Blog CCXXXI (231): The State of Military History (Part 4)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

All to the good, but I believe the piece never gets to some of the real strengths of military history.  The popularity of the topic in book stores is not the strongest of these.  (Few academics are ever going to write a book that sells 20 or 30 thousand copies—which in the commercial world of New York based publishing houses is still pretty small).  The strength comes from the fact that the military needs military history and supports the field in many, many ways.  (Some of what follows are points that Lynn made in his 2008 article.) 

First, there is more money in the field than in many others within the history business.  The private foundations associated with many military schools and history centers have book awards, article prizes, dissertation grants, fellowships, visiting professorships, and sabbaticals.

Another factor, perhaps the most important, is that there are a lot of non-academic jobs for military
historians.  Each branch of the U.S. armed services has a history center that employs history Ph.D.s to produce official histories.  (This situation also exists to a lessor degree in other English-speaking countries).  Although many historians might look at these as studies as propaganda, that view misleads more than it informs.  These studies are honest efforts on the part of a large bureaucracy to learn lessons about its past performances that it can use in the future.  These official studies do not preclude historians from asking other questions.  There are probably going to be other issues that future historians will want to discuss, and the official histories do not foreclose these questions.  In fact, in many ways they help facilitate interest in the topic, and access to the documents.  One final point, many units also have command historians who are part archivists, part on demand researcher, and part analyst.  People working in these positions often have much more influence on events than professors sitting in an ivory tower.

These are also teaching jobs, like mine, at military schools like the Naval War College, or the U.S. Air Force Academy, the U.S. Naval Academy, and so on.  The students you interact with, be they undergraduates at one of the academies or mid-career professionals at a staff college, are very, very good.  They eagerly consume military history, not because they are history buffs—some are—but because it is a tool in their professional development.  It is also worth noting that all of these jobs pay much, much better than the academic average.

The Society for Military History, the main academic organization in the United States for historians focusing on this field, is impressively run.  Although it is scholarly outfit, it is very welcoming of those holding jobs outside of academia.  My guess is that roughly a third of the people on the program have jobs outside of an academic history department.  Although it is American organization it is globally minded.  Its journal—The Journal of Military History—publishes articles and book reviews on all time periods and regions.  So, you will probably see articles on both the Confederate States Army as well as the Mongol Horde, and reviews of books about military innovation under Louis XIV as well as the performance of various Arab armies in the 1960s.  The journal has also published foreign scholars.  What is more impressive is that SMH has held its annual meeting outside the continental United States and has had a foreign scholar serve as its president.  The organization has a $00,000 budget and has a paid staff to manage its day-to-day operations.

Another factor is that military history has a constituency outside of academia.  Politicians, journalists and big dollar donors like military history.  During this public debate on military history, several people without a Ph.D. in history intervened and shaped decisions. There are two ways to look at these interventions, either: a) academics bent to this outside pressure, and did things they would not have done, like filling the Ambrose-Hesseltine professorship; or 2) academia responded to the attention that the debate was getting and gave the field more coverage in journals and conferences to explore an issue on which society had an interest. (In many ways, this influence has been exceptionally important, and is one of the reasons why I believe Logevall and Osgood might end up winning the debate they started in 2016 about political history).

Another strength is that there are a lot and I do mean a lot of venues for military history.  By my count there are at the moment 22 peer-reviewed academic journals published in English that do military history: 

1. Air Power History
2. British Journal for Military History
3. Canadian Military History 
4. Civil War History
5. First World War Studies
6. International Journal of Military History and Historiography
7. International Journal of Naval History
8. The Irish Sword
9. Journal of the Australian War Memorial
10. Journal of Chinese Military History
11. Journal of the Civil War Era
12. Journal of Medieval Military History
13. The Journal of Military History
14. Journal of Slavic Military Studies
15. Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research
16. Journal of Strategic Studies
17. Military History Journal
18. Military History of the West
19. Small Wars & Insurgencies
20. U.S. Military History Review
21. War in History
22. War & Society

There are more if you look at French-, Spanish- and/or German-language journals.  There are at least six more if you look at the journals focused on diplomatic history; the realm of strategic history is
often where military and diplomatic history meet, and these journals have often published articles that are part military, part diplomatic in nature.  Those are just the academic journals.  If one includes the professional, military periodicals that the various armed services produce, and/or the magazines aimed at the general public, this list could be very close to 100.  That is a lot of venues to get your ideas out to an audience, and places to have your work reviewed.

It is possible to go too far with this argument.  “Military history has always been marginal; unfortunately, the golden age of military history never existed,” Stone stated.  “Military history has been isolated in the academy for as long as there has been an academy.” Case in point, after he came to the Naval War College, Kansas State did not replace him.  There is also still push back in academia.  There was a prominent job search for a position in military history at a major university in 2016-2017 that apparently did not get filled.  There is all sorts of gossip as to why.  

While it is misleading to use the metaphor of a turning point, the public debate does suggest something has changed.  The real questions to ask are:  How much? Where? And for how long?

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 3.

Blog CCXXX (230): The State of Military History (Part 3)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 4.

In many ways, the public debate on military history slowly started to simmer down in 2009 when Wisconsin hired a historian to fill the Ambrose-Hesseltine professorship in U.S. military history.  The university either had enough funds to "top off" the accounts that fund the position, or the faculty in the history department realized they had to hire the position.  My read of the situation is that it was probably both.  I would give it a 60/40 division of responsibility, but which side you give 60 percent, and which you give 40 is something I will leave to the reader. 

In several other ways military historians scored several substantial victories.  Major venues in academic history began making concessions to military history.  By my less than stringent count, the AHA had 30 sessions related to military history at its 2015 meeting.  That same year the OAH held a roundtable on the status of military history.  Mark Grimsley made his comments available on his blog.  He argued that the field was much stronger than when he wrote "Why Military History Sucks."  He also agreed with the position that Lynn took that there were a number of different career paths for the military historian:

PhDs who specialize in military history have four viable career tracks: civilian academe, to be sure; but also PME, public history (where there is considerable demand for expertise in military history), and national security research institutions such as RAND Corporation. I once pointed this out to a colleague of mine, who shrugged it off with a jibe about the 'military-industrial-academic complex.'  The colleague, safely ensconced in a tenured berth, could afford to take such a view. My students can’t. Consequently, nor can I.  As the anecdote suggests, in my view it remains a fact that military history lags badly in terms of its acceptance within academe. This does not mean that tenured radicals are driving military history out of the academy, as the National Review asserted in 2006; much less that it has been “purged” from the academy, as the Wall Street Journal declared in 2009. In fact, there are more graduate programs in military history that at any preceding time. However, I continue to find that historians outside of military history frequently look askance at the field, usually on the basis of unexamined assumptions.

My take: this assessment is basically correct.  My quibble is with the assumption that there are  jobs for history Ph.D.s in the think tank world.  These institutions want Ph.D.s but not historians.  Other than that, he is basically correct.  Academics look down upon military history and always have, except—according to some research I have done—during the 1942-1945 time period. 

In 2010 Stone of Kansas State wrote a short, but important article, “The Future of Military History: A Glass Half Full,” in  Historical Speaking (April 2010), 33-34.  He designed this essay as a rejoinder to the symposium that had taken place in the journal on military history.  This piece is one of the most interesting contributions to this public debate, because it broke away from the "woe-upon-me" school of thought that had dominated so much of the public debate about military history's role in the profession.  “There’s good reason to believe that military history is as strong as it has ever been for all the reasons listed in the symposium.” These factors included strong enrollments, public interest in the topic, and financial support from think tanks and foundations interested in the field.  The real acid test for military history or another sub-field is employment options.  Here the evidence is ambiguous.  Trying to find a job as a history professor, regardless of specialization, is amazingly difficult these days.  Stone’s research of data from the American Historical Association found the percentage of faculty teaching military history ranged between 2 and 3 percent from 1975 to 2005.  Departments offering courses in military history fluctuated between 30 and 35 percent.  Those numbers are not particularly great, but neither are they as bad as many in the public debate had assumed.  Another factor that Stone found is quite interesting.  In absolute terms the number of military historians doubled from 1975 to 2005.  “It is worth keeping in mind that far more military historians are practicing their craft in American universities now than thirty years ago.” 

Sandberg

In 2012, Brian Sandberg of Northern Illinois University, writing on the blog of the Society for Military History, argued there had been a clear turning of the tide in the historiography: "In case you haven't notice, violence studies are in. There has been a steady flood of publications on warfare and violence over the past decade". He cited the publication of major works, such as Peter H. Wilson’s The Thirty Years’ War: Europe’s Tragedy, Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War, and Timothy Snyder’s Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin.  His reasons for this change were fairly simple.  "The shock of the September 2001 Attacks, the lengthy commitment of the Afghan War, and the polemics surrounding the Iraq War have all contributed to a massive growth in interest in the serious study of the history of violence and warfare."

The leadership of the SMH worked to take advantage of the turning of the tide with the release of its white paper: "The Role of Military History in the Contemporary Academy.” (I wrote about this document in Blog CXCIV (194): The SMH White Paper and the Future of Military History).  The paper hit on a major strength of military history:  "Our students’ desire for knowledge creates an important opportunity for Departments of History. The late recession has produced a drop in humanities majors as students seek courses that seem more likely to produce an immediate payoff in terms of jobs and wages. Legislative budget cuts have forced even state schools to conform to a tuition-driven model, and departments that cannot attract a sufficient number of students can expect hard times to get harder." All of that is true, but that fact that students often vote with their feet or their tuition is something that decision makers should consider. "University college administrators, particularly college deans and chairs of History Departments, may find some relief in the appeal of military history. Courses in military history tend to fill, not only with history majors and minors, but also with students from other disciplines who are interested in the field. And because military history intersects regularly with the profession’s other subfields, it can serve as an ideal gateway to the other specializations any given History Department has to offer. It may, as well, lure back some of the students who have been drawn away to political science, international relations, and public policy departments."

Because of this shift—which was subtle—critiques in journalistic venues went into hibernation for several years.  In 2016 Robert Neer reopened the debate with an article in Aeon, the digital magazine of ideas and culture. In "The US Military is Everywhere, Except History Books," Neer stated that "academic historians, especially those at the nation’s most richly endowed research universities, largely ignore the history of the US military."

Ann Little on her Historiann blog made her feelings clear with the title of a post on this topic entitled: "Here We Go Again: Military Historian Complains that No One Teaches or Writes about Military History Any More, Part Eleventybillion."  She observed: "Yes, it’s a perennial complaint we hear about the absence of military history, although it’s usually part of a not-very-sophisticated political attack on the other fields history departments also represent these days."  She makes another strong point:

If Neer were remotely curious about the world west of the Hudson River, he might discover that hundreds of state universities and colleges–Aggies, and the directionals, primarily, like North Texas, Texas A&M (two very prominent military history bastions he mentions in his article!), not to mention the University of Colorado and Colorado State University–hire in military history, teach military history classes, and promote colleagues who research and write in the field.  But none of this matters because Harvard, Yale, and Columbia don’t!  

Although this point is a strong one, I am of two minds of it.  First, I agree with Little; there is a lot more to the historical profession than the departments of eight private schools in the northeast.  On

Little

the other hand, the Clauset, Arbesman, and Larremore, "Systematic Inequality" article that I spent so much time discussing on this blog makes it clear that eight schools (just not the eight in the Ivy League) are responsible for filling the majority of the good jobs in the profession and that kind of influence is significant.  So, there might be sound reason for getting upset about what a small handful of schools are doing, or not doing. 

Paul Huard wrote a news story on the defense news web site: War is Boring.  The title of  his article is interesting: "The Battle Over U.S. Military History Loved by Ordinary Americans, Hated by Scholars? The Answer is More Complicated Than You Might Think," but the piece fails to deliver on the complexity it suggests.   Huard repeats the argument that military was dominated academia in the past—it did not—and the old argument that it is popular with the general public, just not academics.  “I’m not going to criticize anyone’s interest in any kind of history,” Little is quoted in the story. “We need audiences to buy and read our books. But I will suggest that popular writers of the ‘battles, bullets and bios’ school underestimate their reading audience.”  She also adds: “I think anyone who will buy and read serious nonfiction should be treated like a sentient and thoughtful adult who can handle the complexity or ambiguity of warfare. Many, if not all, are not necessarily looking for another heroic biography or another reflexively and stupidly patriotic treatment of military history.”

Little appreciated the article: "Interestingly, both in Huard’s article and in recent private correspondence between me and Neer, we probably agree on more than we disagree."

Neer and Huard were not the only ones advancing these views in 2016.  Max Boot, wrote an article "Teaching to the Narrative" in Commentary magazine on the Logevall and Osgood debate on political history.  He was sympathetic to their arguments, but tried to turn the conversation back to military history: "The failure is even more serious in the field of military history which has been all but drummed out of the prestigious universities."

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 2, and part 4.

Blog CCXXIX (229): The State of Military History (Part 2)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 1, part 3, and part 4.

The wide-spread attention that these articles garnered had an impact among academic historians.  Two of the main journals within history—The Journal of American History and the American Historical Review—published historiographical assessment of military history in 2007.  These two articles were:

• Wayne E. Lee, “Mind and Matter—Cultural Analysis in American Military History: A Look at the State of the Field,” Journal of American History, 93 (March 2007), 1116-1160
• Robert M. Citino, “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” American Historical Review, 112 (October 2007), 1070-1090. 

Lee's article was the centerpiece of a roundtable in the JAH on the state of military history.  Lee, a professor at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, examines the cultural turn in military

Lee

history, which he sees as a different topic and approach from the social history approach that had been so central to the "war and society" view of military history.   A number of historians: Sir Basil Liddell Hart, Russell Weigley, Victor Davis Hanson, and John Keegan have pushed the idea that there are cultural norms within the military and the larger society that shape a distinctive approach to war.  This article was an interesting historiographical examination of work on the U.S. Army, and—to a much lesser degree—the U.S. Air Force.  “Cultural analysis in military history should connect that "idea template" to wartime behavior, while recognizing that there may be different templates at different levels with in the military and the political leadership,” he argued. 

Four historians offered their assessments in the pages that followed.  A trio of foreign scholars (Brian P. Farrell of the National University of Singapore, Marc Milner of the University of New Brunswick, and Brian Holden Reid of King’s College London) argued that there was a need for comparative studies of the U.S. and British Armies to see if there really was a distinct cultural approach to war as so many argue.  Ronald H. Spector in his commentary added that ground power dominated military history and that scholars needed to look more at naval power.

The other major article of 2007 was Robert M. Citino’s “Military Histories Old and New: A Reintroduction,” a 20 page historiography.  He starts the article with a tired observation: “Military

Citino

history today is in the same curious position it has been in for decades: extremely popular with the American public at large, and relatively marginalized within professional academic circles.”  He also notes “its academic footprint continues to shrink, and it has largely vanished from the curriculum of many of our elite universities.  It has been this way for a long time, and frankly, there seems little chance that things will change any time soon.”  Fortunately, he does not spend the rest of this essay belaboring this point.  He notes that there are three main subjects that military history explores: war and society; operational history; and the history of memory.  His discussion of the literature goes back a hundred years to the work of English and German Medieval historians who tied changes in military technology to the rise of feudalism.  (Historians since have disputed these views).  He also discusses more recent military histories of Ancient Greece, Rome and then moves to Southwest, South, and East Asia before spending a good deal of time in early modern Europe, and then the United States. 

Despite this wide ranging account, he did not get to everything.  His analysis ignored accounts about the application of military power at sea and in the air.  (Then again, not many people write on these topics.  That probably has something to do with a larger unfamiliarity with the sea and the air as transportation venues among historians.  There is plenty of scholarship on railroads and the auto industry; far less on maritime or aviation history).  His study also tended to ignore strategic history—where military, political, and diplomatic history collide.  (This field is one in which social scientists rather historians dominate, so there might have been good reasons for Citino to pull his punches).   The long and short of it is this essay is an impressive, wide-ranging study that shows the diversity of military history.  If one is looking for a quick introduction to the field, they would have a difficult time trying to find a better starting point.

As these articles were going into print, another venue of opinion journalism fired a shot in this debate.  David A. Bell, a historian of Napoleonic France at Princeton University and a contributing editor for The New Republic entered the fray with his essay "Casualties of War: Military History Bites the Dust."  Bell argued the military history suffered because of the success of other fields. "Most historians pay scant attention to military history," he noted, "particularly the part that concerns actual military operations."  That might be a luxury that universities could no longer afford as the United States was in the midst of a long fight in the shadows against terrorists organizations like Al-Qaeda. 

In the real world, nonintellectual concerns constantly impinge upon what professors teach and write, while the question of the university's civic—as opposed to intellectual—obligations is not easily put aside. During the cold war, the government and private institutions like the Ford Foundation provided impressive funding for various sorts of 'area studies,' so as to increase American understanding of the regions in which we might find ourselves confronting the Soviets. It was not a question of forcing existing professors to teach or write on new subjects, but of encouraging movement into the desired areas.

The issue even entered the presidential campaign of 2008 when Senator Fred Thompson of Tennessee, a candidate for the Republican nomination, blamed the decline of military history on the ideological nature of university faculty.  "History that ignores the importance of warfare is not history," he remarked in a radio address.

In 2008 Lynn wrote another article on the state of military history for Academic Questions, the journal of the National Association of Scholars.  He argued in "Breaching the Walls of Academe: The Purposes, Problems, and Prospects of Military History" that there were three different kinds of military history: 1) popular; 2) academic; and 3) applied.  With those three distinctions in mind, much Military History, which boasts eighty thousand readers; its own book clubs; and now its own television channels. There is a great deal of money to be made on popular military history."  The problem with popular military history, he explains, is that to reach as wide an audience as possible it must take a superficial approach, which creates problems for academic military historians. 

Lynn

of the criticism that had been fired in journalistic venues was aimed at the refusal of academic institutions to teach operational military history.  One of the odd things about history Ph.D.s is that there is not much of a demand for that degree outside of academia compared to a Ph.D. in other fields like civil engineering, economics, or marketing.  The military history Ph.D., as Lynn notes, is something of an exception: "Popular military history is, indeed, an industry. It fills bookracks in the United States and around the world. It has its own magazines and journals, for example,

I am not sure that Lynn is entirely correct.  What is popular with the public is the history of combat at the tactical and operational levels.  A lot of what the public consumes is superficial, but that probably has more to do with the venue than anything else.  (How much detail does a sixty minute documentary give compared to a book in even a best case scenario?)

Lynn is on better ground in his discussions of applied military history.  I should note that applied military history is basically what I do at the U.S Naval War College.  Lynn describes applied military history as "the use of military history as part of the professional education of officers and as a guide in establishing doctrine and planning and waging war."

From my experiences working at a military school, this point is basically correct.  The study of the past is exceptionally important to most armed services.  The military uses history as part of its professional development in a way few, if any, other professions do in contemporary American society.  "Historical examples can provide warnings against poorly conceived actions on strategic, operational, and tactical levels or in weaponry and logistics, while also suggesting more effective courses to follow. In addition, knowledge of the past can serve as a kind of checklist pointing the way to important factors to be considered now and in the future." 

Lynn makes one final point that in many ways gives historians of this field more influence than those in other sub-fields: "Military historians should be cognizant and proud of the fact that we pursue one of the rare sub-specialties of historical scholarship that is actually regarded as important for training and guidance by real world practitioners."

The debate even made the pages of the news magazine U.S. News & World Report when it was still a print publication.  In "Why Don't More Colleges Teach Military History?," Lee of UNC, Chapel Hill, offered the novel argument that the popularizers were actually a liability to military historians.   “They can make us look primitive in our approach to history,” he told the magazine.  “The solution isn’t to complain about it, but to try and generate military historians who do good work and creative work and who can speak the same language their colleagues do.”

In other ways, the article advanced the "woe-upon-me-as-the-honest-but-oppressed-military-historian" take on the field.  "Each of us is pretty much a one-man shop,” Carol Reardon of Penn State University told the magazine.  Russian military historian David R. Stone—then of Kansas State University, now a departmental colleague of mine—disputed this comment: “While it is certainly true that military historians are often isolated within their departments, that’s true of most historians in most fields.  I am part of a military history program at Kansas State, but when it comes to Russian and Soviet history here, it begins and ends with me.”  

The debate grew in force in 2009 when two major New York newspapers picked up on the topic.  In May, The Wall Street Journal printed the comments of Lewis E. Lehrman at the New-York Historical Society.  Lehrman, an investment banker who ran for governor of New York in 1982 as the Republican nominee, had played a role in establishing historical centers for the study of the U.S. Civil War at Yale University and Gettysburg College.  "The study of military history has in fact been purged from many of the faculties and curriculums of the universities of the Western world," he stated. "How did this happen? Perhaps it is explicable by some form of political correctness; or, parochial specialization; or, the armchair unrealism of the faculty lounge; even ivory tower snobbery—among other related social diseases."

A month later The New York Times entered the fray with a news article entitled:"Great Caesar’s Ghost! Are Traditional History Courses Vanishing?"  The article had a tone and took sides: 

Simply giving everyone a place at the table is just not affordable in an era of shrinking resources. “I’d love to let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Alonzo L. Hamby, a history professor at Ohio University in Athens, but “it’s hard for all but the largest departments or the richest.” In his own department of about 30 faculty members, a military historian recently retired, triggering a vigorous debate over how to advertise for a replacement. (A handful of faculty members had the view that “military history is evil,” Mr. Hamby said.) The department finally agreed to post a listing for a specialist in "U.S. and the world," he said, “the sort of mushy description that could allow for a lot of possibilities.”

Since this story was in The New York Times, it resulted in a flurry of commentary on blogs all over the internet.  All of them in disagreement:

• Claire Potter, "Let's Run Away from the Girls and Other Strategies to Make History Relevant to a Twenty-First Century Liberal Arts Education," Tenured Radical, June 11, 2009
• Mary Dudziak, "Another Slow News Day at the New York Times," Legal History, June 12, 2009
• Timothy Burke, "History As It Was," Easily Distracted, June 16, 2009
• David Silbey, "Never Mind The Facts…," The Edge of the American West, June 17, 2009

The Historical Society devoted several issues of its journal, Historical Speaking, to discussions on the status of "traditional fields."  These included: intellectual history, military history, economic history, and naval history.

My personal assessment is that these arguments are premised on the assumption that things were different in the days before Vietnam.  My own research on this topic, suggests quite strongly, that military history has never been a popular topic among academia...ever.  I wrote a paper on Theodore Roosevelt's tenure as president of the American Historical Association.  He was AHA president after his stay in the White House.  Needless to say, getting Roosevelt to serve in this position was a major coup for the organization.  The details, though, were a little less impressive.  Roosevelt decided to run for President again in 1912 and never attended any meetings of the AHA officers.  Most of the work of the AHA president feel on the vice president for that year.  Roosevelt did attend the 1913 annual meeting and gave the presidential address.  He also attended a session and spoke on the status of military history.  It was not a popular topic at the time, and many of the complaints people made in 1912 about the hostility of their colleagues towards their topics sound awful lot like those made a 100 years later.

Editorial Note: click here to read part 1, part 3, and part 4.

Blog CCXXVIII (228): The State of Military History (Part 1)

Editorial Note: This posting is part of an exceptionally long essay on the status of military history.  Since it is over 5,000 words in length, it has been divided into four parts.  Click here to read part 2, part 3, and part 4.

The X-Men

In 1963 Marvel Comics created the X-Men series, which in 2000 spawned into an extremely successful film franchise.  The X-Men characters are genetic mutations who have superhuman powers because of the presence of an extra gene.  These powers makes the X-Men special, but it also engenders hostility from the rest of society.  The irony of that situation makes the X-Men a very powerful metaphor to discuss a number of very different topics.

Military history and its relationship to the rest of the profession is like the X-Men characters.  In many ways the field is at the bottom of the professional hierarchy, at least in academia.  In other ways, it is one of the strongest fields in the history business today.  Reflecting both those apparently contradictory assessments, there has been a long public debate on the status of the field.  Historians love to examine their fate and debate the state of their fields. These type of debates usually take  place in academic journals where the main audience is a professional one.  In this day and age, though, there are a number of other venues in which to advocate or commentate, and the debate on the fate of military history has often involved non-historians for better or for worse. 

This debate was not the first examination on the status of military history.  There was a big one in the 1980s as the war and society approach grew in popularity.  This exchange, though, was traditional in nature.  It took place in academic journals and was aimed at specialists.  For examples, see:

• Richard H. Kohn, "The Social History of the American Soldier: A Review and Prospectus for Research," American Historical Review, 86 (June 1981), 553-567.
• Peter Karsten, "The 'New' American Military History: A Map of the Territory, Explored and Unexplored," American Quarterly, 36 (no. 3, 1984), 389-418
• Edward M. Coffman, "The New American Military History," Military Affairs, 48 (Jan. 1984), 1-5
• John Whiteclay Chambers II, "The New Military History: Myth and Reality," Journal of Military History, 55 (July 1991), 395-40

The public deliberation that I plan to discuss here focuses on the status of the field within the historical profession, and could easily be called the "Why Do They Hate Us So Much?" debate.  It started in the mid-1990s when Mark Grimsley of The Ohio State University, published an essay on his blog that soon became famous: "Why Military History Sucks."  He argued that other historians turned a blind eye to the field of military history because its quality was not particularly good:

Indeed, I would argue that the best military history is usually done by people who were not trained as military specialists. And the fact that they do do it should suggest not only their interest in military affairs but also the fact that they have to do it—that when they pose a historical question related to military affairs, too often no military historian ever thought of the question before or thought it was worth exploring. We were too busy writing about our subject in a way that did not connect with the concerns of non-military historians.

Grimsley's argument, though, was one that a lot of other military historians rejected.  For a good example, see: John A. Lynn II, “The Embattled Future of Academic Military History,” Journal of Military History, 61 (October 1997), 777-789.

There things might have stood—a debate fought on the pages of academic journals and a specialized blog with a very small audience—had it not been for Stephen E. Ambrose.  I have written about Ambrose and his many professional shortcomings, but one of the cooler things he decided to do was donate a big chunk of change to the University of Wisconsin to create an endowed position in military history.  Depending on your view, one of two things happened: 1) Ambrose did not provide quite enough money to fund a chair and Wisconsin had to use its own funds and investment revenues to cover the hidden costs of a faculty position (pension contributions, health care costs, etc.), or 2) the faculty in the department rebelled and simply refused to fill the position.

Miller

John J. Miller, the director of the Dow Journalism Program at Hillsdale College, took the later view.  He wrote an article in the National Review: "Sounding Taps: Why Military History is Being Retired."  He savaged the Wisconsin history department's refusal to fill the Ambrose professorship.  Miller's take was dire, as his title suggests, and he contended that the leadership of the historical professional was marginalizing the field:

Military historians who try for a more conventional career, however, often confront the academic equivalent of urban warfare, with snipers behind every window and ambushes around every corner. “You shouldn’t go into this field unless you really love the work,” warns [Dennis] Showalter [of Colorado College]. “And you have to be ready, like Booker T. Washington, to cast down your bucket where you are.” Many talented scholars wind up taking positions at second-rate institutions because they don’t have other options.

Grimsley

This article got a good deal of attention, which is a bit of an understatement.  It got reposted on the blog of the historical society: Randall J. Stephens, "Which History?" The Historical Society Blog.  Other commentary followed and there was an exchange about it on the H-Net discussion group dedicated to military history: H-War.  

At this point, Mark Grimsley entered the debate again.  He pushed back on Miller's attack on both his blog and the History News Network.  The two had an e-mail exchange, which they both made public, and came into agreement on the fact that Wisconsin had an obligation to fill the position, but disagreed on why the university had failed at that point to do so.  "Yours are crocodile tears. You'd love to see us disappear, because it would make a nice talking point in the increasingly stupid culture wars."

Victor Davis Hanson joined in the fight with an article, “Why Study War?” that was published in City Journal  (Summer 2007), the quarterly of the Manhattan Institute.  A historian of ancient Greece and Rome, he was a Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.  His take was similar to Miller's: “The academic neglect of war is even more acute today.  Military history as a discipline has atrophied, with very few professorships, journal articles, or degree programs.”

Editorial Note: click here to read part 2, part 3, and part 4.

Blog LVI (56): Stephen Ambrose: Another Rebutal

When it rains it pours. Many others have been discussing the Stephen Ambrose case and it is looking worse and worse for the late, great historian. Lori Cune is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of California at Davis. She is writing a dissertation entitled "Executing the Rosenbergs: A Transnational History." In this essay, originally published on the History News Network, she discusses how her own research has brought many of Ambrose's writings into question. As she makes clear, there is more to her work than young scholar knocking down established scholar to make a name and reputation. Like me, Ambrose's writings influenced her to go to become a scholar and she clearly confronts his shortcomings more out of sadness than anger. Here is her article originially title: "Stephen Ambrose's Falsifications of the Rosenberg Execution":

I met Stephen Ambrose when I was a young, idealistic graduate student attending my first American Historical Association conference in the late 1980s. He graciously shared his paper – and enthusiasm – with the groupies he attracted. Years later, his Rise to Globalism was on my coffee table so often that I have a photo of my then two-year-old son “reading” it. It is safe to say his work played a role in my decision to study history.

The New Yorker’s recent allegations that Ambrose manufactured interviews with – and likely quotes from – Eisenhower (“Channeling Ike,” by Richard Rayner, April 26), combined with earlier accusations of plagiarism, have tarnished his reputation. In my research on the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (arrested for conspiracy to commit espionage in 1950 and executed in 1953), I have recently discovered instances where Ambrose also fabricated information from written documents.

In chapter thirteen of Ike’s Spies: Eisenhower and the Espionage Establishment (1981), Ambrose explains in two footnotes that his section on the Rosenberg case is based on his interviews with Eisenhower and Attorney General Herbert Brownell, and Eisenhower’s memoir of White House Years 1953-56, Mandate for Change (1963). On page 182 of Ike’s Spies Ambrose writes: “Some of Ike’s most trusted advisers told him he would have to grant a stay of execution because the nation simply could not put to death the mother of small children. Many in the Cabinet recommended clemency.” I do not believe any part of these statements to be true. While we cannot know what Eisenhower or Brownell told Ambrose when interviewed, in Mandate for Change Eisenhower makes no mention of advisers urging clemency because Ethel was a mother, or for any other reason. For Cabinet recommendations, I attempted to corroborate Ambrose’s account with Cabinet meeting minutes. The minutes from the two meetings where the Rosenberg case was discussed (12 February 1953 and 19 June 1953, the day of the executions) contradict Ambrose’s assertions. According to the Cabinet minutes of Staff Secretary L. Arthur Minnich, no one expressed support for clemency when asked at the February meeting. During the June meeting, U.N. Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge and presidential advisor C.D. Jackson suggested the need for an additional presidential statement on the case, but no one recommended clemency. According to Attorney General Herbert Brownell’s oral history housed at the Eisenhower Library (interview by Ed Edwin, 5 May 1967, OH-157, 3 of 5, 189-196), Brownell stated (page 193-4): “I cannot recall that any Cabinet member voiced such a position [support for pardon] at the Cabinet meetings…I can’t remember any Cabinet member ever dissenting from that viewpoint [that the Rosenbergs were guilty].” Brownell continued on page 196 that Eisenhower “would have subordinated his views about the world-wide effect on the Russian government’s propaganda campaign” and offered clemency if the president doubted the Rosenbergs’ guilt, which Brownell asserted he did not. While it is theoretically possible that Brownell, in a subsequent (undated) interview with Ambrose, contradicted his earlier insistence that Eisenhower allow the executions to proceed, this does not hold up to the propensity of evidence. In fact, while international opinion ran hot for clemency, the majority of Americans appeared to support the executions and had little problem putting “to death the mother of small children.”

Another example comes from Ambrose’s discussion of the Rosenberg case in Eisenhower: The President, Volume Two (1984). On page 84 Ambrose writes that on the day of the executions Eisenhower “said he could not remember a time in his life when he felt more in need of help from someone more powerful than he.” Ambrose’s footnote reads Emmet John Hughes’ The Ordeal of Power: A Political Memoir of the Eisenhower Years (1962), 80; and Minnich, Cabinet, 6/19/53. Hughes, an aid and speechwriter for Eisenhower, quotes Minnich’s Cabinet meeting minutes and makes no mention of Eisenhower’s “need of help.” This sentiment is not in any of the versions of the June 19 Cabinet meeting agendas or minutes. One wonders why Ambrose felt compelled to imply that Eisenhower needed the help of a higher power when he decided to allow the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg to proceed. Eisenhower “could not remember a time in his life” when he needed “help from someone more powerful.” Really? Not even D-Day?

While small examples, these hint at a much larger problem. Ambrose not only fabricated interviews with Eisenhower, he manufactured written evidence relating to his presidency as well. I found these discrepancies in just a few hours in one little corner of Eisenhower’s career, the Rosenberg case. If we all investigate the pieces we know best, a clearer picture will emerge. Perhaps the examples I have from the Rosenberg case are unique. I fear, however, that for today’s graduate students Ambrose will be known more for plagiarism and falsified evidence than for his popular narrative prose.

Blog LV (55): Stephen Ambrose: A Rebutal

In Blog XLVIII, this blog explored the question of Stephen Ambrose's profesional and ethical behavior. Ambrose had a highly successful career and could serve as a good role model for those wishing to interact with the wider public. A number of issues have arisen, though, that must give all of us pause. In Blog LIII, this forum reproduced an essay his son and former collaborator, Hugh Ambrose, wrote defending his father, and which served as a counterargument to charges that he fabricated sources, specifically the number of meetings he had with Dwight D. Eisenhower. The following essay is from Timmothy D. Rives, the deputy director of the Eisenhower Library. Rives was responsible for finding the evidence that brought Ambrose's fabrications to light initially. His essay is basically a rebuttal to the argument that the younger Ambrose offered. This article originally appeared on the History News Network as "Ambrose and Eisenhower: A View from the Stacks in Abeline":

I am the deputy director and supervisory archivist of the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum in Abliene, Kansas. In the April 26, 2010, edition of the New Yorker magazine, I was quoted extensively in an article (“Channeling Ike,” by Richard Rayner) about claims made by the late Stephen E. Ambrose and his purported relationship with President Dwight D. Eisenhower; there are problems relating to the dates Ambrose claimed he interviewed Ike and the scholarly annotations concomitant to those supposed interviews.

The article and subsequent news stories and interviews have spread the story around the world over the last few weeks. Both supporters and critics of Mr. Ambrose have encouraged me to discuss the background of this story and to comment on the Ambrose-Eisenhower relationship to the extent that it can be documented in the holdings of the Eisenhower Presidential Library. I am pleased to do so, but before I tell the story I must first say that the opinions expressed below are mine alone and not those of the Eisenhower Presidential Library or its parent federal agency, the National Archives and Records Administration.

One of our tasks as a presidential library is to develop and host public programs. These programs include high-profile events, such as our May 8, 2010, commemoration of the sixty-fifth anniversary of Victory in Europe (V-E Day) which featured Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as keynote speaker. Other events are less grand, and feature speakers such as myself. This was the case last fall when we hosted a program to discuss the influence of the books of Stephen Ambrose on the historiography of General and President Dwight D. Eisenhower.

The program came about by accident. We hold three book talks a year in cooperation with the Abilene (Kan.) Public Library. The talks center on an Eisenhower-related book. We had hoped to have an Eisenhower family member speak at the November talk, but were forced to change plans because of a scheduling conflict just a few weeks before the advertised date. It was too late to cancel the event and so staff began brainstorming for a replacement program. I recalled that we were near the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Ambrose’s two-volume Eisenhower biography, and for lack of a better idea, suggested we host a retrospective on Ambrose’s works. We assembled a discussion panel that included two retired Eisenhower Presidential Library archivists. The archivists had spent most of their careers working with researchers following Ambrose’s lead, and held interesting perspectives on his work. A third panelist, described as a general reader and avid Ambrose fan, completed the panel. I moderated the discussion, which we called “Stephen Ambrose: The Peoples’ Historian,” and which took place on November 10, 2009.

We use public programs as a way to publicize our archival holdings. The non-researching public is rarely exposed to this side of our operation, and we have found table-top displays of facsimile documents a convenient way to introduce them to our rich collections. Given Ambrose’s oft-told stories of his relationship with Eisenhower I assumed finding interesting documents would be an easy task. It was, but the results were not I expected.

As recounted in the New Yorker, the records I found did not substantiate Ambrose’s account of how he met President Eisenhower, nor did the records support his claims to have interviewed Eisenhower extensively over four or five years. Furthermore, according to the records, Ambrose never met with President Eisenhower alone. The Ambrose-Eisenhower relationship I discovered in Ike’s post-presidential records, it must be said, differs radically from the one described by Ambrose in his writings and in numerous interviews.

Yet it must also be said I found in those same records an Ambrose-Eisenhower relationship that Ambrose never discussed publicly, a relationship that was too complicated to be described in the confines of the New Yorker’s “Talk of the Town” section. That relationship will be the subject of this essay. A note on sources before I begin: the letters cites below are all from Eisenhower’s Post Presidential papers, 1961-1969. I will provide specific citations to interested readers.

The documented Ambrose-Eisenhower relationship was formed in the context of Eisenhower and his lieutenants’ efforts to shape and defend his political and military reputations. It is not a stretch to describe these efforts as a war. The war was fought on several fronts in various ways and campaigns, including the writing of presidential memoirs, the opening of a presidential library and museum, the publishing of Eisenhower’s papers, and the recruiting of friendly intermediaries in the press and the academy. Some of these intermediaries were drafted. Some, as we will see, eagerly volunteered.

As Eisenhower and his inner circle of friends, family, and advisors saw it, the need to defend his reputation began during the 1960 presidential campaign when candidate John F. Kennedy accused the Eisenhower administration of allowing a “missile gap” to grow between the American and Soviet arsenals. Criticism of the Eisenhower years as an era of inaction and passive conservatism by other prominent Democrats also bothered the Eisenhower forces.

The criticism convinced Eisenhower to begin writing his presidential memoirs immediately. His son, John S. D. Eisenhower, resigned his Army commission to help with the project. The memoir team, led by John with research and secretarial assistants, moved into its Gettysburg, PA, office the Monday following Kennedy’s Friday inauguration. There was no time to waste.

The urgency was based on the fear that the criticism voiced in the campaign would permanently shape the public’s perception of the Eisenhower administration; its history would be written by its enemies. Ike’s brother, Dr. Milton S. Eisenhower, the president of the Johns Hopkins University, shared this fear. Milton approached him with a proposal to open up a second front in the war on the critics. The sooner the records of the administration were available to scholars, Hopkins historian David Donald had told Milton, the better for Ike’s reputation. Milton asked his brother on March 9, 1962, to consider “a ten year research and publishing effort which would result in the publication of your principal papers.” Milton promised Ike the project would not interfere with his memoirs or the presidential library nearing completion in Abilene. President Eisenhower agreed and the project was soon underway.

In the meantime a fresh attack on Eisenhower’s reputation would push the Hopkins project in a more ideological direction. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Sr., published a poll of presidential rankings in the July 29, 1962, New York Times Magazine. The poll of the forty-eight historians ranked Ike a lowly twenty-second out of the thirty-one presidents it examined.

“Nobody in his right mind would consider these evaluations anything like valid,” John Eisenhower wrote a friend, “but it seems to me that if we’re not careful, this can well be the image by which people see his performance in the future…. The reason I trouble you with this complaint,” John said, “is that it seems to me that there must be some way of getting more articulate Republicans—or at least conservatives—to fight against the super-liberalism that seems to have gripped our educational
institutions.”

With this concern in mind, John pushed his uncle that fall to ensure that a conservative historian would be hired to run the Hopkins project. “In a Churchill letter the other day,” John said by way of an example, “I ran across the statement ‘Thank God you are at the helm.’ A friendly editor will find a way to work this into the background; an unfriendly one will give it the deep six.” (It is not in the Hopkins volumes because Eisenhower did not write it; he received it.)

“At the moment,” Milton replied, “I am waiting on nominations from Dr. David Donald, who is a fairly conservative fellow and who is wholly sympathetic to the idea of having a top man who has been friendly to the Eisenhower philosophy.” Donald suggested historians Elting Morison, Clinton Rossiter, and Forrest McDonald. “I’m sure,” Milton wrote, “you would also be enthusiastic about Dr. Alfred DuPont Chandler, Jr…. He helped [Elting] Morison edit the Theodore Roosevelt Papers. I am told he is a conservative.”

Chandler, who would earn fame as the dean of American business historians, accepted the offer, and became editor in 1963. After a few months at the helm, he wrote John Eisenhower on April 8, 1964, to update him on the progress of the project and to inform him that he hired an associate editor, a man who would go on to become Eisenhower’s greatest champion, Stephen Ambrose. “At 28,” Chandler said, “Ambrose is one of the leading young military historians in the country. He has written biographies of Halleck and Upton and is now writing a history of West Point.”

Ambrose arrived at Hopkins that summer. After only a few weeks on the job, he took the bold step of introducing himself to Eisenhower. “Dear General Eisenhower,” he wrote on September 10, 1964, “I have been appointed the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers, under Dr. Alfred D. Chandler, Jr. It is a very great thrill for me to … work on your papers.” Ambrose’s six-week immersion in Ike’s papers had given him the feeling he knew the General “intimately.” So well did Ambrose believe he knew Eisenhower he thought “it only fair that you have an opportunity to see some of my writing.” One can doubt Ambrose’s logic here, but not his confidence. “I am taking the liberty of sending you two of my books,” Ambrose said, “each a biography of a nineteenth century general—one is about Henry Halleck, the other Emory Upton.”

Eisenhower thanked Ambrose in his reply of September 16, 1964, and noted, “So far the two books you mention have not arrived in my office. However, I assure you that I will read them with the greatest interest because I never tire of reading biographies or memoirs of our Civil War generals.” The books arrived at Gettysburg on September 24, 1964. The Halleck biography Ambrose sent still sits on a shelf in Ike’s home at the Eisenhower National Historic Site, according to the museum curator.

Ambrose allowed Eisenhower a few weeks to read the books before writing him again and making another confident request of the General. His letter of October 15, 1964, praised Ike for his war work between Pearl Harbor (December 1941) and June 1942, when Eisenhower took command of the European Theater of Operations. “It is an aspect of your career that I think has been inexcusably overlooked.” Compliment in place, Ambrose starts the wind up to his pitch. Marveling at the speed at which the nation mobilized for war in 1941 as compared with the slower pace of 1861, Ambrose draws a parallel with the progress at which World War II history and biography is being written. “It took almost forty years to publish the Official Records of the Civil War; the U.S. Army in World War II has of course been appearing at a rapid pace. The records are also being made available to the historian much sooner than was the case in the nineteenth century.”

To Ambrose the conclusion was obvious: “the time has come to begin the scholarly biographies of the leaders of World War II.” Now comes the pitch. “I would like to begin a full-scale, scholarly account of your military career.” Ambrose assured Eisenhower he wasn’t after money or permission to write the “official biography.” But he reminded the General that because of his access to Eisenhower’s papers at the Hopkins project he had a “great advantage over any historian who might be contemplating a similar work.”

Ike in return praised the two books Ambrose sent him—“especially the one on Halleck”—and added that “when the time comes and you want to do a military biography of me I shall be glad to be as cooperative as I can.” But he also warned the young historian, “I doubt that I could be available before next spring [1965].” Ike’s availability would prove so elusive over the remaining four years of his life that Ambrose only saw him a few times.

The records verify three face-to-face meetings between the men. The first was on December 14, 1964, at Eisenhower’s Gettysburg office. John Eisenhower arranged the thirty-five minute meeting for Drs. Chandler and Ambrose. The purpose was to discuss Eisenhower’s work with the Operations Division (OPD) in the early days of World War II and for him to “meet Dr. Ambrose” in person. A second meeting, arranged by Milton Eisenhower, took place on July 6, 1966, when Eisenhower, Chandler, and Ambrose, met for a photography session to promote the Hopkins publication project.

Ambrose asked for the third and final meeting, according to the records. Ambrose wrote Eisenhower in early February 1967 requesting an appointment to interview him for his military biography. Eisenhower replied on February 9 that he might find time to speak with him in May. But when Ambrose heard nothing for several months, he wrote Ike’s secretary, Lillian Brown, on April 26 asking her to schedule an appointment. “I am primarily interested in the unity of command concept, the development of operations in Northwest Europe, and in the wisdom of the decision for TORCH,” Ambrose said (TORCH was the code name for the Allied invasion of North Africa in November 1942).

Brown passed the request to Eisenhower, who told her on May 25, “Let him ask [for a specific date] unless I volunteered when to tell him to come.” On June 15 Brown relayed the request to Eisenhower’s personal gatekeeper, executive assistant Robert L. Schulz, for his approval, noting that “DE has said yes.” Schulz told Brown to wait for further word from Ambrose “per DDE note.”

The long-suffering Ambrose wrote again on September 9 to ask if “it would be possible to see the General sometime this fall.” Schulz finally approved October 11, 1967, at 9:30 a.m. as the time for Ambrose to have his “DDE biography” appointment with Eisenhower. Schulz also approved the inclusion of Joseph Hobbs, an assistant editor on the Hopkins project, who wanted to ask the General about his wartime associate General Walter Bedell Smith. After more than eight months of negotiation, Ambrose was finally granted a shared hour—possibly one hour and fifteen minutes—with Eisenhower. It should be noted that Ambrose could have met with Eisenhower alone during this time but elected to share it with a colleague.

Ambrose’s difficulty in scheduling an interview with Eisenhower is puzzling given the various ways the two men were working together prior to and during this time. Ambrose was, of course, the associate editor of Eisenhower’s papers. But he was also acting as the General’s point man in another campaign in the war for his reputation.

The attacks on Eisenhower had grown sharper and more threatening in 1965 and 1966 largely because of the publication of four books: Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.’s A Thousand Days (1965), Theodore Sorenson’s Kennedy (1965), Samuel Eliot Morison’s Oxford History of the American People (1965), and Cornelius Ryan’s The Last Battle (1966).

Schlesinger and Morison damned Eisenhower with all the sneering condescension a New Frontiersman could muster for the squandered opportunities of 1950s and the “Laodicean drift” of his administration. Morison in particular drew Eisenhower’s anger, inspiring the president to fire off a Memorandum to the Record and send it to his library in Abilene for posterity (“In my opinion the author is not a good historian, not that I condemn it as a whole but because in those events with which I am personally familiar he is grossly inaccurate.” June 9, 1965).

The Sorenson book blamed Eisenhower, among other failings, for the botched invasion of Cuba known as the “Bay of Pigs.” Eisenhower flatly rejected this claim. To answer Sorenson’s charge, he relied on a technique that has come to define his presidency, and which will shed light on his relationship with Stephen Ambrose. That technique was famously described by political scientist Fred Greenstein as the “hidden hand.”

One aspect of the “hidden hand” is the use of intermediaries to fight your battles. Eisenhower abhorred public fights and did not respond directly to Sorensen. He instead summoned a friendly journalist, Earl Mazo, to his Gettysburg office and gave him an exclusive interview. Mazo in turn reported Ike’s version of events. Ike had given him the story but retained control over the quotes he could use and the slant of the piece. He also made sure Mazo hammered home his main point: “There was no tactical or operational plan [to invade Cuba] ever discussed” on his watch. The article, “Ike Speaks Out: Bay of Pigs was all JFK’s,” appeared in the September 10, 1965, edition of Newsday.

Eisenhower’s chief complaint about the increasing flow of books coming out about his military and political careers was that few of the writers bothered to get the story from him. He pointed to Ryan’s Last Battle as an example. “The trouble is,” Ike wrote a friend in April 1966, “is that no one ever seems to take the time to go to anyone of the American High Command to find out exactly what information we worked on at the time, under what conditions we were making plans, and what was the basic character of the mission assigned to us by our bosses.”

It wasn’t for a lack of trying. Ryan’s editor, Michael Korda, sent the uncorrected proofs of the Last Battle to Gettysburg in early March for Eisenhower’s review. But Eisenhower was recuperating from illness in California and never saw them (Korda, coincidentally, would publish his own Eisenhower biography in 2007). Had Ike received Korda’s package he might never have begun the collaboration that distinguishes his relationship with Stephen Ambrose.

The Eisenhower-Ambrose relationship had progressed little following their December 1964 introduction. According to the records, they had not seen, written, or talked to each other since then. This began to change in early 1966 when Eisenhower received the galley proofs of Ambrose’s West Point history, Duty, Honor, Country from the Johns Hopkins University Press. Ike wrote Milton Eisenhower on January 29, “I find the document, with one exception, remarkably accurate and interesting.” The “one exception” was a perennial sore point with Ike, that as a soldier he lacked political judgment, especially in regards to the intentions of Soviet leaders. Ike responded to Milton with what amounted to a three-page memorandum to the record documenting his early awareness of Soviet treachery. This seems an odd response to a sibling only if you forget that Ike knew that whatever he wrote was for the ages. Eisenhower tacked on a postscript, also written with an eye on that horizon where future historians would gather to judge him: “On page 102 of the galley, in the second paragraph at the end of the fifth sentence there is a typographical error; the word should be ‘understand’ not ‘understanding’.” Clearly, Ike was saying, I am a man on whom nothing is ever lost.

Eisenhower’s response to the West Point manuscript, though overwhelmingly positive, panicked its young author. “He was profusely apologetic,” Milton told Ike, “for he did not intend to give the impression that you … lacked political judgment. He wants to write you, presumably after changing the offending sentence.” Ambrose removed the disputed passage. Eisenhower wrote the book’s foreword, something he did for few writers.

If this was a test, Ambrose had passed it. And the summer of 1966 would see him begin a new and truly cooperative relationship with Eisenhower. Milton would no longer separate the men as a go-between. Ambrose would work with Ike directly. Eisenhower would need the extra help in the next phase of his campaign to protect his legacy, and the direct line of communication to Ambrose would improve the rate he could return fire on his critics.

The battle for Eisenhower’s reputation intensified that summer. The Schlesinger and Sorenson memoirs were still riding high on the New York Times best-seller list. They were joined in May by Ryan’s Last Battle, which soon moved to number one. Ryan presented an old charge but a new threat. The author of The Longest Day, a popular account of D-Day that sold more than five million copies, Ryan threatened to spread the charge of Eisenhower’s political naiveté and misjudgment to millions of readers around the world.

Ryan’s criticism was this: because Ike was duped by Stalin and stopped his forces at the Elbe River seventy miles short of Berlin, he was responsible for the Cold War problems that beset Germany after the war. Ryan also charged Eisenhower with an excessive fear of a “National Redoubt” of Nazi troops in Austria and Bavaria, and thereby wasting troops that could have been used to capture Berlin. If Eisenhower had realized that Stalin’s objectives late in the war were political rather than military, he would have taken the city and the world would be a safer place.

Eisenhower counterattacked with a review essay written by Ambrose in the Wisconsin Magazine of History entitled “Refighting the Last Battle: The Pitfalls of Popular History.” The piece appeared in the summer 1966 issue. The essay had been discussed in telephone calls, manuscript reviews, and correspondence between Ambrose and Eisenhower.

The records don’t tell us exactly when the planning for this campaign began. Eisenhower and Ambrose met in person, along with Alfred Chandler, on July 6, 1966, for a publicity session to push the Hopkins project. Did they discuss Ryan then? The Berlin book was in the news, and the charge of poor political judgment was one Ambrose was acutely aware of, given Ike’s reaction to his West Point manuscript. But we just don’t know. The records do tell us, however, that Eisenhower called Ambrose on August 9, 1966, at 10:20 a.m., only to learn that he was out of the office on vacation, and that he called again on August 11 at 10:40 a.m. We do not know the length of this conversation (Eisenhower’s schedule notes that he went to lunch at 12:30. He and Ambrose could have spoken for as long as an hour and fifty minutes). But we do know what they discussed over the phone that day from an August 18 letter from Ambrose to Eisenhower thanking the General for his help on the manuscript and noting that he had “made all the changes in the article that your very good comments called for.” Ironically, Ike’s “very good comments” on the manuscript (specifically that taking Berlin “would not have had any effect on the subsequent ‘cold war’.”) were made too late to affect the published version of the essay.

Ike had apparently received a copy of the manuscript sometime prior to August 9. But who initiated the contact? This remains a mystery, but my money would be on Eisenhower. Ike’s post-presidential records contain numerous examples of him reaching out to authors to make sure they knew and disseminated his version of events. It’s a trait of the “hidden hand” style. He was also by now familiar enough with Ambrose to know he had a smart, ambitious, hard-working, and eager-to-please ally at his disposal. Who better to send into the breach?

The Last Battle review is interesting in that Ambrose questions Ryan’s stylistic technique as much as he does his facts. He criticizes him for using “a device often employed in … political novels—an abundance of detail.” This technique gives such stories an “aura of verisimilitude,” Ambrose writes. “Anyone who knows the size of the star of the epaulettes of a Russian field marshal,” Ambrose says, “or the make of Stalin’s favorite pipe, surely must be on firm ground when he quotes entire paragraphs of Stalin’s conversation.” Eisenhower, in his comments on the manuscript, also raised an eyebrow at the reputed Stalin quotes: “How silly can a writer be?” Ike asked. “Was he there?”

Ambrose also accuses Ryan of overdramatizing the importance of taking Berlin. Even if the Allies had captured the city, they would have been obligated to withdraw to predetermined zones of occupation after the war. “The drama in all phases of World War II is inherent,” Ambrose writes. “No author needs to exaggerate, overdramatize, or invent, for the straight story is better than any imaginable one.”

Eisenhower’s decision to stop the Allies short of Berlin captured Ambrose’s imagination. Displaying the productivity that would put so many of his books on the best-seller lists in the years to come, Ambrose expanded his interest into a monograph on the Berlin decision. Once again he had Eisenhower’s help in its preparation.

Eisenhower received the Eisenhower and Berlin, 1945 galleys from W.W. Norton and Company at his winter home in Palm Desert, California. He wrote Ambrose on February 28, 1967, that he had read the manuscript and made a few notes. “I have written them frankly and with no thought of modesty,” Ike said. “If you want them I shall be glad to send them on but only after you have agreed to read them and then return the document to me, without transfer of any notes anywhere else.” The galleys are in the Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum. Eisenhower’s comments would have as little effect on the final manuscript as his annotations on the Ryan review had on the final version in the Wisconsin Magazine of History. Ironically, Ambrose includes one of Eisenhower’s notes from his review of the Ryan essay in the Berlin book (see page 87).

Ambrose replied on March 6, 1967, thanked Eisenhower for his comments on the manuscript, and added, “I will of course abide by the conditions you specify; specifically, I shall read your notes and then return the document, without copying anything you wrote.” And then he writes a prophetic sentence that expresses the legacy of the Ambrose-Eisenhower relationship. “I must in fairness add a warning… what you say will undoubtedly influence my future work on this subject.” It did obviously, and it paid Eisenhower in dividends of generous appraisals from Ambrose for many years, dividends that are still accruing to his reputation, and dividends that informed our discussion of Stephen Ambrose last November.

We are still left with a mystery, however. How could Eisenhower be so distant when Ambrose wanted to interview him for his biography but so accessible when he wanted Ambrose to fight his battles? The records suggest that Stephen Ambrose knew two Eisenhowers, whose willingness to see or write him was contingent on the immediacy of the action. Given the heat of battle in the mid-1960s, when Eisenhower’s reputation as a military and political leader was under fire in bestselling books, one Eisenhower called the young historian to come to his defense. But when the battle lay safely in the distance, outside the sound of trumpets, another Eisenhower, ensconced in Gettysburg or Palm Desert, had little time or use for conscripts or volunteers.

Blog LIII (53): Stephen Ambrose: A Counterargument

There are always two sides to any story. A few weeks ago, an article in The New Yorker magazine exposed the fact that historian Stephen Ambrose had exaggerated his association Dwight D. Eisenhower. He said he had interviewed Eisenhower, but the former president's appointment records show that Ambrose was no where near Ike on several of the occasions the historian claims in his footnotes. As I explained in Blog XLVIII several Ambrose books were critical in my own intellectual development and I was extremely disappointed in his actions. I also thought Ambrose's career served as a good model for a new historian. Much of that seems suspect now. Needless to say, Hugh Ambrose, the son of Stephen Ambrose and a writer in his own right, views things differently. He offered a defense of his father in this essay appeared on the History News Network under the title "Eisenhower and My Father, Stephen Ambrose". Here is his take on this recent controversy:

The recent accusation that the late historian Dr. Stephen E. Ambrose, the author of numerous national bestselling books, was guilty of “fabricating” a relationship with former President Eisenhower has left readers to ponder its meaning. An examination of the evidence reveals a few mistakes which, while regrettable, hardly outweigh a towering legacy: through decades of scholarship, Ambrose pioneered the evaluation of Dwight D. Eisenhower’s career as a general and as a president.

In early 1964, at the start of his career Steve Ambrose (my father), accepted a prestigious appointment as a professor of history at Johns Hopkins University and as the Associate Editor of the Eisenhower Papers. The latter job involved combing through thousands of documents encompassing Eisenhower’s distinguished career to create a multi-volume reference work for use by scholars. At the end of 1964 Ambrose had a meeting with Eisenhower.

Thirty years later, my father often said that the meeting had come about because Eisenhower had read one of his books, about a Civil War general named Henry Halleck, and had thought so highly of it that he had called the young historian to determine his interest in writing a history of his service as the supreme commander of Allied forces in Europe during World War II. The story contained an unfortunate exaggeration, since it is clear that Ambrose initiated the idea of writing the book in a letter to the president.

The story’s main point, however, is true. Before their first meeting on December 14, 1964, Eisenhower replied on October 19 to the young historian’s letter. The president liked Ambrose’s approach because “From the nature of your suggestion I recognize that your interest is only in the truth. This, together with the confidence I have derived from your work by reading your two books—especially the one on Halleck—give the reasons why I should be ready to help out so far as I can.” In short, the president had taken the measure of Stephen Ambrose and had decided to trust him to write his military biography.

The relationship between the former president and Ambrose lasted for several years. In their written correspondence, the historian asked detailed questions and Eisenhower gave substantive replies. These letters indicate that they also spoke on the phone. On at least one occasion Eisenhower encouraged Ambrose to “give me a ring.” The two men also met at the president’s home in Gettysburg. How many times they actually met is in dispute. Six discrepancies between the president’s schedule and Ambrose’s footnotes exist. As proof that the daily schedule was sacrosanct, an archivist at the Eisenhower Library recently claimed that Eisenhower’s “full schedule demanded that anyone wanting an appointment with him needed to begin the process months ahead of time.” In February 1967, though, three years after their relationship began, the president instructed Ambrose: “If you will call Miss Brown in my office I think we could set up an engagement on twenty-four hours notice.”

The six discrepancies (in a book containing 1,153 endnotes) remain a problem and the critics have made the most of them. Based upon some records that he acknowledged are spotty, the archivist proffered his opinions about what Eisenhower may have or may not have told Ambrose. The reporter, who wrote the story about the archivist’s allegations, included these speculations to prove that Steve Ambrose “fabricated” his relationship with Eisenhower. The reporter, however, admitted to me later that he had not examined all the evidence—he published what he had before someone else beat him to the punch.

The career of Stephen Ambrose deserved better. Two years after they met, Eisenhower wrote a forward for Ambrose’s book, Duty, Honor, Country, in which the former president praised his scholarship. Having one of the world’s most respected and popular men add his name to the cover of one’s book is the kind of thing all young historians covet, even though prominent historians of the day ranked Eisenhower’s importance near the bottom of the list of U.S. presidents.

An equally important contribution came a year later, in 1967, when
Eisenhower read the draft of Ambrose’s first work to emerge from his years of research: Eisenhower and Berlin: 1945. In it, Ambrose began a reassessment of General Eisenhower’s handling of the end of the war. Ambrose challenged assertions made by the eminent historians John Toland and Cornelius Ryan. This was big time scholarship for a young historian. He was moving from assembling Eisenhower’s papers to interpreting them. General Eisenhower went through the manuscript line by line, writing notes in the margins. “I have written them very frankly and with no thought of modesty,” he wrote to Ambrose. The former president offered to show his notes to Ambrose so he could revise his book—but “only,” however, “after you have agreed to read them and then return them to me, without transfer of my notes anywhere else.” Since Ambrose had no copy he could not cite his source. In sum, Dwight Eisenhower was secretly helping Steve Ambrose take a big step forward in his career. It would be difficult to imagine a more emphatic endorsement.

It is clear, though, that Ambrose did not spend “hundreds of hours” with the president. This quote, used by the reporter, struck me and others who had worked with Steve Ambrose as strange, because we had never heard him say it. Both the reporter and the archivist told me where to find the quote. Ambrose said it to a group of high school students in 1998. He should not have said it. Like many an embarrassing moment, it lives online. Readers can decide for themselves, whether, out of a hundred TV appearances and a thousand more on radio and in print over the course of forty years, one exaggeration in an interview Ambrose did as a courtesy for some young people should be the measure of the man or his career. What kind of reporter uses this source to charge Steve Ambrose with misrepresenting his relationship in order to sell books?

The first five volumes of The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower were published in January 1970 and were critically acclaimed. The editor, Alfred Chandler, kindly wrote his associate editor, Ambrose, “you should be pleased, as your work was certainly the core of the volumes.” That same year, after six years of immersion in the documents, Ambrose published his second book about Eisenhower. It debuted at a time when America struggled with the war in Vietnam and the public’s regards for its military leaders sank to new lows. Publishing a book entitled The Supreme Commander could not have been viewed as a path to fame and fortune. The New York Times reviewer stated “It is Mr. Ambrose’s special triumph that he has been able to fight through the memoranda, the directives, plans, reports, and official self-serving pieties of the World War II establishment…” to write “…an extraordinarily fascinating book.” Henceforth, General Eisenhower would no longer be portrayed as an officer who arrived in Europe ready to lead all Allied forces (as other historians had it), but understood as a man capable of growing into the job.

Steve Ambrose grew into his job in the 1970s, publishing a number of books that received critical acclaim before returning to Eisenhower at the end of the decade.

Ambrose’s two volume masterwork on Eisenhower was so significant that the staff of the Eisenhower Library celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of its publication. In these books, Ambrose joined a handful of historians who proved that the common understanding of President Eisenhower as a befuddled golfer had been wrong. A decade of reading the documents—and becoming good friends with Eisenhower’s brother Milton and his son John—allowed Ambrose to reveal him as an active president, deeply involved in the creation and direction of his administration’s policies. The perception of him as an old duffer had been, in fact, created at least in part by the president himself. Eisenhower had astutely recognized that the country held him in such high esteem that he could ignore challenges that other presidents could not. Ambrose’s interviews with Eisenhower—whether through the mail, on the phone or in person—comprise only a sliver of the mountain of research upon which this work stands.

Throw out the hyperbole. What the archivist found and what the reporter wrote amounts to, by their own count, six questionable endnotes out of the thousands of endnotes in all of his books on Eisenhower. While it might be tempting to attribute these to typographical errors, the date of an interview with the former president was too important to get wrong. How to weigh these items in the light of his body of work is not a judgment, however, that should be left to a reporter and an archivist who wish to become the talk of the town. Stephen Ambrose wrote great books about Eisenhower. I find it unfortunate that my father did not take his own history, and how he came to meet the former supreme commander, as seriously as he took the subjects of his books. As for President Eisenhower, he kept a few treasured possessions from his decades as a public figure on a bookshelf in his private dressing room in Gettysburg, now a national historic site. Two volumes by Steve Ambrose stand there; one of them is Halleck.