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4B ? THURSDAY, OCTOBER 17, 2002
Ambrose ? in his own words
who stresed the importance of writing well. After getting my M.A. degree in 1958, I returned to Wisconsin to do my Ph.D. work under Hesseltine.
Funny thing, Harry Williams was a much better writer than Hesseltine, but Hesseltine was the better teacher of writing. We graduate students once asked him: "How can you demand so much from us when your own books are not all that well written," as we confronted him with a review of one of his books that praised his research and historical understanding but deplored his writing. Hesseltin replied, "My dear boys, You have a better teacher than I did." ,
From 1960 to 1995 I was a full-time teacher (University of New Orleans, Rutgers, Kansas State, Naval War College, U.C. Berkeley, a number of European schools, among others), something that has been invaluable to my writing. There is nothing like standing before 50 students at 8 a.m. to start talking about an event that occurred 100 years ago, because the look on their faces is a challenge ? "lets see you keep me awake." You learn what works and what doesn't in a hurry.
Teaching and writing are one to me - in each case I am telling a story. As I sit at my computer, or stand at the podium, I think of myself as sitting around the campfire after a day on the trail, telling stories that I hope will have the members of the audience, or the readers, leaning forward just a bit, wanting to know what happens next.
Some of the rules of writing I've developed on my own include: never try to write about a battle until you have walked the ground; when you write about politicians, keep in mind that somebody has to do it; you are a story-teller, not God, so your job is not to pass judgments but to explain, illustrate, inform and entertain.
The idea for a book comes in a variety of ways. I started as a Civil War historian because Hesseltine taught the Civil War. I wrote about Eisenhower because he asked me to become his biographer, on the basis of a book I had done on Henry Halleck, Lincoln's Chief of Staff. I never wanted to write about Nixon but my editor (Alice Mayhew at
Simon and Schuster) made me do it by saying, "Where else can you find a greater challenge?" I did Crazy Horse and Custer because I took my family camping in the Black Hills of South Dakota and got hooked on the country, and the topic brought me back to the Black Hills many times. I did Meriwether Lewis to have an excuse to keep returning to Montana, thus covering even more of the American West.
My World War II books flowed out of the association with Eisenhower, along with my feelings toward the GIs. I was ten years old when the war ended. I thought the returning veterans were giants who had saved the world from barbarism. I still think so. I remain a hero worshiper. Over the decades I've interviewed thousands of veterans. It is a privilege to hear their stories, then write them up.
What drives me is curiosity. I want to know how this or that was done ? Lewis and Clark getting to the Pacific; the GIs on D-Day; Crazy Horse's Victory over George Custer at the Little Big Horn; the making of an elite company in the 101st Airborne, and so on. And I've found that if I want to know, I've got to do the research and then write it up myself. For me, the act of writing is the act of learning.
I'm blessed to have Moira Buckley Ambrose as my wife. She was an English Lit major and school teacher; she is an avid reader; she has a great ear. At the end of each writing day, she sits with me and I read aloud what I've done. After more than three decades of this, I still can't dispense with requiring her first of all to say, "That's good, that's great, way to go." But then we get to work. We make the changes. This reading aloud business is critical to me ? I've developed an ear of my own, so I can hear myself read - as it reveals awkward passages better than anything else. If
I	can't read it smoothly, it needs fixing. Hesseltine used to tell his students that the art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of a chair. It is a monk's existence, the loneliest job in the world. As Moira and I have five kids (at one time all teens together; the phone in the evenings can be imagined) I started going to bed at eight to get up at
four and have three quiet hours for writing before the teaching day began. The kids grew up and moved out and I retired in May, 1995, but I keep to the habit.
I'm sometimes asked which of my books is my own favorite. My answer is, whatever one I'm working on. Right now (Winter 1999) a book on World War II in the Pacific as well as a book on the 15th airforce and the B-24 Liberators they flew. I think the greatest achievement of the American Republic in the 18th Century was the army at Valley Forge; in the 19th Century it was the Army of the Potomac; in the 20th Century, it was the U.S. military in WWII. I want to know how we beat the Japanese in the Pacific and how our airforce helped us beat the Germans. To do a book of this scope is daunting but rewarding. I get paid for interviewing the old soldiers and reading their private memoirs. My job is to pick out the best one of every fifty or so stories and pass it along to readers, along with commentary on what it illustrates and teaches. It is a wonderful way to make a living.
My experiences with the military have been as an observer. The only time I wore a uniform was in naval ROTC as a freshman at the University of Wisconsin, and in army ROTC as a sophomore. I was in second grade when the United States entered World War II, in sixth grade when the war ended. When I graduated from high school, in 1953, I expected to go into the army, but within a month the Korean War ended and I went to college instead. Upon graduation in 1957, I went straight to graduate school. By the time America was again at war, in 1964, I was twenty-eight years old and the father of five children. So I never served.
But I have admired and respected the men who did fight since my childhood. When I was in grade school World War II dominated my life. My father was a navy doctor in the Pacific. My mother worked in a pea cannery beside German POWs (Afrika Korps troops captured in Tunisia in May 1943). Along with my brothers ? Harry, two years older, and Bill, two Years younger--I went to the movies three times a week (ten cents six nights a week, twenty-five cents on Saturday night), not to see the films, which
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were generally Clinkers, but to see the newsreels which were almost exclusively about the fighting in North Africa, Europe, and the Pacific. We played at war constantly. "Japs', vs. Marines, GIs vs. "Krauts".
In high school I got hooked on Napoleon. I read various biographies and studied his campaigns. As a seventeen-year-old freshman in naval ROTC, I took a course on naval history, starting with the Greeks and ending with World War
II	(in one semester!). My instructor had been a submarine skipper in the Pacific and we all worshipped him. More important , he was a gifted teacher who loved the navy and history. Although I was a premed student with plans to take up my father's practice in Whitewater, Wisconsin, I found the his- > tory course to be far more interesting than chemistry or physics. But in the second semester of naval ROTC, the required course was gunnery. Although I was an avid hunter and thoroughly familiar with shotguns and rifles, the workings of the five inch ? cannon baffled me. So in my sophomore year I switched to army ROTC.
Also that year, I took a course	entitled
"Representative Americans" taught by Professor William B. Hesseltine. In his first lecture he announced that in this course we would not be writing term papers that summarized the conclusions of three or four books; instead we would be doing original research on nineteenth-century Wisconsin politicians, professional and business leaders, for the purpose of putting together a dictionary of Wisconsin biography that would be deposited in the state historical society. We would, Hesseltine toid us, be contributing to the world's knowledge. The words caught me up. I had never imagined I could do such a thing as contribute to the world's knowledge. Forty-five years later, the phrase continues to resonate with me. It changed my life.
At the conclusion of the lecture - on General Washington ? I went up to him and asked how I could do what he did for a living. He laughed and said to stick around, he would show me.
I went straight to the registrar's office and changed my major from premed to history. I have been at it ever since.