A Historian Meets His Little Bighorn

Abstract

According to two articles published last week on the Web site Forbes.com, Mr. Ambrose included passages from other authors' works in his books Crazy Horse and Custer (Doubleday, 1975), Citizen Soldiers (Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery: 1973- 1990 (Simon & Schuster, 1991). In each of the four cases, Mr. Ambrose listed the other author's book in his bibliography but did not credit the author for writing key phrases that appeared in his text. The Forbes.com report revealing that case prompted e-mail messages from readers, including a note from Joseph Balkoski, a military historian who said Citizen Soldiers contained lines from his 1989 book Beyond the Beachhead (Stackpole Books).

SOUNDS FAMILIAR: Last week was a bad one for Stephen E. Ambrose. Only days after he had apologized for plagiarism in his latest book, the historian and best-selling author faced charges that an earlier book of his also contains passages lifted from another scholar. Then two more allegations surfaced.

According to two articles published last week on the Web site Forbes.com, Mr. Ambrose included passages from other authors' works in his books Crazy Horse and Custer (Doubleday, 1975), Citizen Soldiers (Simon & Schuster, 1997), and Nixon: Ruin and Recovery: 1973- 1990 (Simon & Schuster, 1991). Earlier that week, an article in The Weekly Standard by its executive editor, Fred Barnes, had revealed close similarities between Mr. Ambrose´s 2001 book about bomber pilots in World War II, The Wild Blue (Simon & Schuster), and Thomas Childers´s Wings of Morning (Addison Wesley, 1995).

In each of the four cases, Mr. Ambrose listed the other author's book in his bibliography but did not credit the author for writing key phrases that appeared in his text.

At press time, Mr. Ambrose had no comment on the latest charges against him, but after The Weekly Standard story broke he apologized to Mr. Childers in a written statement. He acknowledged that he had used portions of Wings of Morning to describe three events in The Wild Blue, noting his source with footnotes but failing to put sentences in quotation marks. He said quotation marks would be added in future editions of The Wild Blue.

Mr. Childers, a history professor at the University of Pennsylvania, said that while he doesn't believe Mr. Ambrose's lifting of his work was malicious, he doubts that Mr. Ambrose simply internalized his work. "It doesn't seem inadvertent," he said. "If anything, I think this might be the result of Ambrose working too fast. You can't publish as many books as he does as quickly as he does without losing focus."

One section of Mr. Childers´s book reads: "Up, up, up, groping through the clouds for what seemed like an eternity. ... No amount of practice could have prepared them for what they encountered. B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping out of the clouds all over the sky." Mr. Ambrose´s book says: "Up, up, up he went, until he got above the clouds. No amount of practice could have prepared the pilot and crew for what they encountered -- B-24s, glittering like mica, were popping out of the clouds over here, over there, everywhere."

Some passages in Mr. Ambrose´s book about Custer are similar in their lack of originality, closely resembling lines from the late Jay Monaghan's 1959 book Custer (Little, Brown & Co.). The Forbes.com report revealing that case prompted e-mail messages from readers, including a note from Joseph Balkoski, a military historian who said Citizen Soldiers contained lines from his 1989 book Beyond the Beachhead (Stackpole Books). Mr. Ambrose wrote the foreword to the paperback edition of the book. "He will footnote me, but the writing is either identical or subtly changed without using quotation marks," said Mr. Balkoski. He told Forbes.com that he did not complain about the matter when Mr. Ambrose's book first came out because he believed it was an isolated instance.

Forbes.com also reported that Ruin and Recovery, the third volume of Mr. Ambrose's Nixon trilogy, contains "numerous" lines that nearly match passages from Robert Sam Anson's 1984 book Exile: The Unquiet Oblivion of Richard M. Nixon, also published by Simon & Schuster.