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(taring 1898, Stephen Ambrose not oily lolled save the memory ol Prime Ryu, to also tad Ms oa tte best-seller lists, was a regular 01 TV tlsterical documentaries aid continued his battle to develop a D-Day museom in New Orleans.
oughly half a century after D-Day, historian Stephen Ambrose undressed and rushed into the surf at Normandy.
The University of New Orleans students who?d made the trip with him were startled, but not really surprised.
Ambrose has long had a reputation for diving into his work. ?Sometimes he gets lost in the moment. In his lectures, he?d even do voices sometimes,? says Elena Marina, a UNO graduate who attended his classes in the early ?90s. ?He did a particularly good imitation of Nixon.?
And well he might. He spent six years working on a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Prior to that, he had written the biography of Dwight Eisenhower. He?s written 22 books of history and seen four of them (if you count the hardback editions separately) on the New York Times best-seller list at one time.
?No one else ever did that,? he says.
He was named consultant on Steven Spielberg?s most recent blockbuster, ?Saving Private Ryan.? Spielberg optioned one of Ambrose?s World War II books, Citizen Soldiers, for some $250,000. And both Spielberg and ?Private Ryan? star Tom Hanks have donated genorously to Ambrose?s pet project, a planned D-Day museum in New Orleans? Warehouse District.
All this is pretty heady stuff for a man who recently retired after nearly 20 years teaching history at UNO. But Ambrose?s life has a habit of taking extraordinary twists.
He was born in Decatur, 111., in 1936, so he?s old enough to remember one of the periods in history that form his expertise.	-*
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BY LIZ SCOTT ? PHOTOGRAPHED BY FRANK ROGOZIENSKI
56
N E W ORLEANS DECK M B I: R
1998