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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... Mindful that I would be spending two days or more with the ambassador before he arrived at his new post , the embassy had laden me with briefing books covering every possible subject into xi Foreword by Monteagle Stearns.
... arrival , I was fortunate enough to marry the daughter of his predecessor in Athens , and her father was unable to ... arrived on the scene , Briggs had the ability to take charge of a large diplomatic mission and make it work . But his ...
... arrival , when I was promoted from vice consul in Callao to third secretary in 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 ...
The Memoirs of a Career Ambassador Ellis Briggs. time of my arrival it had been thoroughly riddled by the wood - chewing larvae . One always cherishes a special interest in and affection for his first post . Sentiment apart , Peru is the ...
... arrived late in Callao , this could cause the vice consul endless trouble . The skippers of Grace ships were en- couraged by the company to make a fetish of punctuality . Punctuality in ar- rival . Punctuality in departure . When the ...
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 |