Apr 25 2010
Historians Behaving Badly
On the heels of this week’s revelations regarding Orlando Figes’ sock-puppet denunciations of “rival” historians via Amazon.com comes breaking news of yet another scandal involving a “best-selling popular historian.” In this case, the shenanigans in question involve the late Stephen Ambrose (1936-2002) author of nearly two dozen books (including widely-heralded accounts of the Lewis & Clark expedition, the D-Day landings, and the American Trans-Continental Railroad) and adviser to Stephen Spielberg’s Academy Award-winning epic Saving Private Ryan (1998).
As Richard Rayner notes in an April 26, 2010 piece for The New Yorker titled “Channeling Ike,”
Ambrose spoke often, on C-SPAN or “Charlie Rose” or in print interviews, about how his life had been transformed by getting to know the former President and spending “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing him over a five-year period before Eisenhower died, in 1969.
The only problem? The claims aren’t true. A recent investigation of President Eisenhower’s papers by Tim Rives, Deputy Director at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum (Abileen, KS) has uncovered an alternate reality, namely “that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together.”
The issue might be brushed off as an unfortunate (if gross) embellishment of the record by an otherwise well-regarded historian save for two things.
First, Ambrose’s early career was built upon his prodigious writing as the “official” historian of the Eisenhower presidency. The discovery that he did not, in fact, have sustained and personal contact with Ike as he long claimed will doubtless call into question the voluminous notes and references in his books that cite these non-existent interviews.
Second, this is hardly the first time that Ambrose has been found to have acted in a manner that might be charitably be described as “less than scrupulous.” In 2002, he was infamously forced to admit to having copped numerous passages of his book The Wild Blue from other authors without attribution. [History News Networked exhaustively chronicled that earlier controversy here.]
On the whole, a rather dismal week for the historical discipline.