Did Historian Stephen Ambrose Lie About Interviews with Dwight D. Eisenhower?

April 27, 2010— -- The late Stephen Ambrose, one of America's most popular and prolific historians, fabricated numerous interviews he held with former President Dwight D. Eisenhower, says an historian who cites newly-discovered documents recording the handful of meetings between the two men.

Ambrose, the bestselling author of the World War II histories "D-Day" and "Band of Brothers," said that he had conducted "hundreds and hundreds" of hours of interviews between 1964 and 1969 while working on "Supreme Commander," the two-volume biography of the general-turned-president that would catapult Ambrose to the top ranks of American historians.

But when a researcher at the Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library and Museum earlier this month went to pull minutes of those meetings from the libraries archives, he found what amounted to less five hours' worth of interviews.

"It was entirely by accident," said Tim Rives, deputy director of the Eisenhower library in Abilene, Kansas. "I just stumbled over the documents. We were holding a program at the library about Ambrose and Eisenhower. We typically display documents in an exhibit along with the program. I've read all of Ambrose's accounts of Eisenhower. But when I looked at the documents there was plenty of material that just didn't match up."

Ambrose, who died in 2002, said he was approached by Eisenhower in 1964 to become his biographer, a request that changed his life and made him at one point perhaps the most famous historian in the United States.

"I was a Civil War historian, and in 1964 I got a telephone call from General Eisenhower, who asked if I would be interested in writing his biography," Ambrose said in a C-SPAN interview in 1994.

"I'd walk in to interview him, and his eyes would lock on mine and I would be there for three hours and they never left my eyes," Ambrose told C-SPAN. "I was teaching at Johns Hopkins and going up two days a week to Gettysburg to work with him in his office." Eisenhower had a home near Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, in his later years. He died in 1969.

Rives says Ambrose's account is contradicted by the meticulously-kept documents recording Eisenhower's correspondence and schedule.