Jon Wiener: Stephen Ambrose, Another Historian in Trouble
[Jon Wiener started writing for The Nation in 1984. He's also professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and a Los Angeles radio host.]
Stephen Ambrose, the best-selling historian who wrote or edited more than a dozen books about Eisenhower as general and president, based his fame in large part on what he said were his interviews with Ike – but now, eight years after Ambrose's death, an official at the Eisenhower Library in Abeline says the interviews never took place.
In his first and biggest Ike book, "The Supreme Commander," published in 1970, Ambrose listed nine interviews with the former president. But according to Richard Rayner of The New Yorker, that's not true. The deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, Tim Rives, told Rayer that Ike saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours, and that the two men were never alone together.
Ambrose wrote more books about Ike after "The Supreme Commander," including a two-volume biography. As the books got longer, the footnotes got fuzzier – instead of specific dates, readers found footnotes reading simply "Interview DE." But "as the citations grew more nebulous," Rayner writes, "the range of subjects that the interviews allegedly covered grew wider: the Rosenberg case, Dien Bien Phu, Douglas MacArthur, J.F.K., quitting smoking, the influence of Eisenhower's mother, Brown v. Board of Education."
It turns out Ambrose was making it up. You might call that "lying."...
Read entire article at The Nation
Stephen Ambrose, the best-selling historian who wrote or edited more than a dozen books about Eisenhower as general and president, based his fame in large part on what he said were his interviews with Ike – but now, eight years after Ambrose's death, an official at the Eisenhower Library in Abeline says the interviews never took place.
In his first and biggest Ike book, "The Supreme Commander," published in 1970, Ambrose listed nine interviews with the former president. But according to Richard Rayner of The New Yorker, that's not true. The deputy director of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abilene, Kansas, Tim Rives, told Rayer that Ike saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours, and that the two men were never alone together.
Ambrose wrote more books about Ike after "The Supreme Commander," including a two-volume biography. As the books got longer, the footnotes got fuzzier – instead of specific dates, readers found footnotes reading simply "Interview DE." But "as the citations grew more nebulous," Rayner writes, "the range of subjects that the interviews allegedly covered grew wider: the Rosenberg case, Dien Bien Phu, Douglas MacArthur, J.F.K., quitting smoking, the influence of Eisenhower's mother, Brown v. Board of Education."
It turns out Ambrose was making it up. You might call that "lying."...