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Stephen and Moira Ambrose with grandson Alexander in Whittier, Calif.
In college Ambrose, like many his age, considered himself a liberal.
Among his liberal friends was his roommate, Dick Lamb, who went on to become governor of Colorado and later Ross Perot's vice-presidential candidate.
"I remember our landlord shocked us both when he said, ?If you?re not liberal when you are young, you have no heart.
If you?re not conservative when you are old, you have no brain.? Of course we didn?t believe him - then.?
Ambrose chose to focus on Civil War history, as did his professor, to whom he still refers, respectfully, as ?Mr.
Hesseltine.?
But Ambrose?s first book, Halleck.:
Lincoln's Chief of Staff, attracted the
attention of none other than former president Dwight Eisenhower.
Ambrose was 28 by then, married with two young children and holding his first teaching job, as assistant professor of history at UNO -then Louisiana State University in New Orleans, a brand-new school occupying a fomier U.S. naval station built during World War II. It turned out to be a prophetic setting.
Eisenhower asked Ambrose to help edit his papers, then to write his biography. Within the next eight years, Ambrose would tackle both projects, turn out three other books and accept teaching positions at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore and the U. S. Naval War College in Newport, R.I.
He would also lose his young wife, Judy, a manic-depressive (someone who suffers from bipolar disorder), to suicide. (In 1996, his bestseller Undaunted Courage, about the journey of Lewis and Clark, would focus on someone else he believes to have been affected by that malady, Meriweather Lewis.)
In 1967, he married Moira Buckley, who has a Ph.D. in English literature from Tulane University. ?She is always my first editor,? he says. The two met in Baltimore when she was writing for that city?s daily, The Sun.
Later, he adopted her three children. Hugh, the youngest, works as Ambrose?s assistant. The Lewis and Clark Trail in Montana turned out to be a fine place for the young family with five children to vacation and for Ambrose to research his Lewis and Clark story as well. He has a house in Helena, Mont.. where he and Moira spend six months of the year, and another in Bay St. Louis, Miss., where they spend the rest of their time.
He can work in both places.
"I make my living by reading other people?s mail, listening to their stories, reading the memoirs,? he writes in the introduction to Citizen Soldiers.
There are two ways to record history. One is to research documents and artifacts of those long dead, and one is to record the memories of those still alive to tell the tales.
Ambrose has done it both wavs.
He started out on the more traditional path and breathed life into long-dead people such as Gen. George Custer and Crazy Horse, as well as I,ewis and Clark, sometimes by re-creating their experiences.
?I?ve walked every step of that trail. I've made wakes (in the river) where Lewis made wakes, and I?ve sat around his campfires,? Ambrose told a People magazine reporter.
He was, he admits, forced to use the same method when he researched Richard Nixon, although Nixon was very much alive. But he refused to talk to Ambrose.
And yet, he says, ?When I was finished with him, I felt that I knew him as well as I knew Dwight Eisenhower? - this though he spent six years with Eisenhower.
BURST INTO THE OFFICE
Ambrose returned to UNO in 1970, by now so engrossed in his work he seemed a bit on the absent-minded-professor side. "I don?t know if he could even write a check,? says one fomier student. ?When he taped the TV classes, the producer was always running after him, trying to straighten his tie or adjust his jacket, and Ambrose would kind of brush him off.?
But his classes were so popular, students couldn't get enough of him.
David Campbell was one of those students. He decided Ambrose should be teaching more and researching less, if at all, and he voiced his complaint in the Driftwood, UNO?s student newspaper.
?Then guess who burst into the Driftwood office and said, ?Who?s this David Campbell??" Campbell recalls.
Instead of chewing out the young man, Ambrose went for a walk with him and gave his views on the necessity of scholarly research. He was convincing. Campbell would eventually become his teaching assistant and works in the Montana office maintained by Ambrose and his son.
Ambrose founded the Eisenhower Center at UNO in 1983. To gather material for his books about World War II, D-Day, Citizen Soldiers and Ihe Victors, Ambrose put out a call to veterans, through -?116
AMBROSE FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH
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