Melville House Books

Dwight D. Eisenhower

A New Yorker magazine story by Richard Rayner reports that the late, popular historian Stephen Ambrose, author of Band of Brothers and numerous other bestsellers, appears to have lied about the thing that first made him famous: his supposed interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Ambrose, who died in 2002, made his reputation as Eisenhower’s official biographer, writing and editing many books about the former president. But the New Yorker story now says many of those interviews may not have taken place.

Ambrose had long told stories—to CNN, to Charlie Rose–of his “”hundreds and hundreds of hours” of interviews with the former president. According to the New Yorker, “In Ambrose’s oft-repeated telling of the tale, Eisenhower contacted him after reading his biography of Henry Wager Halleck, Abraham Lincoln’s chief of staff. ‘I’d walk in to interview him, and his eyes would lock on mine and I would be there for three hours and they never left my eyes,’ Ambrose told C-SPAN. ‘I was teaching at Johns Hopkins and going up two days a week to Gettysburg to work with him in his office.’”

Only now it seems that Tim Rives, the deputy director of the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum, in Abilene, Kansas, has discovered that this story is a near-complete fabrication. While planning a display of some memorabilia from the Eisenhower/Ambrose interviews to coincide with a celebration of Ambrose’s work, Rives came up instead with information that materially contradicted Ambrose’s story.

Through researching Eiesenhower and Ambrose’s letters, Rives uncovered the fact that, contrary to Ambrose’s telling, Eisenhower never approached Ambrose to write his biography. And that was just the beginning of what he discovered….

According to the New Yorker, “records show that Eisenhower saw Ambrose only three times, for a total of less than five hours. The two men were never alone together. The footnotes to Ambrose’s first big Eisenhower book, The Supreme Commander, published in 1970, cite nine interview dates; seven of these conflict with the record.” It is worth noting that Eisenhower died in 1969, one year before the publication of Ambrose’s first book about him, The Supreme Commander.

“Access to Eisenhower in his retirement years was tightly controlled and his activities were documented by his staff, particularly by his executive assistant, Brigadier General Robert L. Schulz, who kept meticulous records of his boss’s schedule and telephone calls,” the New Yorker reports. So it remains highly doubtful that Ambrose could have been interviewing Eisenhower without any record of those interviews existing. When Rives asked John Eisenhower, the President’s son, if it where possible that the two could have met outside office hours, the New Yorker reported that, “Eisenhower told Rives that such meetings never happened: ‘Oh, God, no. Never. Never. Never.’ John Eisenhower, who is now eighty-seven, liked Ambrose, and he recalled, too, Ambrose’s fondness for embellishment and his tendency to sacrifice fact to narrative panache.”

This is not the first time Ambrose’s work has been the subject of scandal. As a New York Times story from 2002 details, back in 2002, Ambrose was accused of plagiarizing significant passages in his book The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew B-24′s Over Germany from a University of Pennsylvania professor and historian Thomas Childers‘ Wings of Morning: The Story of the Last American Bomber Shot Down over Germany in World War II. Ambrose and his publisher Simon and Schuster claimed that he cited Childers in the footnotes but omitted putting quotation marks around directly quoted passages in the text. His defense seems to have been he was too busy telling the story. “I tell stories. I don’t discuss my documents. I discuss the story,” he explains in the Times report.

Valerie Merians is the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.