What might have been

My one brief experience with presidential politics occurred in 1995. My candidate was Colin Powell. The great historian Stephen Ambrose had emerged as a leader in the movement to win the 1996 Republican presidential nomination for Powell, and I was able to make contact with him in Helena where he shared a part-time home with his daughter and son-in-law.

Ambrose, probably best known in Montana for his authorship of his biographical work on the tragic life of explorer Meriwether Lewis, was also the biographer of Eisenhower, “Soldier and President a one-volume life of Dwight D. Eisenhower.�...