(soft ambient music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you in part by the Eugenie and Joseph Jones Family Foundation.

a local foundation proud to support education the arts and culture in the Greater New Orleans area.

The 909 Fund is proud to support the quality programming on public television.

This program is also made possible with support from Lori & Bobby Savoie.

And by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of WYES local productions.

(soft ambient music) - [Eisenhower] Soldiers, sailors, and airmen of the Allied Expeditionary Force.

- [Narrator] General Dwight D Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War 2 makes the decision to launch what would become one of the nation's most significant battles, the Normandy Invasion, D-Day.

- [Eisenhower] You are about to embark upon the great crusade, toward which we have striven these many months.

The eyes of the world are upon you.

- [Narrator] Waves of men stormed the beaches from Higgins boats landing craft built in New Orleans by Andrew Jackson Higgins, who Eisenhower later lauded as the man who won the war.

- [Steve] Said, "If he hadn't developed and then built "those Higgins boats, as they called them, "we never could have gone in over an open beach.

"It would've changed the whole strategy of the war."

- [Narrator] University of New Orleans historian and bestselling author, Stephen Ambrose, began collecting the personal stories about the invasion from D-Day Veterans.

- He was always impressed with the young 18, 19-year-olds who would go into the teeth of the fire on Normandy beaches.

- [Narrator] The personal stories of those who fought inspired these two historians and dear friends to found a museum so that generations to come would remember the price paid for freedom.

This is the story of how they got the job done.

(inspiring music) (crowd applauding) (soft piano music) - Today is a day we have long awaited.

15 years ago, the idea for this museum was born.

We come as the successor generations to salute a great generation, a generation that is great for purpose, for bravery, and for valor.

- [Narrator] June 6th, 2000, opening ceremony for the National D-Day Museum in the New Orleans warehouse district, a triumphant day for Dr. Stephen Ambrose and Nick Mueller, the two University of New Orleans historians who led the charge for it to become a reality in the city where they planted their professional roots at a new public university, then called Louisiana State University in New Orleans, LSUNO, growing a deep friendship and a shared belief in a strong democracy.

(soft music) - Well, I was born in Philadelphia.

My father was a professor of church history and theology at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.

But I never thought I was gonna be a historian, but I was certainly always impressed with my father's knowledge of history.

I started off as an English major and by the middle of my sophomore year, I decided I wanted to shift majors.

So I shifted it to history and I wanted to try to go to graduate school.

And that led me to the University of North Carolina and Chapel Hill, and I finished my PhD there in '69 and came to LSUNO at that time.

Steve was an undergraduate about five years younger than I was.

He was an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin.

In 1960, while he was just finishing a PhD, he came down to LSUNO and taught here for three years before I came.

- I came here in the fall of 1960.

I had been a student at LSU of Harry Williams, and I loved New Orleans.

And I thought the greatest thing in the world would be get a real job in New Orleans.

And here was this new university opening up.

And I applied as soon as I was qualified.

I managed to get the job.

In 1964, I got a call from President Eisenhower in Gettysburg asking me if I'd come up and talk to him about being an editor of his papers and his biographer.

I was 28 years old.

And I said, yes, sir.

And I got on the next plane.

Changed my life completely.

Obviously, I went into World War 2.

And because I stayed with Eisenhower, I got into political history necessarily, which I never intended to do.

But who could pass up an opportunity like that?

- The stories and the legends of Steve Ambrose were rampant in the department.

And in '71, Stephen Ambrose decided that he might look south again.

He came down and met with the department.

Steve and I just hit it off.

We just shared so many different things in common besides our love of history.

Took him down to our place in the French Quarter and said, "Steve, you gotta come, man."

So he did about a couple weeks later and signed on.

We just became fast friends almost immediately.

I mean, we just started doing everything together, you know, traveling.

Our families just grew up together, basically.

And it was just one of those great friendships that you're lucky to have in your life.

And there are two or three of 'em that, that happened to you, you're lucky if that happens.

And it did with Steve.

- Just feel like I grew up with him coming over.

And it would be around cocktail hour around five in the evening.

And intermingled with the evening news or before that, or before dinner, it was discussion.

And once all of the debates had subsided, then it would be, well, what are you working on, and what are, what do we want to do and how do we want to do it?

And, you know, I remember my dad would say, "Oh, Nick," you know, 'cause he'd have some plan.

He just loved his friendship with him and he loved the adventure because dad was an adventurous spirit as well, and that that was matched in them.

- So it was just traveling together and doing things outside of the university, as well as important things inside the university.

- They were just so committed to not only having fun and being together but in improving the world.

And dad's favorite quote was that we have to add to the sum of the world's knowledge, that that was what history was, and that was what they were doing.

- And some of the adventures had to do with history actually, 1980.

I was Dean at that time of Metropolitan College and finally convinced Steve to do his first D-Day to the Rhine tour.

And that kind of changed his life and his trajectory of his research as well, because he started meeting the Veterans along the way and taking them.

It was a great, great tour.

And Steve got excited about recording their stories.

(nostalgic music) - There's a cemetery there at Omaha Beach.

It just wipes you out.

And you see all these graves are... Dwight Eisenhower was with Walter Cronkite on the 20th anniversary of D-Day.

And Walter asked former President Eisenhower at that time, asked him, "What do you think "about when you come here, sir?"

He said, "You know, Walter, Mamie and I get our greatest pleasure in life "from our grandchildren.

"And I come here and I look out at all those graves "and I think of all the parents back "in the United States who don't have any grandchildren "because their son died here so that my grandchildren "could grow up in freedom."

- We're here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty.

- I think that the turning point for him, for the collection of the oral histories was in 1984 when he had a group over there and Ronald Reagan spoke at Pointe du Hoc on the 40th anniversary of D-Day.

He came home and said, he said, "Nick," he says, "I need to have some students "or somebody to staff and a place to, "I want to record histories of Veterans "and write a book on D-Day."

So I said, "Well, let's create something "that we could raise money around," and we called it the Eisenhower Center for Leadership Studies.

- The Eisenhower Center really came out of the fact that Stephen Ambrose went to the 1984 D-Day anniversary.

And he realized that the 50th anniversary would be much bigger.

The Eisenhower Center in that early phase collected oral histories of D-Day soldiers.

And most of the staff was involved with transcribing those oral histories.

Dr. Ambrose had a one page advisory, if you will, that he would send to people who would do oral histories.

So he would tell on this advisory to soldiers, sit down, take a glass of whiskey, have a sip of whiskey, and then start talking into a tape your D-Day experience.

- [D-Day Soldier] We started running across the beach.

We were about 500 yards out.

So we are neck deep water.

When we got to the actual beach, there were a group of us running across the beach with our rifles at port arms, which is the rifle across your chest.

When we got to about 135 yards away from the sea wall, a machine gun spray came from the trenches up on the bluff.

- So it collected a lot that way.

He also, when reunion groups came to New Orleans, he'd go down and interview 'em.

That's how he got onto the Band of Brothers, they were all doing a reunion at one of the hotels, and he heard about it and busted into their reunion and stood up on the coffee table said, "I'm Steve Ambrose."

Well, nobody ever heard of him, but he said, "I'm gonna do all your stories."

He wanted to get the story from the ground up from the guys on the beaches or in the planes parachuting into enemy territory, the guys on the ships, the Coast Guardsmen who were taking the guys in.

Understand, you know, why were these guys, you know, doing this?

I mean, this was gonna be a hellish invasion.

And they could sense right away that he understood the experience.

He wasn't a Veteran, but he knew the story.

And that, in a way, gave them permission to talk about it.

- When he had over a thousand oral histories, he began to write his big D-Day book.

- He never had any doubt.

He was worried about what it's going to cost and he was worried about how long it's going to take.

He worried about most of all, the young men that he was sending into battle.

But he was determined that he was going to be the head of a victorious Alliance, and he saw to it that that happened.

- And we talked about this story a lot while he was collecting them in the mid '80s.

It was a common conversation in his backyard and canoe trips.

He talked to me also about, you know, how he was going to write the book book.

One of those conversations hatched an idea that would forever change the lives of both men.

- Fateful, fateful afternoon.

And I had just been asked to lead the development of the research and technology park.

And it was the 30 acres of the Pontchartrain Beach amusement park out there, and it was all vacant land.

So this day, he had something on his mind.

He said, "Sit down and have a drink."

So I could see this glass of sherry coming through the haze at me.

"I got an idea, we're gonna do something here."

And I said, "Okay."

So he says, "Look, I have finished the research "on the oral histories.

"That's all transcribed.

"I'm starting to go through 'em now "and I'm gonna write the book, "D-Day 1994 for the 50th anniversary of D-Day."

He said, "It's gonna really be big.

"I've got a thousand of these oral histories now.

"Some of these guys send artifacts that are connected "to the stories on their tapes and they gotta be preserved.

"I don't know anything about how to save these things.

"Some professionals need to do that.

"So what we're gonna do is we're gonna build a D-Day museum "in your research park.

"And I'll give you all my oral histories and my artifacts "and you raise the money."

And I said, "Well, Steve, "that's the best idea you ever had."

I was really excited about it so I said, "But there are a couple of problems with it.

"Number one, you're the big name, so we're gonna do this "together like we've done everything else."

And he said, "Oh, okay."

So I said, "You're going to be fundraiser in chief."

And he says, "Okay, that's settled.

"No, we're gonna do it."

And I said, "Yes."

So he says, "Good, now it'll only cost a million dollars."

I said, "Oh, Steve, you're so naive about these things.

"It's gonna be at least four million, you know.

"I know more about these things than you do."

"Oh God," he said, "we could never raise that much money."

I said, "Well, we're gonna have to."

And so that's where the naivete comes in.

- While I was Chancellor at the University of New Orleans, Steve Ambrose and Nick Mueller came to me with the idea of a museum to honor World War 2, but specifically to honor the work of the Higgins Boatyard and Andrew Higgins around the D-Day Invasion.

It was an amazing story because I even, having lived in New Orleans for several years, didn't realize the impact that Andrew Higgins had had, and that the Higgins Boatyard had had, and that it was an integrated boatyard in a segregated south.

So the story began to really capture.

- He built 20,000 of the landing craft vehicle personnel.

That's why Dwight Eisenhower said to me, the first time I ever met him in 1964, "Did you know Andrew Higgins," and he said to me.

I said, "No, sir."

And Ike said, "That's too bad.

"He's the man who won the war for us."

And I went.

And he saw my face and he said, "No, he was the man who won the war for us.

"If he hadn't developed and then built those Higgins boats "as they called them, we never could have gone "in over an open beach.

"It would've changed the whole strategy of the war."

And I came back to New Orleans.

I was teaching at LSUNO as it was called at that time, determined to build something in New Orleans to honor this guy.

I mean, there was not a street named after him in this whole city.

There was not a building named after him.

- People ask me all the time you had such a big vision.

No, it was a little, little small manageable $4 million project.

- [Narrator] They conducted a feasibility study and were advised to get Congress involved.

- And they said your guys are not gonna get anywhere unless you get Congress to kick in some dough at the front end, you know, 'cause nobody's gonna think, you know, a couple historians at a university are gonna be able to succeed.

- [Narrator] Ambrose headed to Washington, DC to meet with then Louisiana Congressman Bob Livingston who headed the House Appropriations Committee.

Ambrose reported back to Nick.

- So Steve calls me up.

"We got it, we get everything we need."

I said, "How much?"

He said, "Four million."

"Oh Steve, that's great, but you could have asked for 10."

He said, "I knew you'd be mad at me."

So anyway, I said, "No."

I said, "It's great," and it was enough to catalyze the project.

And so we had a board by '91, four million bucks, and we were off to the races.

- [Steve] The National D-Day Museum is coming to New Orleans because Andy Higgins built the LCVPs here.

And it's gonna be located at the place where he tested the first LCVP and within about a third of a mile from one of his four assembly plants, which was over on the Industrial Canal.

- Well, Steve and I had the same publisher.

We had a pretty close relationship.

We talked a lot on the phone.

And then he said one day, we were having a drink, and he said, "You know, we don't have "a National World War 2 Museum and it's a scandal.

"And it's supposed to be in Washington if we had one.

"But I think we ought to have one in New Orleans."

And he said, "I'm working on it."

I said, "Steve, you're crazy.

"Nobody's gonna go to New Orleans.

"Nobody's gonna come down there."

He said, "We're gonna have it on the lake."

I said, "That's even worse."

- We had a goal to open in 1994.

And we picked an architect here locally.

And then the architects told us that it was gonna cost 15 million to build on the lakefront.

We nowhere close to even breaking ground in '94, so.

- [Narrator] There was also disagreement about the museum's location, lakefront or downtown.

- I mean the business community was smarter than we were.

They said, it's gotta be downtown.

It's where the tourists are.

Steve hung onto that site out there 'cause of its, it was simpler, it was cheaper.

It was an authentic site.

- [Narrator] But time was running out on the federal dollars.

If it wasn't spent on the project, it had to be returned.

An opportunity to buy a downtown warehouse with the remaining federal money settled the location issue.

- And it was 80,000 square feet.

And for a million bucks we could buy the warehouse and the property around it.

So immediately the controversy was over.

That was a, that was a turning point in terms of the physical development of the museum.

- Luckily some of the cohort of businessmen that he surrounded himself with to help promote the museum, help pay for it, they convinced him to come downtown.

And that was a, a crucial decision.

I had nothing to do with that, but he called me and said, "I got talked out of the lake."

- [Narrator] With a private donation, the D-Day artifacts in a museum in France were purchased.

- We bought the whole kit and kaboodle.

I mean, these were all artifacts from the fields and beaches of Normandy.

Now we have a thousand oral histories, we have close to a hundred thousand small artifacts and no museum.

In '95, '96, and about that time, I went to Baton Rouge to try to seek an appropriation.

Now we thought we didn't have a chance.

What they said is here's three million bucks, but we're gonna put it in priority five and you can't move it up to spendable priority one money until you can show you can finish the project.

And we weren't close to that.

We were still kind of stuck from '96 to '98 and not doing well.

- At first.

It seemed like a big dream, but with Steve's dynamism, it was one that we could achieve.

So we went to the community, we went to our delegation in Louisiana, we went to our federal delegation and built more and more support for the idea of a truly national museum.

- It was amazing the inspiration Stephen Ambrose gave to the members of those, the early board.

When I got involved, it was a lot of bickering about how we're gonna get the money.

And every time we ran outta money, Steve would write a check.

And he would say, "We're all in this together," coming back from the World War 2 motto, after the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

- [Narrator] Meanwhile, the proposed D-Day museum caught the attention of two US Senators on the Appropriations Committee, Ted Stevens and Daniel Inouye.

Also on that committee then Senator from Louisiana, Mary Landrieu who worked to secure federal dollars.

- So Nick came to me after a couple of years of them fundraising and said we are, you know, really in a jam and we really have to have, you know, an infusion of some funding.

So I said, "Well, let me see what I can do."

And we were able to get the museum over one of its big fundraising humps.

That funding came in at a crucial time.

- [Narrator] Finding the necessary funds remained challenging and the organizational structure needed improving.

- '97 Was part of the dog days.

I think the word on the street in the business community was DOA, dead on arrival, you know, it ain't gonna happen.

I mean, that was what I was hearing, Steve was, too.

Board members were starting to resign.

- There was no organization.

We kept talking about the same things over and over.

And there was no, no progress.

We had a, we had the building, we finally bought a building which was certified to be in perfect shape.

Then we found out and they said there were no termites.

Well, the termites had eaten a roof off of it.

It had to be gutted from the inside and start over, really.

It was all kind a lot of expense and so forth.

So I said, "I don't know if this is ever gonna happen."

- Steve retired but he was working on his books, spending a lot of time in the summers up in Montana.

And you know, I was still a volunteer member of the board and that was kind of where we were.

- [Narrator] It was then that all eyes turned to Nick Mueller and his managerial talent.

He was asked to become Board Chair and CEO.

He describes it as more like an ambush.

- Ambrose was sitting there and I'm looking at him.

And he grabbed my hands.

He said, "Nick, you got me into this.

"You gotta get me out of it," with a kind of look.

He says, "The most important thing you can do "right now, Nick, is if you would take this on."

So when I accepted, I said, "We're gonna get this done and get open."

So and that's what I told the board on first day, "D-Day June 6th was our D-Day so we're gonna get there."

And I didn't exactly know how, but I knew I needed a lot of money.

- We had some artifacts to show from the Normandy invasions and the, in the D-Days.

My passion exploded a little bit more when Mike Foster was the Governor.

Jackie Clarkson, who was a State Representative then took us up there, and Mike was a good friend of mine, to get money to build the Louisiana Pavilion.

We had gotten $4 million from Congress and then we were doing all of our own fundraising.

- It gave us a lot of hope that things were gonna move forward.

And then Diana was involved.

Diana Bajoie got involved and worked toward getting the state money.

- All of my work on this project was done in the Senate.

It sound interesting, but it wasn't till I actually met with Ambrose.

He talked about all the things that went on during the war and what if, what a positive effect it had on people living in New Orleans who worked at the Higgins Warehouse where they were building the boats.

Mostly it was women and minorities, African Americans.

He didn't discriminate.

You know, it really was pleased with hearing and the role that he played in the whole war.

Then the more I got involved in it, the more supportive I became.

And we were only doing at that time, the Louisiana Pavilion.

- She helped me attract some African American Veterans to the board too, and so we began to pull in the African American community.

It took a year or so till about '97 where we actually began work.

We had an architect.

We had to tear out walls.

The whole atrium had to be ripped out all the way up to the roof, so there was a lot to do.

We had enough money to do the exhibits on the third floor, put in a gift shop.

It was pretty bare bones and a small part of the ground floor for the theater where we're gonna show our documentary, award-winning documentary "D-Day Remembered".

So that was it.

And about 18 months before June 6th, 2000, we went to Frank Stewart and asked him for a major gift.

And he made a $2 million commitment.

And that's how much I needed to know that we could open.

- When they presented to me the importance of educating the people of the World War 2 victory, I began to understand the importance and of course the whole aspect of the university was education and to educate the people on why we are free.

- I always asked Veterans after I interview them.

I said, "What did it all mean?"

And some of 'em give me very thoughtful answers.

And the most thoughtful one was a guy who looked me in the eye and said, "Listen, Steve, I was 18 years old.

"I had my whole life ahead of me.

"I knew the difference between right and wrong "and I didn't wanna live in a world "in which wrong prevailed, so I fought."

And we're gonna honor the one who went out and struggled for right and brought it about.

- And I was deeply committed to the idea of getting this museum going, but now it's different.

It's really different when you're Chairman and CEO and you're on the dot.

Steve and I felt confident about working with the exhibit designers and telling the story of D-Day.

It had to be personal, based on Steve Ambrose's core narrative of the D-Day book that he wrote in 1994.

And it had to reflect positively on the American spirit.

We felt like that contributed to the Allied victory tremendously.

It's a big American story.

It had to be authentic, relying more on technologies, on visuals, on oral history, video clips.

And so if there's gonna be an artifact in the D-Day Museum, it has to have, most desirably, a personal story to somebody connected to that artifact.

I mean, what made those young 18-year-olds wade ashore on Omaha Beach on June 6th, 1944 in the face of annihilating enemy fire when they should've been, as Steve Ambrose always said, at their high school prom?

They knew what they were fighting for and against.

And somehow that has to be part of the story.

I mean, it was very intense.

I mean, we had construction going on.

We had exhibit design going on.

I was spending a tremendous amount of time with fundraising, so was Steve.

I was rebuilding the board and there was marketing.

We had to change our image in the community as a museum idea that was going to be dead on arrival.

So Malcolm Ehrhardt, I got him on board as the Ehrhardt Group to help change the public relations image.

- We wanted to do was highlight the things that would make it unique in the country.

And the question that we got asked most as we went into other cities was why would a national museum be located anywhere but in New York or DC.

And so we took that to heart, that was in the early days, and we said, okay, if we're gonna plan a museum that eventually will become a national museum, it really has to be, it has to reflect both the reasons why the museum was begun and all the things that can make it terrific.

- [Narrator] Confidence was building also, boosted by an active board and a burst of star power from Hollywood elites Steven Spielberg and Tom Hanks and from broadcast news anchor and author, Tom Brokaw.

- Steven Spielberg called up Steve Ambrose over in Bay St. Louis about two or four months before "Saving Private Ryan" came out.

And Steve ran around the country with Spielberg and Hanks 'cause he was so enthusiastic about it and brought Veterans together, every city, on TV, and had a chance to talk about this museum that we were building here to D-Day.

And so we got a lot of national publicity.

- By that time, Nick and Tom Brokaw had struck a friendship.

And of course Steve was a friend of both of them, as well.

It was a combination of having some star power, Tom Brokaw, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Steve Ambrose.

Having them involved was a headliner as headliners helped us.

- Everything's happening at once, I mean, just the way it was.

Nothing you could do about it, D-Day was gonna happen.

And as Eisenhower said in the real D-Day, there's no alternate plan.

So we just had to get it done somehow.

Malcolm Ehrhardt said, "Nick, you gotta start organizing "for this big grand opening that you wanna have."

- When we came up with the plan we wanted to involve Veterans, of course, Veterans of World War 2, Veterans of D-Day.

We knew that they would be honored.

- We wanted a parade, we wanted all the units that were involved, their successor units.

We wanted representatives of everything.

So I really had a very big and ambitious vision for this thing.

And Mary Landrieu was very helpful in getting Congress to designate us as this day as an official commemorative event for the United States of America.

Once the military starts swooping in, you know, all kinds of things started happening.

The parade was all taken care of by the military.

We asked them to pick D-Day Veterans, not just from Normandy, but every D-Day of the Mediterranean and the Pacific.

At the same time, Jimmy Duckworth and Jerry Strahan had started in '97 to build a Higgins landing craft with the blueprints from Andrew Higgins.

So we were gonna have a Higgins landing craft on D-Day, June 6th, 2000.

And that, of course, was one of the key reasons Steve Ambrose did this in the first place was to recognize Andrew Higgins.

And that's one reason, the main reason, I should say it's the main reason the National D-Day Museum was going to be in New Orleans.

So all those things were trying to, were helping.

I mean the state support, another 2 million from Congress, and private support started happening.

We started getting more board members.

All of these factors were kind of coalescing and giving us momentum.

But it was close, it was, I mean, we were, you know, mopping the floors and painting the midnight before we opened.

So it was a, it was a great adventure.

- [Narrator] The National D-Day Museum was set to open.

The cost, just over $20 million.

- I worried that they'd fail, I really did.

I couldn't see it.

But yet I came to the opening, okay?

In 2000, okay?

On the anniversary of D-Day in 2000.

And it changed my mind.

- I think we all felt great confidence in the last two weeks that this was gonna get done, that wed be in good shape to do it.

We realized this was gonna be a big and memorable event.

In the first of the series of events or very toward the beginning was a re-enactor effort out at City Park.

And once Steve got out there and started his conversations with those who were World War 2 Veterans around him, and he just comes to life, you know.

French government responded, British responded, and so it turned into literally a week's worth of activities.

- Thank you.

I'd like to congratulate all the D-Day Veterans.

It seems, against great odds you have successfully taken New Orleans.

(audience laughing, clapping) - I went to Normandy in 1984 to produce a documentary on the 40th anniversary.

And the first morning I stepped onto those beaches with two Veterans from the First Division, my world changed forever.

- Happy to be here to be part of the dedication of a museum whose time has come.

Long overdue, but better late than never.

- It was gonna be an outside dedication in the parade.

So there were about 80 trucks filled with about 20, 30 Veterans each.

So that was the plan.

In addition to the Veterans and the parade, everybody showed up there that we had hoped would show up.

I mean, of course, Secretary of Defense Cohen, Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, six Medal of Honor recipients, Senator Breaux, Senator Mary Landrieu, and Tom Brokaw.

- There are too many dignitaries here for me to say all of their names.

But the real dignitaries, they're sitting right in front of me and they're scattered all through this audience, the men and women of the Second World War.

- The active military in this country responded in ways that we could not have imagined.

And we had flyovers and we had commitments of troops.

- There were hundreds of Veterans there.

And they put a lot of them on trucks.

They had tremendous parade.

The enthusiasm was contagious.

And I thought, "You know, this, I think might work.

"It might work."

- It was a lineup of Boysie Bollinger who was gonna be my successor.

And of course Steve and myself at the, moment of triumph, I guess, you know.

It was just, you know.

(crowd applauding) - All right.

- It was an amazing, amazing day, but the actual ribbon cutting was pretty special.

- It was an incredibly patriotic day.

It was an incredibly emotional day.

It was intended to be the marker that this was an opportunity for New Orleans to host a museum that the rest of the country and the world would recognize as something unique and worth seeing.

And I think we succeeded.

(gentle music) (audience applauding) - [Narrator] The full slate of activities capped off with a heartfelt message from D-Day Veteran, Army Ranger, Leonard Lomell.

- So if this museum can help the future generations to see war as I see it and they can go forth and be our leaders and in some way, stop it and find a peaceful way to resolve their disputes.

Thank you.

(audience applauding) (gentle music) - Well, that is going very big and it is the only museum, not only in the United States, but in the whole world that is gonna cover all of the D-Days in Normandy, obviously, but also North Africa and Sicily, and Italy and all the ones in the Pacific, because in every invasion of World War 2, the men who carried out the invasion rode to the beach in boats built in New Orleans by Andrew Higgins.

- And when we opened on June 6th, 2000, I was just getting ready to become Chairman, it was such a success that Veterans Parade and the fact that they had never been appreciated in all these years, since the war ended, was just an inspiration to everybody that was there that day.

So our next goal was to another 5,500 square feet to open the Pacific wing, which was 18 months later.

And then we were off and running.

We started really saying, "Okay, we have a lot more to do."

I was very close to Ted Stevens as was Steve Ambrose, Senator from Alaska, and Dan Inouye, who from Hawaii, both Veterans of the war, they told us, you know, it's really hard to fund this thing in New Orleans.

But he said, "If y'all expanded the mission "to be a repository for everything about World War 2, "we'll make it a National World War 2 Museum "and we can do some federal funding."

So that was very exciting to us.

And of course, we did become the National World War 2 Museum.

- Well, you know, there was some pushback.

It wasn't the easiest thing to pass that resolution, renaming it from the D-Day Museum.

And I can remember several of the Senators bristling a little bit, "Well, what's so special about New Orleans?

"Why should it be there?"

And our delegation worked very closely together and we ended up passing that resolution to name it the official World War 2 Museum.

- It was the afternoon, early evening of the day before we opened June 5th, 2000.

Senator Stevens had been a good friend of Steve Ambrose.

But he says, "You have got to do now the rest of the war."

He said, "So look," he said, "if you two will take "on expanding this museum to become "the National World War 2 Museum, "change your mission and figure out what it's gonna cost "and how to do it," he said, "I'll help."

And Steve looked at me and he rolled his eyes.

"Nick, don't say, yes, don't say yes," 'cause we thought we were done.

We thought it was finished.

10 years, we had just opened this thing.

So he gave me that look, but I said, "Yes, we'll look at it."

So it was, it was now a new planning process.

It had to get underway.

And we were just getting to the beginning of the end, which was gonna be a long time off.

But we had to do master planning.

We had to get the board involved, you know.

You don't get a man that powerful giving you that opportunity but one time.

And as soon it was over, Steve said, "Well, if he says, I guess we gotta do it."

- And then along the way, he decides to expand it.

And he's getting a lot of letters along the way from vets in the Pacific, like, what about us?

And so he put together an exhibit that was entitled D-Days in the Pacific.

And I thought it was absolutely riveting exhibit, really, very strongly drawn to this thing.

And that was the last thing that he was really working on.

(gentle piano notes) - [Narrator] The National D-Day Museum was welcoming visitors and planning to expand.

- That was going on while we're still trying to finish the D-Day exhibits, but it was all-consuming as well, because it not only how do we change the mission, had to figure out how to do World War 2, that was harder than just D-Day.

- [Narrator] But then came the unthinkable.

- Steve called me from Bay St. Louis the afternoon after he was diagnosed with stage four lung cancer.

And it was an emotional call, but he just said matter of factly, "Doc said I've got the big C." Ugh, God.

And anyway, he said, he told me, "I got six months."

It was a blow, a huge blow, personally, to me, the most important blow was losing someone you loved as a, almost as a brother.

And Steve took it well, he was fought it, but I think he knew that he wasn't gonna beat it.

- Obviously, when we found out in April that he was sick, it was a tough blow.

And so the news came down that the stage four lung cancer, it was a reality that was very hard for the whole family.

He, of course, was the center of our family and he did everything he could.

So he just continued to live.

And in spite of everything, he set a very good example for bravery in the face of, in knowing that it wasn't much longer that he had.

- He immediately went to work on getting another book out.

Said, "I still got something to say and I gotta do it fast, "'cause I know this chemo's "gonna wipe me out in a few months."

So he wrote "To America", which was really autobiographical in a way.

I mean, it was not his normal history but it was sort of his intellectual history.

We were talking a lot about the expansion plans 'cause we were in the concept planning.

So there was a lot of people pinned their hopes on Steve Ambrose's reputation as a scholar and as a great historian, and as an outward face.

I mean, celebrities and Hanks and Spielberg are here and there and for the big events, but Steve was living here in New Orleans at the University of New Orleans.

Retired, but they knew Steve wasn't going anywhere.

But now he was, and it was, you know, the last chapter for my friend.

But we had lots of conversations over the course of the summer as he had declined.

And it was, it was hard for both of us emotionally.

But he had great spirit immediately going to his courage, you know, to his intellect as well.

August, September as he was declining pretty rapidly, but he was always positive and smiling.

And I know that we knew it was getting close to the end.

In early October, there was a, the French American Chamber of commerce here was taking a trade delegation to Normandy.

And I was to be there to represent the museum.

And it was getting close.

And I wanted to cancel the trip.

And Steve said, "No, you're not gonna cancel this trip."

Well, he was having problems.

And then I flew to Paris and walked into my hotel room.

And I'll tell you, I opened the door and turned on the TV.

And it was a picture of Steve.

(Nick exhales) (somber music) Yeah.

You know.

It was tough.

(somber music) (uplifting music) - No, I didn't envision we were gonna be where we are, but I knew we would go a lot further.

Steve would challenge me a lot on my thinking of how big we could get, and just because of the difficulty we had in the early days of raising money.

But once we were a success and a big success, I was always convinced it may take us a while, but we're gonna raise the money, we're gonna get it done.

- It was a whole lot different than when I took over as Chairman.

We had really pretty much nothing.

Now we had a D-Day museum that was open and successful, and 350,000 visitors at Boysie Bollinger.

He said so many times, I believe that we have much more chance of succeeding raising 300 million than we ever had a chance to open this museum in the first place.

We expanded the board to a national board and we developed a master plan.

We had a trustee, John Kushner, who was a real estate guy.

And he would go negotiate with our neighbors to buy the property.

But we'd buy it.

And thank God we did because without him, we wouldn't have had the footprint we have.

And it's hard to believe that, this is in 2004, that we finally came up with a master plan that is almost identical to what we built.

And then, of course, the canopy was a huge issue.

I always felt we were gonna get there to the point where we could build that canopy.

- [Narrator] Building expansion also meant new exhibits with a focus on diversity.

- There was an issue.

We start trying to spotlight and show the diversity of their war.

And I did do a lot of research on African Americans.

And it was one of them things that they talked about all the time, how they were mistreated after they got back home from the war.

One of the things they, when they brought one of the exhibits here, it's the one on, it was called "Fighting on Two Fronts".

And that was well attended.

And a lot of people found out, learned a lot from that.

They had quite a few other exhibits they brought in.

But to me that was one of the better ones.

- Initially people felt they were not inclusive enough.

You know, there is no African American experience, no Native American experience, no women involved, so what we think today about sort of inclusive experiences.

The museum sort of had to build on that criticism and to their credit, they did.

- [Narrator] The final piece of the master plan, the Liberation Pavilion, delves deeply into lingering questions.

- When we were designing this, the exhibit concept people and they said, how do you answer the question 50 years from now, so what, so what did World War 2 mean?

Why was it important?

Who cares?

How do you explain that in this museum?

What difference did it make to America and to the world that America, through everything she had into this war and prevailed with the Allies?

So we had to answer that question by the Liberation Pavilion.

And that gets into the meaning of the war and the legacy of the war.

(somber music) - We're well on the way to having our campus master plan complete.

I think the visitor experience here is second to none and really true to the core of how we began.

It's about the personal accounts of the men and women that fought during World War 2.

There has been, you know, dramatic growth in other aspects of the museum's mission that go beyond just the core visitor experience, the expansion of our educational outreach into schools, not only in this community, but all across the country through our national electronic field trips and teacher training programs.

It's centered in the belief that we're an educational institution.

- [Narrator] This was reinforced when, in 2005, hurricane Katrina kept visitors away, as did the COVID pandemic in 2020.

- There were no people walking through the doors so it really challenged us to think about mission and relevance.

Some of our earliest investments in distance education and distance learning really came as a result of Katrina and realizing that when people can't come to you, you have to go to them.

- [Narrator] People are coming to the museum from across the globe.

It ranks among the most popular museums in the nation.

While its size and price tag, 400 million, grew from Steve Ambrose's and Nick Mueller's original dream, its purpose has remained steady.

- We want people to come here and not only learn what happened during World War 2, but why that was important, why it continues to have relevance, and what were we fighting for, which is freedom and democracies.

- Everybody I've talked to that's ever been, or they've heard about it, it's never disappointed.

You know, it's always met and exceeded people's expectations.

- Is almost make me emotional when I think about it.

It's one of those projects that really turned out to be something that I was just so proud of and I'm glad I was involved in it.

- And we're standing up here, you know, in this balcony.

And I like to do that because I like to see the look on the kids' faces and in the exhibits.

They're transfixed by these exhibits and they're not being led by their parents.

You know, okay, "Kids, we're going to a museum today."

"Ah," you know.

It's set up in such a way that things are come right out at you.

The exhibits are interactive.

- I mean, those things are invaluable to get the story from the Veterans' mouth.

- We went over this front, it had little ramps on each side, went over on the front, and worked in.

That's for the first time we saw these little things popping up in the water.

We didn't know what they were.

- Just think 50 and a hundred years from now how valuable that history lesson is when they all gone, you know.

And yet you can get it from the source.

- As I look at how much the museum has grown since its opening in 2000 and I'm in awe as many people in almost everybody in town would be in awe of what has been accomplished.

Nick and Steve's friendship was based on, I think, mutual respect for each other for the talents.

They enjoyed being together with each other and other people liked being with them.

And so there were many great times, many, many great times.

- Oh, he would just love it.

He would slap him on the back and say, "Oh Nick, this is wonderful."

It would, he would be right.

It would be right with the world that they had created this as a monument to the sacrifices of others.

And that's really what it was about.

That's what those interviews are about.

That's what it's all been about.

It's about making sure that those sacrifices don't go unheard or unknown.

- I know what he'd say if he came back.

He'd tell me I told you so.

(inspiring music) - [Narrator] The National World War 2 Museum is now a part of the landscape of New Orleans, providing a look into the American spirit that rose up against tyranny to preserve freedom.

Visitors experience a personal journey through World War 2, beginning with a Higgins boat in the Louisiana Memorial Pavilion, then onto the many exhibits throughout the museum campus.

Education and research remain a primary focus, as well.

A library, and the Institute for the Study of War and Democracy provide an extensive collection of research materials, including oral histories for study.

- This museum is about preserving memory, but it begins with the stories and the documents that come from people.

So curating memory and preserving memory is what we do.

And to tell the American story of how this country helped through its Allies to save and preserve our freedom and our democracy.

- [Narrator] The Higgins Hotel, next to the museum, offers space for conferences and also features a meeting room where a replica of a D-Day map reminds visitors of the immensity and significance of the Normandy Invasion, which served as the genesis of the museum.

- This room here is the Overlord Conference Room, and I'm standing in front of the exact replica of the map that is in the Southwick House, outside of Portsmouth, where General Eisenhower and all the Allied commanders sat right there in Portsmouth, getting ready to launch the greatest invasion, the most significant, largest invasion in the history of mankind.

And this map lays out all of the routes for all of the ships that came from everywhere up the coast of England and all the way from Ireland and Scotland and converged on the beaches of Normandy.

In addition to the map of the invasion itself, everything was contingent on the weather.

And Eisenhower's weatherman had been reporting to him for six months before the invasion every morning to see how accurate his forecasts were.

And in the morning of the fifth, he said, "The sixth is gonna be clear, get in there now."

And Ike said, "Okay, let's go."

June 6th, 1944.

Well, it's just amazing what's happened here behind me and Steve Ambrose was the culprit, I guess you could say.

And he'd be gob-smacked if he came back to earth and saw all of what's happened since he died in 2002.

We used to stand on the rooftop after we opened the D-Day Museum across the street.

And we would look over to these empty and decrepit warehouses that we had to buy for the expansion into World War 2.

So that's where the dreaming of the expansion began.

But it was an epic war.

It was an epic war and it was, it was tough to figure out how to do an epic museum to contain and tell that story for future generations.

And this was a fight to the finish for democracy, for freedom, for the values of our country, in all democratic loving countries.

But this museum had to tell the big story, but it also had to tell the personal story well.

And Steve can rest easy, wherever he is right now, that my departed friend who... We wouldn't be standing here if it hadn't been for Steve Ambrose having the idea years ago.

Freedom is a very fragile thing.

And today America is in the world and the world is in us.

Were a beacon of hope and freedom.

And I think we can say job well done.

I like to think of the canopy above us all as hovering over the campus and protecting the stories of the Veterans of World War 2 that we have in such great numbers in this museum.

The canopy of peace, that's what it is.

Bold and strong.

- Beyond those that we honor here, this museum exists for future generations of Americans.

In the museum, our children, and their children and grandchildren will learn what the Second World War entailed, what it demanded, how it was fought, why the democracies won and how they did it.

We want democracy to last for all ages to come.

(attendees applauding) The museum is, in its conception, in its essence, in its spirit, a love song to democracy.

And it is here in New Orleans on Mark Twain's Mississippi River, the heart of America.

- [Narrator] Springing forth from their friendship, these two historians and teachers founded a lasting lesson for the present and the future, the price and the value of freedom.

(regal orchestral music) - [Announcer] This program is brought to you in part by the Eugenie and Joseph Jones Family Foundation.

a local foundation proud to support education the arts and culture in the Greater New Orleans area.

The 909 Fund is proud to support the quality programming on public television.

This program is also made possible with support from Lori & Bobby Savoie.

And by the WYES Producers Circle, a group of generous contributors dedicated to the support of WYES local productions.