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When, in 1962, Dwight Eisenhower read Ambrose’s first book (a biography of Gen. Henry W. Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff), the former President invited Ambrose to help edit his papers, then asked the young scholar to write his biography. “It changed my life,” says Ambrose of his days with Ike. “I was a 28-year-old-historian who’d written one book.” Afterward he went on to publish a dual biography of Crazy Horse and Gen. George Custer, a three-volume study of Richard Nixon and three books about World War II, including D-Day, which brought accolades from another popular general, Colin Powell.
As for the man who earned his accolades almost two centuries ago, it was a copy of Meriwether Lewis’s journal, given to him by an aunt in 1975, Ambrose recalls, that “hooked” the author on his subject, “I knew,” he says, “that I had to go out there and see this country.” Which is what he did the following summer, packing up his family-he and Moira have five children between them, now grown-and hiking a small stretch of the rugged trail. (Ambrose will soon venture into another untamed wilderness: television. He has optioned Undaunted Courage, for six figures, to National Geographic Television, in association with Hallmark Entertainment, which plans to turn the book into a miniseries.)
Reading aloud from Lewis’s journals that summer 20 years ago, Ambrose unwittingly embarked, like Lewis and Clark, on a journey of discovery, the outcome of which he could not possibly have envisioned. “The single thing I most wanted was to enlarge the circle of those of us who sit around the campfire talking about Lewis and Clark,” he says, With 197,500 copies of Undaunted Courage in print, that modest goal has clearly been met. ( People 7/1/96)
Ambrose - End of an era for Nixon biographer In a curious way New Orleans has Richard Nixon to thank for the fact that the well-known historian and Nixon biographer Stephen Ambrose has chosen to make his home here. In 1970, when Ambrose occupied the prestigious high-profile position of Eisenhower Professor of History at Kansas State University and Nixon came to the campus to talk about Vietnam, Ambrose heckled him. The resulting firestorm of faculty protest resulted in Ambrose’s quick and voluntary departure.
He was talking about Vietnam and we were yelling things like ‘Napalm! Free fire zone!’ and other such obscenities,” Ambrose recalled in a recent interview. “I wouldn’t do that now, of course. But the age I was then, there was no way in the world I wouldn’t have done it.”
Despite Ambrose’s early Nixon-bashing days, his obsession with the man led to grudging and heartfelt admiration after years of work on a three-volume biography. The final volume, “Nixon: Ruin and Recovery, 1973-1990,” has just been published. The first two volumes, “Education of a Politician” and “Triumph of a Politician” were critically acclaimed, and Ambrose’s work is regarded by many as the definitive study.
Ambrose is well-known for his adoption of the personae of his subjects (he had long hair and wore cowboy boots non-stop while writing “Crazy Horse and Custer”) and his work on Nixon has been a somewhat subdued continuation of that pattern, right down to Ambrose’s frequent dreams about the man.
At 55, Ambrose is working at the height of his powers and he admits he may actually share some of his subject’s traits. “Moira (his wife) said to me the other day, ‘Isn’t it amazing, when we were younger and poorer and you were working your tail off on “Ike” (Ambrose’s critically acclaimed two-volume biography of Dwight Eisenhower), we always had time to go canoeing in the swamps and backpacking in the mountains. And the last eight or nine years, well, now the kids are gone, and we’re relatively well off, and we never find time for that.’ It set me back;. I took her out canoeing that afternoon.”
He mulls the idea over for a minute. “You know, working on Nixon, I guess I have become, in some superficial ways, like him. I live on the beach, and whenever I need to think about things, I take long solitary walks on the beach just like Nixon, but she really did set me back. I’m going to stop working so hard.”
Ambrose is an incredibly productive scholar. He is Boyd Professor of History at the University of New Orleans, and he also directs the Eisenhower Center for Leadership Studies. In addition to the final volume of his Nixon trilogy, published this week, he also has an article on David Duke that will appear in next week’s Time magazine, and forthcoming articles in Foreign Affairs and the Military History Quarterly. His plans to establish a D-Day Museum at the University of New Orleans have been bolstered by a request for a $4-million appropriation from Congress, and the center has just acquired a 1957 Higgins-designed boat (like the New Orleans-produced landing craft that made D-Day a successful operation). He’s on a roll.
Ambrose already has completed his next book, called “Band of Brothers,” about the 101st Airborne, to be published next June. He is about to begin a major book on D-Day to coincide with the 50th anniversary of that event in 1994. The book will be based on the thousands of oral histories Ambrose has been collecting over the years. “I’d like to write my generation’s Cornelius Ryan,” he said, referring to the bestselling author’s book, “The Longest Day.”
But for now, there’s “Nixon,” and the end of an era for Ambrose, and his fascination with this elusive subject, whom he has called “the most important biographical subject in America in the 20th century.”
Ambrose was in Richard Nixon’s presence only twice, during that speech at Kansas State and at the opening of the Nixon library, and both times he was part of a crowd.
“I tried to meet him, but he turned me down cold,” Ambrose said. “He denounces me now. By name. That’s even better than being on the enemies list.”
But when he thinks about the man, he calls him Dick. After all, as he says, “I’ve known him all his life. I’ve known him from the time he was a little boy to now that he’s an old man. He’s always been Dick to me.”
Despite his initial reservations about undertaking the Nixon biography, Ambrose relented, for a number of reasons. “It was as much as anything, running this center here, with a board of directors who are all Republican, and they’re all men I admire and like, and they liked him. I wanted to find out what it was about Nixon that they found admirable.”
He found a great deal to admire, so much so in fact, that he says “If I had to do over again, I’d vote for Nixon.”
Ambrose said that he is one of the first historians to work with the transcripts of the Watergate tapes. “One of the things that was intriguing was that I kept seeing how these guys lied to each other all the time. They were playing this fascinating, intricate game of ‘What does he know? What have I said to him in the past? What is he likely to find out?’ And all of this is in a continuous flow. They’ll talk about how they’re going to send Mitchell to jail and then Mitchell will come in and you’ll see Nixon playing his games with Mitchell. There was a detective’s fascination in working with that material.”
What Ambrose has always striven for in his work is a sense of fairness, a principle that came into play while working with that material. “I was always keenly aware that I was only listening to what was related to the cover-up of the crime, but there were a million other words being said in that office. I kept reminding myself that I was hearing the man backed into a corner, not hearing the president of the United States as he went about his business. And that would have made for a more sympathetic reading, I think.”
This book, much more so than the first two, evoke for anyone over 30 their sharpest political memories. It was our national obsession. And the other thing is the uniqueness of the source. I didn’t have to summarize or guess. It was the damndest experience listening to those tapes the first time through.