US academic world shocked as respected historian is said to have 'made up'
meetings with 34th US president
Paul Harris
The Observer, Sunday 25 April 2010
His book Band of Brothers – which chronicled the exploits of one company of
US airborne troops in second world war Europe – was turned into a highly
praised TV series.
But now American historian Professor Stephen Ambrose, who was President
Dwight D Eisenhower's official biographer and wrote or edited more than a
dozen books about him, is embroiled in a posthumous controversy. It is
alleged that he invented many meetings he claimed to have had with
Eisenhower, and even fabricated entire interviews with him. The revelations
have sent shock waves through the scholarly community in the United States.
The books written by Ambrose, who died in 2002, brought him popular acclaim,
and director Steven Spielberg used him as a military adviser on his 1998
Oscar-winning film Saving Private Ryan. Band of Brothers became a cultural
milestone when it was turned into a TV series on which Ambrose was a
producer. It was hailed for educating an entire generation about the
sacrifices of their forefathers. But it appears that Ambrose indulged in
some sort of fantasy about the extent of his relationship with Eisenhower.
In TV interviews, he claimed to have spent "hundreds and hundreds of hours"
with the former president. He even once said he would spend two days a week
working with Eisenhower in his office.
However, recently studied records of Eisenhower's meetings contradict the
notion that the pair had any lengthy face-to-face contact. "I think five
hours [in total] is a generous estimation of the actual time they spent
together. I personally would push it back to less than two or three," said
Tim Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library in
Abilene, Kansas.
The discovery came to light almost by accident. The museum had been planning
an exhibition exploring the relationship between Ambrose and Eisenhower.
Rives found that the records showed that Ambrose and Eisenhower had met only
three times, and never alone. He found that on seven occasions when Ambrose
had claimed in the footnotes to his book Supreme Commander to have met
Eisenhower, his subject was either elsewhere in the country or holding
meetings with other people at the time. In one example, Ambrose claimed to
have had an interview with Eisenhower in Pennsylvania, when Eisenhower was
in Kansas. "The whole story kind of unravelled from there. It was quite a
surprise. We were not looking for it, so it sort of happened almost by
accident," Rives said.
Given that the lives of former presidents are meticulously detailed by their
staff, there is almost no chance Ambrose could have held interviews with
Eisenhower that went unrecorded.
Later claims by Ambrose in other books to have interviewed Eisenhower lack
specific dates or places, but were just footnoted as "Interview with DDE".
However, the range of subjects Ambrose claimed to have discussed with
Eisenhower increased to take in topics such as giving up smoking or the
Vietnam war.
Rives believes there is no way that Ambrose could have discussed such a vast
array of subjects in the tiny amount of time he actually spent with his
subject. "I find that very doubtful. That should be something that would be
a concern for scholars. It could cast doubt."
Ambrose claimed that Eisenhower asked him to be his biographer by ringing
him out of the blue in 1964. But Rives found letters from Ambrose to
Eisenhower introducing himself and then asking him to agree to Ambrose
writing his biography. This is not the first scandal over Ambrose's work. In
2002 he was accused of plagiarism in his book The Wild Blue. His publisher
issued an apology but Ambrose said he had merely failed to put some short
passages taken from elsewhere in quotation marks.
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