Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002) was an American historian, academic, and author, most noted for his books on World War II and his biographies of U.S. presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.
While teaching at Kansas State University as the Dwight D. Eisenhower Professor of War and Peace during the 1970–1971 academic year, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus.
[11][12] His opposition to the Vietnam War[13] stood in contrast to his research on "presidents and the military at a time when such topics were increasingly regarded by his colleagues as old fashioned and conservative.
[17] The center's first efforts, which Ambrose initiated, involved the collection of oral histories from World War II veterans about their experiences, particularly any participation in D-Day.
By the time of publication of Ambrose's D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II, in 1994, the center had collected more than 1,200 oral histories.
[18] Ambrose donated $150,000 to the Center in 1998 to foster additional efforts to collect oral histories from World War II veterans.
[24] This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years, The Supreme Commander (1970), and a two-volume full biography (published in 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject.
[25] Regarding the first volume, Gordon Harrison, writing for The New York Times, proclaimed, "It is Mr. Ambrose's special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment to uncover the idiosyncratic people at its center.
A reviewer for the Journal of Military History commended D-Day as the "most comprehensive discussion" of the sea, air, and land operations that coalesced on that day.
[29] Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, writing for The New York Times, proclaimed that "Reading this history, you can understand why for so many of its participants, despite all the death surrounding them, life revealed itself in that moment at that place.
During the same week, in September 1998, D-Day and Undaunted Courage, Ambrose's 1996 book on Meriwether Lewis and the Corps of Discovery, appeared on the best seller list, also.
His final book, This Vast Land, a historical novel about the Lewis & Clark expedition written for young readers, was published posthumously in 2003.
Ambrose's most popular single work was Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (1996), which stayed on the New York Times best seller list for a combined, hardcover and paperback, 126 weeks.
[32] Ambrose consolidated research on the Corps of Discovery's expedition conducted in the previous thirty years and "synthesized it skillfully to enrich our understanding and appreciation of this grand epic", according to Alvin M. Josephy, Jr., who reviewed the book for The New York Times.
[33] Ken Burns, who produced and directed a PBS documentary on Lewis & Clark declared that Ambrose "takes one of the great, but also one of the most superficially considered, stories in American history and breathes fresh life into it.
[37] He provided commentary in 20 made-for-TV documentaries, covering diverse topics, such as World War II, Lewis & Clark, and America's prominence in the 20th century.
[43] "He dreamt of a museum that reflected his deep regard for our nation's citizen soldiers, the workers on the Home Front and the sacrifices and hardships they endured to achieve victory.
"[44] He secured large contributions from the federal government, state of Louisiana, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, and many smaller donations from former students, who answered a plea made by Ambrose in the New Orleans Times-Picayune.
"The Stephen E. Ambrose Memorial Fund continues to support the development of the museum's Center for Study of the American Spirit, its educational programs and oral history and publication initiatives.
Past winners include Tom Brokaw, Steven Spielberg, Studs Terkel, Michael Beschloss, and Ken Burns.
[56][57] 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.
[57]A Forbes investigation of his work found cases of plagiarism involving passages in at least six books, with a similar pattern going back to his doctoral dissertation.
[59] A front-page article published in The Sacramento Bee on January 1, 2001, entitled "Area Historians Rail Against Inaccuracies in Book",[61] 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 about the construction of the Pacific Railroad between Council Bluffs, Iowa/Omaha, Nebraska, and the San Francisco Bay at Alameda/Oakland via Sacramento, California, which was published in August 2000.
[59][62][63] 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.
Reviewer Walter Nugent observed that it contained "annoying slips" such as mislabeled maps, inaccurate dates, geographical errors, and misidentified word origins,[65] while railroad historian Don L. Hofsommer agreed that the book "confuses facts" and that "The research might best be characterized as 'once over lightly'.
[24] 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.
[70] Historian David Greenberg stated in 2015 that Ambrose's "wanton acts of plagiarism and the posthumous revelation that he fabricated interviews with Dwight Eisenhower have rendered his work unusable".