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. |
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... Lima , the City of Kings , seven miles inland from the port . Strictly speaking , I was not a member of Ambassador Poindexter's staff ; consulates were not absorbed into embassies until fifteen years later , in one of the streamlining ...
... Lima . Geographically , the variety of Peru is endless . I first saw the long , arid coastline from the ship at Talara — a desert cut through now and then by the greenest of valleys , where irrigation canals that predated the Incas were ...
... Lima was a mile from the embassy , in a downtown office building one block from W. R. Grace and Company , the leading American firm in Peru ; two blocks from the Lima branch of the National City Bank of New York ; and three blocks from ...
... Lima , Peru " and some consular fee stamps , mostly in $ 5 denomina- tions , for the bills of health I issued to northbound foreign vessels . In the main drawer we kept the ship's papers while an American vessel was in port , together ...
... Lima . The har- bor was protected by San Lorenzo Island , a barren shoulder rising a thou- sand feet straight out of the ocean , whitened on the seaward side by deposits of guano . When the wind flowed , citizens did not have to be ...
Contenido
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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 |