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 85
... became partially blind in one eye and for three years was tu- tored at home in Riverdale , New York , and at the family farm in Topsfield , Washington County , Maine . His tutor was a Dartmouth graduate , and this led him to matriculate ...
... became so successful that eventually the State Department selected an erudite ex - Princeton pro- fessor with a mandate to devise an Angus - proof set of examinations . This bureaucratic harassment , along with tobacco , lack of ...
... became more specific . Why had the British in 1920 been so stupid as to back the Greeks in their disastrous Ana- tolian adventure against a Turkey rejuvenated by Mustafa Kemal Pasha ? What was my impression of the Allied control of ...
... became a haven for nourishment as well as a platform where diplomacy has rarely been more ardently debated . Her cook went marketing with Mrs. Fenton after breakfast . The meals they provided were magnificent , and how Mrs. Fenton ...
... became after World War II . The small town atmosphere that prevailed dur- ing the nineteenth century , and until World War I , was still in evidence in the era of Coolidge . Washington was a town of wide , tree - shaded streets and low ...
Contenido
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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 |