For Historian Ambrose, It’s Time for a ‘Love Song’

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.”

‘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.