The historian Stephen Ambrose has devoted his life's work to studying men -- men like the American soldiers who won the Second World War. In the course of his long career, he's interviewed hundreds of veterans about what kept them going in battle, and in such popular and highly acclaimed volumes as the 1993 Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler's Eagle's Nest and the 1997 Citizen Soldiers: The U.S. Army from the Normandy Beaches to Bulge to the Surrender of Germany, he discovered that it was, in part, pride in their country and a sense of purpose they found hard to talk about.
But he discovered that it was also, in part, an experience they found it easy to describe: the sustaining friendship of the men with whom they served. And now, with Comrades: Brothers, Fathers, Heroes, Sons, Pals, Ambrose has written his paean to that sort of friendship, a quirky, uneven, personal book about the male camaraderie that is "one of the joys of my adult life."
In a series of twelve chapters, Comrades presents male friendships from history and from the author's own life, discovering that what distinguishes friends is a willingness to reach beyond self to share both joy and pain. Chapters on men aided by the friendship of their brothers -- Dwight Eisenhower and George Custer -- are followed by chapters on two intense and difficult friendships: Eisenhower and George Patton, and the Sioux warriors Crazy Horse and He Dog. The legendary friendship of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark is profiled, together with an account of the wartime friendships of Easy Company in the 101st Airborne and the postwar friendships of British, American, and German veterans. Ambrose himself has never seen combat, but the details from personal experience the kind of close male bonds that can form apart from war in moving chapters on his own brother, friends, and father.
The most telling chapter, however, is that on Richard Nixon, entitled "Nary a Friend." As the author of a three-volume biography of the president, Ambrose knows the man's life well. And he has come to see that one character flaw more than any other precipitated Nixon's downfall: the incapacity to make friends. "I believe you should keep your troubles to yourself," Ambrose quotes Nixon as saying. "Some people are different. Some people think it's good therapy to sit with a close friend and, you know, just spill your guts." And it was with thoughts like these, according to Ambrose, that Nixon "disqualified himself for love by refusing to ever open himself to it."
Henry Kissinger saw Nixon as having "a congenital inability ever to confide totally in anyone," and said that he had "no truly close friends." Ambrose rejects "the theme of the unloved boy." Nixon's parents were stern, he writes, but "who can say how much love is enough? Who can say that Nixon's childhood was in any way so exceptional that it scarred him for life?" The problem for Nixon was not lack of love; it was lack of character:
Nixon had gifts in abundance -- brains, acceptably nice looks, good health, a marvelous memory, knowledge, superb acting ability and stage presence, a faithful family and awesome willpower, among others . . . The one [gift] that he lacked was character. Virtue comes from character. That is why Nixon despised virtue and railed against it.
Nixon didn't just despise virtue, in Ambrose's view; he despised people, which is why he never wanted to be close to anyone except his daughters and, possibly, his wife. He could no more sacrifice himself in friendship, Ambrose concludes, "than he could bring himself to love, trust, and respect the American people."
Repeatedly, Ambrose contrasts Nixon with Eisenhower, a man with many warm friendships and a gift for leadership. Eisenhower grew up with five brothers for whom "competition was the natural order of things": They fought, one said, "for the sheer joy of slugging one another." Milton Eisenhower went on to become the general's lifelong adviser. Like didn't always take his brother's advice -- Milton was opposed to the 1956 presidential reelection bid, for example -- but he always knew he had in Milton an affectionate, intelligent, discreet sounding board for his ideas. "They had," Ambrose decides, "an utter trust in the others's esteem and love."
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark shared what Ambrose calls "the best-known and the most productive friendship in American history." When Lewis was chosen to lead an expedition across the western two-thirds of the continent, he immediately though of Clark, who had been his commanding officer during six months in the army. By this time, Lewis had come to out rank Clark, but he offered his friend co-command of the expedition anyway. When Clark's commission as captain did not come through, Lewis insisted that they represent to their men that they were of equal rank.
They always referred to each other as "Captain Lewis" and "Captain Clark" and, according to Ambrose, there was never a cross word between them during their twenty-eight month trip. They had utter trust in each other; their friendship set the tone for the expedition and made possible its extraordinary success.
Lewis and Clark provoke Ambrose to his most lyrical description of friendship -- and to his clearest recognition of the limitations of friendship as well. "Perfect friendship is rarely achieved, but at its height it is an ecstasy," he writes. "For Lewis and Clark, it was such an ecstasy, and the critical factor in their great success. But even at its highest, friendship is human, not godlike. For all his efforts and intentions, Clark could not save Lewis."
When Lewis fell prey to deep depression, Clark lent him money and opened his home to him. But he was not with him when, en route to Washington to try to straighten out his tangled financial affairs, Lewis sat on a hillside on the Natchez Trail, telling his servant that "General Clark . . . was coming on. He would set things straight. He always did." Not knowing what was happening to his friend, Clark did not come, and later that night, Lewis took his own life.
In all the friendships he describes, his own and those drawn from history, Ambrose celebrates this willingness to open up to others, to reveal vulnerability as well as strength, and to trust. It shows, for instance, in Ambrose's account of the time he and his wife "got into a bad situation with the booze" -- when his friend John Holcomb, who had coped courageously with his own drinking problem, "was a source of strength and inspiration."
The relations Ambrose writes about show what affection can become when combined with loyalty, dignity, honesty, and courage -- in short, with character. The friendships he describes are the opposite of "I feel your pain" sentimentality; they are a function of maturity. He quotes Heraclitus -- "A man's character is his fate" -- and he finds our friendships inextricably linked to our characters.
But character is not simply a static gift of the gods. Like a talent for throwing a baseball or telling stories, the character that shows in friendship may be strengthened or left to wither away. Combat can help form friendships, but so can peacetime experience. And for the men willing to venture into them, intimate friendships are not just the manifestations of character. They are what builds character -- and what rewards it as well.
Stephanie Deutsch is a writer living in Washington, D.C.