches history at Hunter College in New York. Daughter Stephenie is the company secretary and author of a children's version of the Lewis and Clark tale. Son-in-law John Tubbs is the treasurer.
Then there's Barry, a trapper and fisherman in Montana. Andy calls him a "mountain man," and even their father chuckles that he was born 150 years too late. Celeste, his wife, cooks meals for the Ambrose Missouri River tours.
Questions Arise Over at Least 5 Books
It was The Wild Blue first. Then Crazy Horse and Custer, Citizen Soldiers and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery 1973-1990. By the time critics had pored over the minute lines of Ambrose's work, at least five of his tomes had turned up lacking quotation marks on borrowed passages.
As Ambrose points out, it was 10 pages out of 15,000. But it was enough. They called him a fraud. They called him a copycat. Professors frowned and wrung their hands. Newspapers wagged their fingers. Ambrose was skewered on Web sites, talk shows and editorial pages.
"It was very painful for Hugh, very hard on Moira," he said, mashing eggs and oatmeal into a gooey breakfast in the Jefferson Hotel restaurant. "You have desperate thoughts. Recalling all your books. Never writing again."
But in the end, Ambrose's popularity prevailed--and the scandal didn't do much damage. In fact, some publishers theorize the Ambrose scrape could boost sales in the long run by strengthening his name recognition.
"There is the school of thought," literary agent Jeff Herman said, "that there's no such thing as bad publicity."
Besides, says a California ethics expert, the common reader has a hard time grasping why he should be angry over misplaced footnotes. If a vignette is true and fair, why should the reader care who gets credit?
"It's not the most serious or vile of offenses--it's laziness, and people aren't that excited about it," says Michael Josephson, president of the Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics in Marina del Rey. "The victim of plagiarism is the other author. It's almost an internal civil issue."
Even in his adopted hometown of New Orleans, where the local history scribe is adored as nowhere else, Ambrose cleaves a split. On the one hand, the public adores him. It is his fellow historians who regard him with suspicion--even disdain.
Though he stepped down from the University of New Orleans history department in 1995, the city continues to draw nourishment from Ambrose's frenetic intellectual pursuits. He deposited thousands of veterans' oral histories into the Eisenhower Center for American Studies, an archive born in his old office at the university. In 1999, years of begging, badgering and stumping paid off when Ambrose opened his pet project: the D-Day Museum in the New Orleans' warehouse district.
When the footnote frenzy reached its peak, local luminaries rushed to Ambrose's defense in a vehement round of unequivocal quotes and irate letters to the Times-Picayune of New Orleans. University Chancellor Gregory O'Brien called the historian "a great treasure for American culture." Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities President Michael Sartisky wrote in to decry the "feeding frenzy," which he suggested was motivated by the jealousy of "lesser lights."
Even George S. McGovern, whose autobiography Ambrose is accused of plagiarizing, donated an impassioned letter to the historian's Web site to defend "this brilliant author--one of the few great men I have been gifted to know."
But in the faculty where he'd toiled for decades, support was wan. In a crisp January letter to the editor, history chair Warren Billings condemned plagiarism, distanced his department from its retired star. "We abhor such a practice," he wrote.
To hear Ambrose tell it, he's a longtime pariah among the lesser-known historians who populate university faculties across the country. Even before he fell into fame and fortune, there were cold shoulders from his colleagues, he says. It was harder for him to get fellowships and grants; tricky to nail down slots in important conferences.
Ambrose believes his interests were unfashionable. He's long been an outspoken critic of teachers who favor obscure glimpses of the past over the epic stories of looming leaders and drastic clashes. "I always had a hard time because I did military history. They want you to teach about gays and lesbians in the Colonial period."
Eisenhower Invites Ambrose to Edit Papers
The Second World War first trapped Ambrose's fancy when Eisenhower invited the unknown 27-year-old Civil War scholar to edit his papers and pen his biography. The young historian was an odd choice, but Ambrose had caught Ike's eye by writing a book on Henry Halleck, Lincoln's all-but-forgotten chief of staff. The hours interviewing the former president and poring over bundles of wartime correspondence shifted Ambrose's interest to World War II for good. Since then, he has interrupted the flow of WWII texts with works on the railroad, Westward expansion, Richard Nixon and Crazy Horse--but he always comes back.
When his stories began to climb the bestseller lists, the chasm between Ambrose and his colleagues gaped even wider. "Any book with more than five readers is automatically popularized and to be scorned," Ambrose says. "I did my graduate work like anybody else, and I kind of had that attitude myself. The problem with my colleagues is they never grew out of it."
Ambrose wrote the book that became the HBO miniseries "Band of Brothers". He was a historical consultant on a collection of movies, including "Saving Private Ryan." He did most of the work over the telephone. There was no time to waste "sitting like a bump on a log" at film sets.
Asked how he defines himself, Ambrose doesn't pause: Storyteller. Asked who he counts as peers, he replies, "Doris and David." Doris Kearns Goodwin suffered her own tumble from grace this winter over missing footnotes. As for David McCullough, he won the Pulitzer Prize for his biography of John Adams. Both, like Ambrose, are wildly popular purveyors of blockbuster history.
"Homer. Every generation has a storyteller. Thucydides," Ambrose says. "What on earth is more fascinating to people than people?"
These days, Ambrose is keeping to himself, mostly, walking the family Labrador along the Gulf of Mexico sands outside "Merry Weather," the little house with the big windows that he and Moira have called home for 20 years. The chemotherapy he's undergoing in New Orleans is intense--and experimental.
"There are a number of things he's had to pull back from," Hugh Ambrose said. "He's got to focus on his treatment right now."
In the meantime, there is work to be done. Last Sunday, Ambrose kept an appointment to take yet another oral history from yet another World War II veteran. Watching her husband sign autographs in the museum lobby, Moira Ambrose smiled a little.
"He's finally got a battle to fight," she said.
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.239.86.117) on Saturday, June 29, 2002 - 10:49 am: |
SCREENING OF 'BAND OF BROTHERS' , NORMANDY, FRANCE - 06 JUN 2001
http://www.rexfeatures.com/cgi-bin/rppshimg0?i=338275A
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (12.241.64.130) on Wednesday, September 11, 2002 - 12:33 pm: |
Ambrose and his son, Andy
Courtesy of Tracy Gordon Goff
| By Anita ten Kate (Anita) (217.120.70.30) on Sunday, October 13, 2002 - 02:32 pm: |
I'm sorry to inform you, I know this comes as a chock to all BoB fans, especial those who read the book but today 13, October 2002 a great historican writer drs. Stephen E. Ambrose passed away.
| By Daniel de Pruis (Crazycavia) (217.120.247.239) on Sunday, October 13, 2002 - 04:14 pm: |
I also just read the tragic news on the CNN website. My condolences to his family.
| By Chia-li Sung (Clavierfeline) (199.79.168.252) on Sunday, October 13, 2002 - 06:08 pm: |
Was really sad to hear from the news that Mr.Ambrose passed away, I wouldn't have in million years learned so much about WWII if I didn't hear his interview on NPR. It's such a huge loss for all of us.
Thank you, Mr. Ambrose
| By jan dawn doronila (Potatomasher) (202.78.97.13) on Sunday, October 13, 2002 - 08:32 pm: |
I got the news when my aunt personally dropped me a call, bearing the news about the passing of Mr. Ambrose;a writer, historian and author of numerous books, the man who wrote the story of E Co. and other war stories.
His passing was such a big loss for us.
| By Melissa Clay (Melissa2800) (66.166.47.71) on Monday, October 14, 2002 - 07:49 am: |
I found out about Mr. Ambrose's passing on the Wild Bill website. What a great loss, what a great writer & historian. He will be greatly missed. Rest in peace
Melissa
| By Chris Langlois (Chrisdfw) (4.42.202.200) on Friday, October 17, 2003 - 10:26 am: |
Part of I-10 in Misissippi to be named for Stephen Ambrose
By The Associated Press
BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. -- A stretch of Interstate 10 on the Mississippi Gulf Coast will be named for the late Stephen E. Ambrose.
Ambrose, who started out as a little-known history professor and became a sought-after lecturer on the Civil War and World War II, died of lung cancer in 2002. Ambrose, 66, died at a Bay St. Louis hospital.
The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Highway will be dedicated Monday at a service at Our Lady of the Gulf Parish Community Center. The Mississippi Legislature approved the designation.
"Some friends of Ambrose thought it would be a good idea," said Janet Sullivan, assistant to Transportation Commissioner Wayne Brown.
Signs will be placed at the Louisiana line and at the intersection of Mississippi 43 and I-10, Sullivan said.
A native of Wisconsin, Ambrose spent most of his teaching career at the University of New Orleans, and he was the driving force behind creating the National D-Day Museum in that city. He divided his time between his home in Bay St. Louis and another in Helena, Mont.
Except for an occasional book signing or lecture in Bay St. Louis, he blended into his adopted hometown's lifestyle, bike riding with his wife, Moira, and walking his dog on the beach.
Ambrose's widow will speak at the dedication, Sullivan said.
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