Stephen Ambrose
I read three of his books, Nixon and Eisenhower biographies, and Undaunted, about Lewis and Clark. I met him twice, at one reading at the Museum of Our National Heritage, in Lexington, MA and one at the Cambridge Public Library. We spoke briefly after each reading. I liked him.
[From biography]
American historian and biographer of U.S. Presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard Nixon. He was a longtime professor of history at the University of New Orleans and the author of many best selling volumes of American popular history.
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Ambrose originally wanted to major in pre-medicine, but changed his major to history after hearing the first lecture in a U.S. history class entitled "Representative Americans" in his sophomore year. The course was taught by William B. Hesseltine, whom Ambrose credits with fundamentally shaping his writing and igniting his interest in history
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In 1970, while teaching at Kansas State University, Ambrose participated in heckling of Richard Nixon during a speech the president gave on the KSU campus.
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In 1964, Ambrose took a position at Johns Hopkins as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, a project aimed at organizing, cataloging and publishing Eisenhower's principal papers. From this work and discussions with Eisenhower emerged an article critical of Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle, which had depicted Eisenhower as politically naîve, when at the end of World War II he allowed Soviet forces to take Berlin, thus shaping the Cold War that followed.[15] Ambrose expanded this into a book, Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945: The Decision to Halt at the Elbe.
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In 1964 Ambrose was commissioned to write the official biography of the former president and five-star general Dwight D. Eisenhower.[16] This resulted in a book on Eisenhower's war years (published 1970) and a two-volume full biography (published 1983 and 1984), which are considered "the standard" on the subject.[17] Ambrose also wrote a three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. Although Ambrose was a strong critic of Nixon, the biography is considered fair and just regarding Nixon's presidency.
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1998, he received the National Humanities Medal.[2] In 2000, Ambrose received the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service, the highest honorary award the Department of Defense offers to civilians.[11] In 2001, he was awarded the Theodore Roosevelt Medal for Distinguished Service from the Theodore Roosevelt Association.[20] Ambrose won an Emmy as one of the producers for the mini-series Band of Brothers.[11] Ambrose also received the George Marshall Award, the Abraham Lincoln Literary Award, the Bob Hope Award from the Congressional Medal of Honor Society, and the Will Rogers Memorial Award.
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In the 1973 ITV television series, The World at War, episode 35, From War to Peace, Ambrose made basic factual errors. He said:
"Manpower losses were almost insignificant; compared to the other combatants, insignificant. Only slightly more than a quarter of a million Americans died during the war. America was the least mobilized of all the nations, of all the major combatants in World War II. Altogether, we had an army and navy and air force of 12 million men out of a total population of 170 million. And of that 12 million, probably less than six million ever got overseas."[27]
While American manpower losses as a percentage of population were insignificant compared to the majority of combatants, his manpower and population estimates were heavily flawed. The population of the United States during the war was 131 million, of which nearly 16.6 million served in the armed forces during World War II, including 241,093 in the Coast Guard, and 243,000 in the Merchant Marine. Military deaths were 405,399.[28] According to U.S. census data, 73 percent of military personnel served abroad during World War II.
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After Eisenhower's death in 1969, Ambrose made repeated claims to have had a unique and extraordinarily close relationship with him over the final five years of the former President's life. In an extensive 1998 interview, for instance, Ambrose stated that he spent "a lot of time with Ike, really a lot, hundreds and hundreds of hours." Ambrose claimed he interviewed Eisenhower on a wide range of subjects, and that he had been with him "on a daily basis for a couple years" before his death "doing interviews and talking about his life."[7] The former president's diary and telephone records show that the pair met only three times, for a total of less than five hours.
http://encyclopedia.thefreedictionary.com/Stephen+Ambrose
Stephen Edward Ambrose (January 10, 1936 – October 13, 2002)
