Alphabet File page 6
APPEALS TO ‘SENSE OF DUTY’
Powell’s reluctance to enter the race hasn’t tempered Ambrose’s enthusiasm. After all, Eisenhower didn’t want to be president either. Ambrose has a strategy for reluctant soldiers. “You have to appeal to their sense of duty,” he said.” You make them understand you want the best for the country and that they’re the best. If he can get the nomination, I’m all but certain he will win.”
Although some of Ambrose’s closest friends doubt Powell’s chances, few question the historian’s straight-ahead drive. Once Ambrose fixes his sights on a goal, they say, nothing much stands in his way. “He’s a formidable opponent,” said Forrest Pogue, a military historian and Ambrose mentor. “In other words, he doesn’t let you knock him around.”
In fact, the Midwestern-born scholar is something of a folk hero. Ambrose remains the quintessential all-
American-patriotic, athletic and self-made.
He bears an uncanny resemblance to the icons of his biographies. Like Eisenhower, he is open and forthright, thinks best when he smokes, and trains his concentration on a subject until he masters every angle. Like former President Nixon, he is savvy and conservative, a trifle dogmatic and given to fits of temper. Like Meriwether Lewis, he is innately curious, a pioneer and an ingenious explorer. And like Gen. George Custer, he’s got an unpredictable streak.
LESSONS FROM BATTLEFIELD
Too young to serve in World War II, too old for Vietnam, Ambrose nevertheless takes his lessons from the battlefield. He is disciplined, industrious and about as tough as they come.
It has brought him all the accoutrements of success: a six-figure salary from UNO, hefty royalties from his books, a three-story Victorian on the Mississippi coast and a cabin in northern Wisconsin. He and his wife, Moira, have sent five children to college. Moira, a liberal and avid outdoorswoman from Long Island, N.Y., left a teaching job at Grace King High School in Metairie in the early 1980s and accompanies Ambrose on most of his travels. She said her husband is becoming right-wing politically, a description he accepts. But conservatism, he said, is a natural consequence of prosperity.
Ambrose realized his 35-year dream to publish a national best seller last year when the critically acclaimed “ D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II” sold more than 250,000 copies. It was his 25th book. Simon and Schuster will release “D-Day” in paperback next month.
His readers include President Clinton, who reportedly used much of Ambrose’s resarch last summer in his D-Day commemorative address at Normandy, France.
In fact, the book sits next to Clinton’s desk in his private library on the second floor of the White House. Ambrose knows exactly where it is because his old college roommate, Richard Lamm, the four-time governor of Colorado, saw it there last month.
“I went into the president’s study, and there, sitting on top of six books to the right of his desk was Ambrose’s ‘D-Day.’ I couldn’t believe it. I called Steve from the room and said, ‘Hey Steve, guess where I am? And guess what’s here?’
BROUGHT PRESTIGE TO UNO
At UNO, Ambrose has been the founder and force behind the Eisenhower Center and the upcoming D-Day museum, which have brought national attention and prestige to the school. He receives loads of fan mail from throughout the country, in part because he’s a darling of the news media.
“They’re really enchanted by him,” said Ron Drez, assistant director of the Eisenhower Center. “He points out little facts that no one would know of. When Nixon’s funeral was taking place (in Yorba, Calif.), Steve said he was struck by the little house on top of the hill that was in the camera’s view. He quoted Nixon as saying he was born in that little house on the hill, built with his father’s hands. Steve would take a llittle detail like that and bring it out. Someone coined the phrase ‘the national historian’ about Steve and I think it’s appropriate.”
UNO students scramble to get into his classes. “He obviously was the big star in our department,” said UNO historian Raphael Cassimere, a former student of Ambrose’s. “And I’m sure people know of our department because he was here.”
But celebrity always has followed Ambrose, said Mary Mohs, a college chum and friend of 40 years.
At the University of Wisconsin, Ambrose was a football hero, Chi Psi fraternity member and respected intellectual. He hung around with the smart set, befriending the like of Lamm, whom he still counts among his closest pals.
On the field, Ambrose was among the last of the 60-minute athletes who played both offense and defense. His ability helped the team reach the 1954 Rose Bowl, Mohs said. “If he had been bigger, he would have gone pro and the world would have lost a great historian.”
TRIP TO N.O. SWAYED HIM
The world did lose a doctor, however. As a son of the only physician in Whitewater,Wis., a farming community of 5,000, Ambrose enrolled in school as a pre-med student with every intention of becoming a small-town doctor. But two events pushed him in a different direction: an encounter with scholar T. William Hesseltine, and a whirlwind trip to New Orleans. “Hesseltine said historians contribute to the world’s knowledge,” Ambrose said, “You can’t do that as a small-town doctor. I changed my major within the week.”
As college seniors, Ambrose and Lamm hitchhiked one Christmas from Wisconsin, where it was 40 degrees below zero, to bright skies and Bourbon Street. “We’d both grown up in the Midwest and that’s where Midwestern boys go.” Ambrose said. “You can’t grow up in the Midwest without thinking about New Orleans. You get in a raft anywhere and you end up here. I’ve never lost my love for the city.”
Ambrose earned a master’s degree from Louisiana State University and returned to Wisconsin for a doctorate. Then, in 1960, he took his first job, teaching history at what was then called LSUNO.
“We were not an elite school in any way at all,” he said. “But we had an awfully good faculty becausse there were a lot of people who said, ‘My God, I want to live in New Orleans.’
Four years later, fate came calling in the person of Dwight Eisenhower. The retired president wanted Ambrose to edit his personal paper. As a voracious student of military history, Eisenhower had read Ambrose’s book on Gen. Henry Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff. The general liked what he saw. “I don’t think 200 people in the whole world read that book,” Ambrose said. “But it was that book that got me the opportunity of my life.”
WORKED WITH EISENHOWER
Ambrose resigned from UNO to take a job at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and work with Eisenhower.
He then taught at a number of schools, including the Naval War College, Temple University and Kansas State, before returning to New Orleans in 1970.
Ambrose began to write furiously on topics ranging from Crazy Horse and Custer to Lewis and Clark, Nixon and World War II.
The first books required countless trips to Montana, tramping over the Great Divide and following the Columbia River with his wife and children. The Ambroses camped, fished and hiked during the summers, eating and sleeping under the stars.
“We’d pack a big container of red beans, a big container of rice and a container of Luzianne and camp out all summer,” Moira said, “I had a huge black kettle. The kids were so good, Those were the best years.”