I'm so embarrassed to be (apparently) the only professional writer in America who has not been plagiarized by Stephen Ambrose. And on the subject of such crimes, let me relate one quick anecdote…
Years ago, a team of comedy writers caught a show I'd written on TV and realized that it had almost the exact same plot — and even many of the same jokes — as a show they'd written. Leaping into high dudgeon, they engaged a lawyer who dispatched a highly-outraged letter to the producer of my show. In grueling detail, it itemized similarities — so many, it concluded, that coincidence was inconceivable. The only rational explanation was that I had shamelessly and without question seen their show and copied down its every word to palm off as my own. The letter concluded by noting that theirs had been conceived, written and aired a full eight months before mine and, therefore, I had "more than ample time" to pull off this daring, daylight burglary.
The producer of my show wrote back a terse note, which was basically a cover letter to what he enclosed. It was a copy of a CBS program log that he'd highlighted to note that the episode of mine they'd seen was a rerun from two years earlier. Mine had, in fact, aired four times by the date they said they'd written theirs.
From their lawyer thereafter, there was silence. From the writers eventually came a personal note saying that they'd fired that rotten attorney who had insisted on sending that inexcusable letter. There was, obviously, no similarity between the shows.
That does not seem to be the case with Mr. Ambrose's lifts. I think the reasons his have the press so intrigued are that, first of all, they can't seem to figure out how anyone — Ambrose or some ghost-writer, if that was the culprit — thought he could get away with it. Stealing from an obscure source in the belief that no one will ever see where you got it is, at least, a bit understandable. Stealing from a book you acknowledge as a reference is like telling everyone where you hid the weapon and hoping they don't notice there's been a murder. Ambrose's "crime" seemed so illogical that the early theory seems to have been the ghost-writer one; that it was perpetrated by someone who knew his own name would not get tarnished and perhaps wished to embarrass his employer. As further instances of theft come to light, the Ghost-Writer Explanation seems increasingly less likely.
The second reason it all has reporters so up-in-arms and paying attention is that they can't believe this wasn't exposed long ago. But then, most of them didn't know before September 11th that the Taliban wasn't a new model of Chevrolet…