Proud Servant: The Memoirs of a Career AmbassadorKent State University Press, 1998 - 430 páginas "These memoirs, by a seasoned and highly competent career diplomatist, covering his various involvements with Latin America and his frequent tiffs with his own government, give an authoritative and amusing picture of the trials of foreign service life and work around the period of the Second World War." --George F. Kennan Ellis O. Briggs (1899-1976) entered the Foreign Service of the United States in 1925. During the next 37 years he was ambassador to seven countries: the Dominican Republic, Uruguay, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Peru, Brazil, and Greece. An eighth appointment, to Spain, was cancelled when he retired due to illness. He also served in Cuba, Chile, Liberia, and China. His memoirs are an exhuberant record of a gifted diplomat. Briggs reached the highest rank attainable in the Foreign Service--Career Ambassador--and received the Medal of Freedom from President Eisenhower for his service in wartime Korea. He gained a reputation for successfully handling large diplomatic missions and dealing with difficult situations. But his greatest virtue was his honesty, his passion to report things just as he saw them and make policy recommendations regardless of conventional wisdom in Washington. He employed a high sense of humor, often to devastating effect, on bureaucrats at home as well as adversaries abroad. His strong views about policy sometimes placed him in conflict with others; fellow Dartmouth graduate Nelson Rockefeller had him fired from the Foreign Service because of disagreements (Briggs soon returned to the Service). A down-to-earth New Englander with an abiding love of the outdoors, Briggs was devoted to his wife and family as well as to his country. Proud Servant is full of insights about the practice of diplomacy in this century and provides a fascinating account of the modern Foreign Service. |
Dentro del libro
Resultados 1-5 de 32
... canals that predated the Incas were still spreading the precious moisture of thin rivers . Behind , to the east , tow- ers the sierra , and hidden from the coast lie glaciers at twenty thousand feet . So abruptly do the Andes rise from ...
... Canal and across the Atlantic to Liverpool . There they boarded a vessel of the Booth Line that took them back across the Atlantic to Belem , Brazil , at the mouth of the Amazon , and then slowly by river up to Iquitos . That voyage ...
... Canal Zone to Santiago and Valparaiso , plus nearly a century of experience in dealing with west coast problems . Pan American Airways , be- fore the word " world " was added , in 1928 had a single ninety - mile service , one round ...
... Canal Zone . The single - engine planes were cramped and inade- quate , and from day to day , passenger demand was increasing . It was with pride , therefore , that we learned in 1929 that Peru would soon receive the first of the new ...
... Canal , with a buffet on deck and a breeze off Gatun Lake , the white cranes on Barro Colorado Island so close you could almost touch them , and the Continental Divide at Culebra . The ruins of old Panama were much the same as when the ...
Contenido
1 | |
7 | |
15 | |
26 | |
36 | |
46 | |
63 | |
Cuba with Jefferson Caffery | 81 |
Expropriation Is Stealing | 137 |
False Calm in Chile Before Pearl Harbor | 144 |
Everything Literally Everything Is at Stake | 157 |
Pearl Harbor | 168 |
Spruille Braden | 172 |
Here Today Gone Tomorrow | 184 |
Pat Hurleys China | 203 |
The State Department Struggles with Peace | 230 |
President Roosevelt Conducts Foreign Policy | 106 |
The Secretary and the Undersecretary | 113 |
Good Neighbors | 121 |
The Pentagon Panama and Alger Hiss | 239 |
The Move to Foggy Bottom | 248 |