As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods (original) (raw)

U.S.|As Historian's Fame Grows, So Do Questions on Methods

https://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/us/as-historian-s-fame-grows-so-do-questions-on-methods.html

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Jan. 11, 2002

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January 11, 2002

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For most of his career, the historian Stephen E. Ambrose was best known for his exhaustive multivolume biographies of Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. He was respected in his field but seldom read by the general public until 1994, when he published ''D-Day,'' a sentimental tale about rank-and-file soldiers.

''D-Day'' became a best seller and changed Mr. Ambrose's life. To manage his soaring income, Mr. Ambrose incorporated into what is now called Ambrose & Ambrose Inc., based in Helena, Mont. He began to keep his five grown children busy as research assistants and published best sellers roughly every two years. With his family's help, he became the most prolific, the most commercially successful and the most academically accomplished of a new group of blockbuster historians.

Lately, however, some historians have begun to wonder about the toll of his prodigious pace. On Saturday, he acknowledged that his current best seller, ''The Wild Blue,'' inappropriately borrowed the words and phrases of three passages from a book by the historian Thomas Childers, ''The Wings of Morning.'' A closer examination of ''The Wild Blue'' by The New York Times indicates that in at least five other places Mr. Ambrose borrowed words, phrases and passages from other historians' books. Mr. Ambrose again acknowledged his errors and promised to correct them in later editions.

But even while conceding mistakes, Mr. Ambrose also defended his overall methods. He noted that in each case he included a footnote to the works he used, and he sometimes praised the books in his text.

''I tell stories,'' Mr. Ambrose said. ''I don't discuss my documents. I discuss the story. It almost gets to the point where, how much is the reader going to take? I am not writing a Ph.D. dissertation.''

''I wish I had put the quotation marks in, but I didn't,'' Mr. Ambrose said. ''I am not out there stealing other people's writings. If I am writing up a passage and it is a story I went to tell and this story fits and a part of it is from other people's writing, I just type it up that way and put it in a footnote. I just want to know where the hell it came from.''

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