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obit: Bringing out the dead.

Should Stephen Ambrose Be Pardoned?The patriot as prose-thief.

By David Plotz
Updated Monday, Oct. 14, 2002, at 5:35 PM ET
Stephen Ambrose

Historian Stephen Ambrose, 66, died Sunday. His tongue-bath obituaries all but clear him of the plagiarism charges that dogged his final year. The Washington Post, after 1,500 words of gush, glosses over the plagiarism as mere lack of quotations in a "couple of books" and hints that academic "jealousy" of Ambrose—not his own misdeeds—caused the controversy. The widely printed Associated Press obit similarly neglects plagiarism till the last few paragraphs, and then allots more space to Ambrose's belligerent rebuttal than to the actual theft. His hometown New Orleans Times-Picayune also leaves the plagiarism till the end and allows Tom Brokaw to dismiss it as an "asterisk" on his career. The TV obituaries don't refer to it at all. Only the New York Times, which discovered some of Ambrose's larceny, delves into Ambrose's wrongdoing early and at length.

All the obits, including the Times, give credence to Ambrose's excuses. He is described as having merely omitted quotation marks in a few passages when he had already footnoted the author. His defiant responses are much quoted: I always footnoted, I always gave other writers credit, I made only a few tiny mistakes in thousands of superb pages. To hear Ambrose, the people he plagiarized should have been grateful that he mentioned their names in his popular books.

But Ambrose's pilferage was much more than a slip-up in a "couple of books." As the Weekly Standard, Forbes.com, and New York Times proved in one damning week last January, Ambrose plagiarized all the time. He did it when he was writing books quickly at the end of his career (the vast ripped-off swathes of recent best-seller The Wild Blue), and he did it when he was writing books slowly at the beginning of his career (his 1975 Crazy Horse and Custer steals from earlier Custer bios). He did it in more academic histories (Nixon: Ruin and Recovery) and in populist best sellers (Citizen Soldiers). He claims he footnoted the victims and merely forgot quotation marks, but no one reads footnotes, and by heisting memorable, vivid prose, Ambrose passed himself off as a better writer than he was. The hunt for Ambrose's plagiarism was called off quickly because news broke of his lung cancer. But there's good reason to believe that the shoplifting discovered in five books that were checked might also be found in the 30 other books that haven't been. Plagiarists repeat themselves.

Judging by obituaries and by his recent sales, Ambrose's readers have forgiven him, though it's not clear they ever blamed him. I suspect that Ambrose is easily absolved because he and his work are so relentlessly upbeat. Ambrose, a self-proclaimed "hero worshiper," kick-started the Greatest Generation mania with his World War II books. Band of Brothers, Citizen Soldiers, The Victors, Undaunted Courage—his books were paeans to great Americans. You'll search Undaunted Courage long and hard for evidence that Meriwether Lewis wasn't a saint or that the Lewis and Clark expedition wasn't the most important and glorious event in early American history. He was not merely a "populist," as he was always described. He was a cheerleader for America. (It's no wonder Ambrose made his second home on the range in Montana: He himself was incapable of a discouraging word.) Criticizing Ambrose always seemed curmudgeonly, almost un-American, as though questioning his work was to question America itself. Implicit in his rebuttal of the plagiarism charges was the notion that his critics were bilious academic malcontents who resented his optimistic, patriotic spirit. Ambrose described his last book, a memoir titled To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, this way: "I want to tell all the things that are right about America." Not exactly a tough job, telling Americans how great they are.

Ambrose's God-Bless-Americanism guaranteed him a devoted and loyal audience, one that didn't care about his transgressions, either against his profession or his readers. And it was his readers who were most sinned against. Ambrose could write a rip-roaring good history, but by the end of his career, Ambrose was less historian than history factory. The Wild Blue is not merely a plagiarism-ridden book, but a shoddy, slapdash one. But that didn't seem to matter. It told the inspiring, heroic story of World War II's B-24 pilots, and that made it a best seller. Ambrose brought the good news, and that was enough.

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David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at .
Photograph of Stephen Ambrose by Christopher Felver/Corbis.
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Remarks From The Fray:

Read in tandem with the obits of Wasserman and Annenberg (courtesy of Shapiro and Shafer), Slate is building a rather nasty image as the "kicker of dead puppies." How about spending more time uncovering the misdeeds (and orchestrating the downfalls?) of living breathing miscreants, than hollering about the oh-so-obvious hypocrisy of those who praise the dead whose lives they lamented...

-- Geoff

(To reply, click here.)


I agree with you to a point about the whole politeness thing ... and the Slate obits have tended towards the crass and tasteless of late ... BUT ... it is usually true that the obit is in most cases going to be the last time a public figure (other than a major politician or cultural icon) will be given much consideration in a non-academic forum. Stephen Ambrose will sell some more books for a while, but in five or ten years he'll be stranded on the remainder tables, and someone else will have come along to fill his niche (maybe it'll even be some lucky Frayster who gets sick of us liberals and decides to set us all straight!). Really, if you want to make your views widely known about a person like Ambrose, the occasion of his death is pretty much the last time your thoughts will have any relevance whatsoever.

Having said that, I must insist there is one crime for which Ambrose should not be pardoned, now or any other time, and that is his invention of the Greatest Generation marketing concept. I know Brokaw's the one who popularized the phrase, but it was Ambrose who started the pablum flowing. Enough with the sanctification already! The GIs were a bunch of guys in the right (or wrong) place at the right (or wrong) time who were just there to do their jobs, and they did those jobs about as well as you or I would have done them under the circumstances, which is to say, adequately, for the most part. I respect what they did, but can we please leave it at that and move on? The rest of the world certainly has.

Ambrose said with pride that he was a hero-worshiper. As far as I'm concerned, hero-worship is one old-fashioned value I'll be glad to see eradicated from this Earth, and I for one am glad Ambrose's pen has finally run dry.

-- OmnivorousReader

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I am shocked. How come no hotlink to the Amazon.com Stephen Ambrose catalogue page? A few months back, when some ex-Weatherman (Weathermen-man?)came out with his memoirs regaling his bygone days of terrorist bombings, a Slate contributor very rightly lambasted the swine for profiteering on his murderous past-- complete with an Amazon.com hotlink to buy the damnable tome. Could this virtual rag be developing some facsimile of a soul?

-- doodahman

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