Thursday, April 29, 2010

Stephen Ambrose’s loss of credibility and the death of Meriwether Lewis

Stephen Ambrose’s loss of credibility and the death of Meriwether Lewis by Kira Gale,  April 28, 2010   http://www.deathofmeriwetherlewis.com (1)

The revelation that Stephen Ambrose fabricated interviews with President Dwight D. Eisenhower (“Channeling Ike” by Richard Rayner, The New Yorker, April 26, 2010) raises new concerns regarding the credibility of America’s leading popular historian.  Ambrose claimed to have spent “hundreds and hundreds of hours” interviewing Eisenhower, while instead, presidential records show that he met with the former president for a total of less than five hours.  Ambrose, whose first book on Eisenhower was published in 1970, a year after the president’s death, cited numerous dates for fictitious interviews, and claimed to have spent two days a week interviewing him.

Ambrose faced years of criticism for plagiarism. The author or editor of over thirty books of American history, he produced over a book a year with the help of his children who served as research assistants.  Evidence of plagiarism, however, date back to his 1963 Ph.D. thesis and his earliest book, Crazy Horse and Custer, published in 1975 (2).  Ambrose, who died in 2002, gained wide popularity as the writer of World War II and other American histories.  His book on the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Undaunted Courage, is said to have earned over four million dollars in royalties (3).  Ambrose wrote (or copied without quotation marks) vivid, dramatic prose that portrayed a positive picture of American history. In choosing Meriwether Lewis as the focus of his narrative on the Lewis and Clark expedition, however, he provided a very mixed message about the explorer, choosing to accept the suicide story without question.  In this he was taking the easy way out, denying the fact that only a few years earlier he had endorsed the murder theory in his introduction to Richard Dillon’s biography, Meriwether Lewis.  Richard Dillon concluded “Was Meriwether Lewis murdered? Yes. Is there proof of his murder? No.” (4)  Stephen Ambrose in writing a new introduction to Dillon’s book in 1988, stated: “But the American figure I admire most, and like the best, and spent the most time with, is a man I’ve never written on, Meriwether Lewis. The only reason I have not written his biography is that Richard Dillon did it first, and his is such a model biography there is no need for another one.”  Eight years later, Ambrose published Undaunted Courage, and without any discussion of various merits of the suicide or murder debate among historians, declared that his hero committed suicide.

His daughter, Stephenie Ambrose, has written a book of essays in which she suggests that Lewis suffered from “Asperger’s syndrome, a highly functioning autistic spectrum disorder” and that this was the cause of his suicide (5).  His son, Hugh Ambrose, is serving as a consultant on a planned HBO mini-series.  It is to be hoped that they will respect the wishes of the Lewis family who have requested the exhumation of Meriwether Lewis’s remains in order to determine the cause of his death, and acknowledge their father’s mixed message as to the cause of Lewis’s death.  We all deserve to know the truth.

(1) The Death of Meriwether Lewis: A Historic Crime Scene Investigation by James E. Starrs and Kira Gale (River Junction Press, 2009)  (2) “Ambrose Problems Date Back to Ph.D. Thesis” by Mark Lewis, Forbes Magazine, May 10, 2002 and “Ambrose Has Done It Before” by Mark Lewis, Forbes Magazine, January 7, 2002. (3) “Stephen Ambrose Dies at 66” New York Times obituary by Richard Goldstein, October 14, 2002. (4)  Meriwether Lewis by Richard Dillon (Coward McCann, 1965) New Foreword by Stephen Ambrose, 1988 (Great West Books, 2003), p. 344. (5)  Why Sacagawea Deserves the Day Off and Other Lessons from the Lewis & Clark Trail by Stephenie Ambrose Tubbs (University of Nebraska Press, 2008), p. 72.

Posted by Kira Gale on 04/29/2010 at 10:16 AM

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