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 37
... PART ONE : The Argentine Problem : Perón , Braden , and Messersmith 230 PART TWO : The Pentagon , Panama , and Alger Hiss 239 PART THREE : The Move to Foggy Bottom 248 18 Gaucho Interlude : The Good Old Days in Uruguay.
... Panama and Cape Horn — pending developments . The consulate had no funds for that kind of indebtedness . Those cases , however , provided opportunities for the practice of diplomacy . The general idea was that if the creditor would not ...
... Panama 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 ...
... Panama was now within range of Lima , and the first service to the north of Peru used amphibians from Talara to Guayaquil and thence north to the Canal Zone . The single - engine planes were cramped and inade- quate , and from day to ...
... Panama , six days from New York , the transit of the 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 ...
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 |