This text was obtained via automated optical character recognition.
It has not been edited and may therefore contain several errors.

---

I've slept overnight, in fact quite a few nights, at the site of the Little Big Horn battle. I've followed Crazy Horse through the Black Hills.
"I just meet the most fascinating characters.? Ambrose says. "Fabulous characters.
"Right now. I'm hooked on Richard Nixon. It's a strange one to get hooked on. But he is an absolutely fascinating person to be with. So now it's Nixon. God help me.''
Ambrose may fantasize that he is a Sioux warrior while galloping bareback on a pinto across the Great Plains, and he may speak of long-dead heroes as if they are close personal friends, but he is every bit the serious academic historian. He holds a Ph.D. in history from the University of Wisconsin. His books are thoroughly researched and extensively footnoted, and he disdains speculative historical re-creations. His most recent work. "Eisenhower ? The President." has drawn highly favorable reviews in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and the San Francisco Chronicle.	!
" Although I lead a very active life ? I'm out in , canoes all the time. I'm a runner. I'm a hunter. I'm a traveler, father of five ? some of my most exciting times have come while sitting in manuscript rooms." Ambrose says.
Ambrose was enthralled while writing the Eisenhower biography. He worked behind his home on Mirabeau Avenue in a book-lined studio he named the Eisenhowerplatz and decorated with a portrait of Ike. a flintlock rifle, bleached animal skulls and duck decoys. He pored over the material he and his wife had unearthed at the Eisenhower Library in Abilene. Kansas.
"I write my best between 4:30 and 8:30 in the morning." he says. "I would get up. and I would almost run out there. I'd be so eager to find out what happened, because I had all this new stuff that nobody had ever seen before.
"I'd come out full of excitement, and read
just meet the most fascinating characters/' Ambrose says. "Fabulous characters. Right now, I'm hooked on Richard Nixon. It's a strange one to get hooked on. But he is an absolutely fascinating person to be with. So now it's Nixon, God help me."
through the records of January 1957. and see how Ike is setting up the U-2 program. and what's happening with Little Rock, and so on
"For almost a year, almost every day. I sat at that typewriter for up to 10 hours a day. drinking incredible quantities of coffee and smoking way too many cigarettes, and just on a high the whole time.
"History is so much the most exciting thing you can do. it seems to me. " Ambrose says, "because your canvas is everything that's ever happened."
The life storv of Stephen Ambrose begins with his birth on January 10. 1936. He grew up in Whitewater. Wisconsin, a Norman Rockwell town of 5.000 nestled in the heart of dairy country. He was the second of three sons. His father
was a family doctor and his mother a housewife.
Ambrose remembers his childhood as an idyll in his safe and secure hometown. There was a flag-waving parade every Fourth of July and a portrait of Lincoln in even.' home. He hunted and fished and played sports year round. He was captain of the high-school football team and king of the prom.
His father was something of a history buff and his mother enjoyed lowbrow historical romances. Ambrose developed a minor fascination with Napoleon and read several books about him. But when he left home for the University of Wisconsin in Madison, he fully intended to follow his father into medicine.
"My idea was ? this would have been almost exactly 30 years ago ? that at this point in time. I would be sitting in my
office in Whitewater, seeing patients." Ambrose says today.
At Madison. Ambrose started at linebacker and offensive guard for the football team, playing in the Rose Bowl on New Year's Day. 1953. He also dug into his pre-med studies ? but found his advanced science courses tough to handle.
"Messages were coming in that I wasn't acknowledging vet ? that I wasn't cut out for this." he says.
To fulfill a humanities curriculum requirement, he signed up for a sophomore history course taught by William B. Hesseltlne. And it was in Hesseltine's classroom that Ambrose had what he calls his road-to-Damascus experience, an event that would change his life.
He walked into the room the first day and said that in this class, vou are
Professor Ambrose teaches three history courses at UNO thisfalL
going to be doing original research." Ambrose says. "He said you're not going to be writing term papers repeating what somebody else has already found out."
Professor Hesseltine explained that each student would write a 10-page report on an obscure congressman for inclusion in a collection of biographies of Wisconsinites.
"I was just stunned, shattered, overjoyed.'' Ambrose savs. "I thought it was the greatest goddamn thing I'd ever heard ? that I would have a chance to add to the world s knowledge. It seemed to me to be an awfully exciting thing to do.
"Within two weeks of
12 / DIXIE November 25. 1984