Remembering Stephen AmbroseGeorge McGovern |
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When Stephen Ambrose telephoned me at my summer home in the Rockies of Montana to tell me that doctors had discovered advanced stage cancer in both of his lungs, it was clear that a lifetime of heavy smoking had claimed its fatal due. But as usual, Steve's response was disciplined and purposeful. "I've asked myself if I have two months or two years to live how do I want to use that time?" Then he added, "I've had a wonderful life writing books. Next to Moira and my family that is what I love most; so I'm going to write another book and I'm going to call it A Love Song to America." It later became To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian, probably at the suggestion of Alice Mayhew of Simon and Schuster--his editor whom he justifiably admired. But the book is "a love song to America" with all its virtues and vices. Steve Ambrose was first and last a fervent patriot. He loved America from the depth of his soul. If he now is ensconced in heaven, he has probably told St. Peter that it's a nice place--second only to the United States of America.
I know of no other esteemed historian who had such reverence for the officers and fighting men of our country. He told me in our last conversation that two of the Americans he most admired were Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Dwight D. Eisenhower. At an earlier time he told me: "If I had been your campaign manager in 1972, you would have taken the White House away from Richard Nixon." When I asked him why, he said in his usual gruff manner, "Because, damn it, you were so busy trying to stop the Vietnam war that you never let the country know that you were a decorated combat pilot in World War II. If I had been running the campaign, I'd have made sure that every voter in the country knew you were a war hero while Nixon was a clerk far from any battle." Years later in his next-to-final book, The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys Who Flew the B-24s over Germany (Simon & Schuster, 2001), he made my crew and me the central theme of this best selling work. Although it was too late to affect the outcome of the ill-dated campaign of '72, Steve depicted me as the "war hero" he wanted me to be as a presidential contender. To write this wartime tale, he and his beloved Moira, with son Hugh--an invaluable research assistant for several of his best books--flew to Rome while I was stationed there as U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. Agencies on Food and Agriculture from 1997 to 2001. From a bomber base adjoining olive groves and vineyards near Cerignola, Italy, on the Adriatic Sea, I flew bombing missions over heavily defended Nazi German targets in 1944-1945. Each morning for ten days, Steve sat me down in our living room in front of a tape recorder and pumped me with questions I hadn't tried to answer since the end of the war. He had given up smoking two years before cancer captured his lungs; so the only way I could escape the relentless questioning was when my wife Eleanor appeared with the coffee pot. But after a couple of gulps of coffee, the questioning resumed more intensively than ever. After long exhausting days in which he had me talking more about the war than in the half century since I flew my thirty-fifth and final mission, I must confess that under the direction of a highly talented interrogator lusting for a lively story, I talked so freely about a forgotten chapter of my life that I had a feeling of regret when the last question was asked. But Steve quickly filled the void. "Let's drive to Cerignola and tramp around the old runways and the buildings where you lived during the war," he said. "I can't go back to the U.S. until we've done that." So we went to the old bomber base, now in ruins, and spent a day and a half going over every foot of ground and probing every relic still standing. I'm frank to say that this visit after more than half a century so flooded my mind with memories that I was happy going back to Rome for some more questions on tape. I remembered the breakfasts before daylight and then seeing a bomber heavily loaded with men, bombs and high octane gasoline exploding on take-off with ten men who had been laughing over breakfast minutes before blown to bits of burned flesh. I could still see the image of a bomber flying near me that took a direct hit over the target, caught fire and exploding in pieces over enemy territory--no parachutes seen. I recalled my last mission flown over Linz, Austria--Hitler's hometown--which sent us home with a hundred anti-aircraft shell fragments in our plane and a seriously wounded gunner who had to remain in the hospital when the rest of our crew flew back to the States. "These are the stories I wish you or your team had told the American people in 1972," Steve said triumphantly. Of course, in 1972 we didn't have Steve Ambrose on hand with his relentless curiosity and his tape recorder. "I'm a historian," he once told me, "but I'm basically a storyteller." And that is why his history books so frequently were best sellers. While I have not researched this, I believe that no other American historian has been read by so many millions of people. He knew how to make history come alive both in his lectures and in his books. Once when I was a guest professor at the University of Munich while Steve was at Innsbruck, I asked him if he would give a lecture to my diplomatic history class on Eisenhower--the subject of his celebrated two-volume work. In the course of his lecture a young German woman asked him if Eisenhower was not lazy--primarily a golfer rather than a hard working president. "Lazy?" Steve exploded. "Eisenhower both as a general and as President worked so hard that he couldn't always find time to take a leak." I have the feeling that the student and her classmates won't soon forget Steven's answer--or Dwight D. Eisenhower--or subsequent remarks about the debt of Europe--Germany included--to the American general and president that Steve so admired. The jacket on Professor Ambrose's final book, To America: Personal Reflections of an Historian (Simon & Schuster, 2002), tells us that six of his books were New York Times best sellers: The Wild Blue (Simon & Schuster, 2001); Nothing Like It in the World: The Men Who Built the Transcontinental Railroad 1863-1869 (Simon & Schuster, 2000); Citizens Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, June 7, 1944 to May 7, 1945 (Simon & Schuster, 1997); Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (Simon & Schuster, 1996); D-Day June 6, 1944: The Climactic Battle of World War II (Simon & Schuster, 1994); and Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne, From Normandy To Hitler's Eagle's Nest (Simon & Schuster, 1992). Many years ago as a young college instructor with a doctoral degree in history from the University of Wisconsin, Steve set out to be a teaching and writing historian. He would rise at 4 a.m., go for a thirty minute jog, eat a light breakfast, and then write until his first class or some other responsibility took him away from what he loved most--writing. He was as a professor of history at the University of New Orleans for most of his professional life. In this same city he raised money for and supervised the construction of the National D-Day Museum, a valuable resource now under the able direction of his closest friend, Dean Gordon "Nick" Mueller of the University of New Orleans (visit, <http://www.ddaymuseum.org/>). Understandably, he was not an immediate best selling author despite endless hours of research, reading, and writing. It was his early book, Halleck: Lincoln's Chief of Staff (Louisiana State University Press,1962), that caught Dwight Eisenhower's attention and led to Ike asking Steve to do his biography. This work produced a reappraisal of Eisenhower by other historians and a keener appreciation for the wartime general and peacetime president. My introduction to Ambrose was reading his text, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938 (Penguin Books, 1971). I have used this excellent book as a guest professor in a dozen different universities. It is always greeted favorably by students. Another early Ambrose book that caught my attention as a South Dakotan was Crazy Horse and Custer: The Parallel Lives of Two American Warriors (Doubleday, 1975). If this book had been released after Steve became a best-selling author, it too would have been a big seller. But as most aspiring young writers learn, it is a long and hard path from obscure scholar to the top of the New York Times best seller list. Perhaps because of personal bias my least favorite of the Ambrose books was his three-volume biography of Richard Nixon. I admire Steve for going ahead with this large production despite the refusal of Nixon and some of his staff to meet with the author. Unlike Eisenhower, Nixon did not welcome the Ambrose volumes. He must have recognized, however, that Steve did the work of a professional, objective historian. It may be appropriate for me to end this little discourse with a few lines from the preface of Stephen Ambrose's final book written while he knew he was about to die. "I'm a storyteller by training and inclination. I tell war stories, political stories, academic stories, business stories. I tell stories about some of my admired Americans--George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Lewis and Clark, Andrew Jackson, Ulysses Grant, Crazy Horse, Custer, Theodore Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Jackie Robinson, Betty Friedan . . . "What happened? Who made it happen? What are the results today? Where do we need to go? It is through history that we learn who we are and how we got that way, and why and how we changed, why the good sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not." George McGovern, former U.S. senator from South Dakota (1964-1980) and Democratic candidate for president of the United States in 1972, was appointed by President Bill Clinton as Ambassador to the United Nations Agencies on Food and Agriculture. McGovern, who flew thirty-five combat missions as a B-24 bomber pilot in Europe, earned the Distinguished Flying Cross and plays a central role in Stephen Ambrose's book The Wild Blue: The Men and Boys who Flew the B24's Over Germany. |
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