The New York Times

January 11, 2002
NATIONAL EDITION
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/11/national/11AMBR.html

As Historian's Fame Grows, So Does Attention to Sources

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

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."

In general, professional historians consider it a failing to rely so closely on a single work by another historian for
whole passages in any event, even when attributed. More important, Mr. Ambrose should have marked direct
quotations in the text, or at the very least noted the closeness of his paraphrase in his footnotes, historians say.
College students caught employing the same practices would be in trouble.

Mr. Ambrose initially defied his critics to find other borrowed sentences without quotation marks in his 30 books,
before he was shown the passages from two readily available previous works that he used in "The Wild Blue." He
acknowledged using sentences verbatim and in at least five cases closely echoed the language and structure of
longer passages from both the Army's official seven-volume study, "The Army Air Forces in World War II" by
Wesley Frank Craven and James Lea Cate (University of Chicago, 1949) and "The Rise of American Air Power"
by Michael S. Sherry (Yale University Press, 1987).

Although Mr. Ambrose, 66, said his integrity had never wavered, he acknowledged that his methods changed over
time, as he turned to more popular subjects and relied more on his children.

When Mr. Ambrose earned his doctorate at the University of Wisconsin in 1960, he said, his ambition was to
emulate traditional historians. His first book, "Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff," was dense with footnotes and
scholarly minutiae and read by almost no one. But one of its admirers was Eisenhower, who in 1964 tapped
Ambrose, then 28, to write his biography.

Mr. Ambrose deliberately overcame his own admiration for Eisenhower to write a nuanced two-volume biography
including Eisenhower's failures. His three-volume biography of Nixon underscored the former president's virtues.
"With Nixon and Eisenhower I was just wedded to the documents," Mr. Ambrose said. "It was a total marriage."
Mr. Ambrose's scholarship helped him win tenure at the University of New Orleans and in 1983 to secure
financing for its Eisenhower Center, where he worked with a team of researchers to collect the recollections of
more than 2,000 veterans.

Mr. Ambrose's interest had turned to stories of triumphant heroes with few moral or historical ambiguities, like
those profiled in "Band of Brothers," published in 1993.

After the success of "D-Day" a year later, his editors at Simon & Schuster began to look forward more eagerly to
each next book.

"We welcome the fact that he is prolific," said David Rosenthal, publisher of Simon & Schuster, "He works at a
schedule that he sets, and we encourage the amount of his output because there is a readership that wants it."
For his part, though, Mr. Ambrose said he never felt pushed. His editor, Alice Mayhew, had even advised him to
slow down, telling him, "I don't want people to think of you as somebody just pumping out cookies," as he recalled
last week.

Mr. Ambrose said computers, and especially spell-checking programs, had helped him increase his pace. He said
he relied on chronological storytelling to build readers' suspense, which helped him organize his books.
His advances for each new book swelled to more than $1 million apiece, and his income, including film rights,
grew to more than $3 million a year, according to The Wall Street Journal.

To keep up the pace, he also increasingly enlisted his son and agent, Hugh Ambrose, 35, as a collaborator, with
additional research from his four other children.

"My son Hugh is my partner," Mr. Ambrose said last week. "He is just a wonderful researcher. I don't know
where he finds these guys" — veterans and sources — "then he gets on the phone with them for three or four
hours, and that stuff is gold to me." Mr. Ambrose said his son's name would appear on the cover of his next book.
But Mr. Ambrose said he used no other research assistants, and took sole responsibility for any instances of
copying. "Hugh gave me the Childers's books and said, `Read this,' and I did," he said.

In light of the recent disclosure, Mr. Rosenthal defended Mr. Ambrose, saying his errors did not amount to
plagiarism.

"There is no effort to deceive," he said. "I think again that the material has been appropriately footnoted, and if
there have been omissions it appears to be in the methods of citing as opposed to the citation itself. If there have
been sins of omission, we will act to rectify them."

Professional historians, however, said damage had already been done to Mr. Ambrose's reputation. Others have
unearthed more limited but similar examples from his biography of Nixon and his book "Crazy Horse and
Custer." Dr. Sherry, a history professor at Northwestern University, was shocked to learn of Mr. Ambrose's use of
his work.

"That is a lot of sloppiness, or plagiarism, or some combination of the two," Dr. Sherry said. "Any of us
professional historians can occasionally slip into uncomfortably close paraphrase, but very few of us do it as much
as he seems to have been doing it in this book. This would be, for me as a teacher, unacceptable in a student, much
less in a professional historian. It's sad because he is historian whose work I have often used and admired."
Other historians said the errors were symptomatic of a style of writing popular history that prizes immediacy and
fast-paced storytelling over critically interpreting the past. "You can't get a more striking example of lack of critical
distance from your sources than simply typing it into your own word processing program," said Patricia Nelson
Limerick, a professor of history at the University of Colorado.

Most, however, simply chalked up the errors to the ambitious pace of Mr. Ambrose's late career as a blockbuster
author. Eric Foner, a history professor at Columbia University, said: "Nobody can write as many books as he has
— many of them were well-written books — without the sloppiness that comes with speed and the constant
pressure to produce. It is the unfortunate downside of doing too much too fast."

Undaunted, Mr. Ambrose said he and his son were hard at work on his next book. This time, "I am sure going to
put quotes around anything that comes out of a secondary work, always," he said.

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company