Stephen Ambrose Interview (page: 2 / 7) Biographer and Historian	Print Interview

So when you were a child, your ambition was to be a doctor?

Stephen Ambrose: It was through high school and the first year and a half of college, yes.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. Whitewater, Wisconsin, like every small town in America, had a Carnegie library. Andrew Carnegie built libraries everywhere in this country, and they were usually in the center of town. This one was, and it opened the universe to you. This was pre-TV. My introduction to the world came in that Carnegie library, and I just devoured those books in there while I was in high school. I was either playing sports or going to school, or in that Carnegie library, reading.

What particular books do you remember making an impression on you when you were a kid?

Stephen Ambrose: I read some historical romances on the American Revolution that got me interested, and I remember reading Emil Ludwig's biography of Napoleon, and being caught up in the sweep and the drama. I don't think I really retained very much out of it except the story-telling aspect of it, and Ludwig is not--he would be scorned by professional historians as a writer. He was a popular writer, but he sure did catch me up. Now, I didn't go from reading that book to saying, "I want to tell stories for a living." I still wanted to be a doc. But as soon as Mr. Hesseltine said that you could add to the sum of the world's knowledge, and tell stories, and make a living doing it -- phew! Throw me into that briar patch!

As you grew older, what other books were important to you?

Stephen Ambrose: In high school I was reading Civil War stuff, and once I'd been exposed to Mr. Hesseltine, I was just ingesting Civil War books. The Civil War was his specialty, so naturally it became mine. He smoked a big oompah pipe, so I smoked a big oompah pipe, and so on -- hero worship to an extraordinary degree. I read all the good books on the Civil War: Bruce Catton's, Douglas Southall Freeman's.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I think the book that I learned the most from in terms of technique, as a storyteller, was Douglas Southall Freeman's biography of Lee. The great biography of Robert E. Lee. Because he does this in it, and he tells you in the foreword this is what he's going to do. You're never going to know anything in this book that Robert E. Lee didn't know. So if we're in the middle of the Civil War at the time of the Battle of Chancellorsville, and Hooker is coming around Lee's flank, and he's going to try to sneak in and make an attack from the rear, and Lee doesn't know that, you're not going to know that as a reader. You're going to find out what Hooker is doing at the moment that Lee finds it out. And what that really means is, in telling a story, don't ever flash-forward, don't ever give your story away. Keep your concentration on the person you're writing about, or the event you're writing about. Let things develop chronologically, because that's the way it happens in real life. Now that sounds very simple and very easy to do. It's awfully hard to do. Awfully hard to do. The temptation of flashing forward and saying, "But he was going to find out how wrong he was about that one," and you give the whole damn story away. So that's what I learned from Freeman.

That's a lot. When you made this rather dramatic switch to history, how did your folks react? Was your dad disappointed?

Stephen Ambrose: Very. My father was very disappointed. He had really counted on it, 'cause I'd been talking about it, and it fit so naturally into the pace of life in Wisconsin in the early 1950's. There was another doctor in town; the town was big enough. Whitewater, with 5,000 people, had two docs in it. The other doc's son had just graduated and come into the practice, and it looked like I was going to do the same. Dad was counting on that.

My older brother had gone off into business, and my younger brother was showing no interest at all in any kind of medical or scientific career. So I was the hope, and I let him down. But on the other hand, he grew up on a farm in Illinois. His dad wanted him to take over the farm. Instead, he went off to the University of Illinois and went to medical school and became a doc. In a way, it was a part of youthful rebellion. It didn't feel that way to me. I think it may have felt that way to him. But he did it to his dad, so I wasn't going to feel all that bad about it. It helped a lot that he liked history, and read Civil War history. After a while we started traveling to Civil War battlefields together. I don't want to say there was a reconciliation, because there was never that big a split. But it was nice that we shared this interest in the Civil War. When I started publishing books, he was very proud, and took it like a man.

I can imagine. Tell us how you became connected to Dwight Eisenhower. That's an amazing early part of your career as a writer.

Stephen Ambrose: I was teaching at the University of New Orleans, doing Civil War studies, and I had published a book called Halleck. He was Lincoln's chief of staff, an obscure figure from the Civil War. This came out of my dissertation that I wrote under Mr. Hesseltine.

Get the Flash Player to see this video. I got a phone call -- it was 1964 -- and it was Dwight Eisenhower on the phone, and he said, "Would you be interested in writing my biography?" And I said, "Yes, sir, I sure would." I was 28 years old. "I sure would." He said, "Well, come on up to see me." And I flew up to Gettysburg and we spent a day talking about what would be involved, and access to his papers, and he would tell his friends that, "Yes, you ought to have Professor Ambrose in for an interview," and so on. A whole day of this. At the end of the day, he said, "Well, you must have a lot of questions, young man." I said, "Yes sir, I sure do, but number one is: why me? I mean, there's dozens of Civil War historians out there, older men." He said, "I read your book on Halleck." Well, you could have knocked me over. That book was published by LSU Press in 1962, in an edition of 2,000 copies. It sold 931 copies. But one of 'em was sold to Dwight Eisenhower, and he read it, and he picked me on the basis of that book.

Ike died in 1969; I had been with him on a daily basis for a couple years before that, doing interviews and talking about his life. Mamie was still alive, she had the farm at Gettysburg, and then 10 years after that she died. Ike had willed that farm to the Government, and it is now part of the whole Gettysburg complex there. It belongs to the National Park Service and is open to the public.

The day after Mamie died, John Eisenhower, the only son, called me and said, "Steve, we're getting stuff out of here before it becomes property of the National Park Service. It is very personal to us, me and my kids." And he said, "Dad's copy of Halleck is here, and he's got it all marked up. Do you want it?" And I said, "What's the alternative?" He said, "The alternative is it's going to stay here in dad's bookcase, where it was." And I thought for a very few seconds, and John said, "Quick, you've got to decide, I've got a lot of other people here to call with this sort of thing." And I said, "John, let's leave it where it is." So it's still there on that Gettysburg farm, and I don't know to this day if I made the right decision or not. Anyway, that's how I got into Eisenhower. He called me on the basis of this book that I had written on Henry Halleck.

How did you feel when he called? Did you recognize his voice?

Stephen Ambrose: Sure. Of course I recognized his voice. How did I feel? Ten feet tall. Curious, overwhelmingly, and he said that he wanted me to come up and talk about doing a biography. I thought that I had flown to the moon, and it turned out I had.

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