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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... bureaucratic apparatus that impedes effective action — all continue to clog the wheels of American diplomacy . Most of these prob- lems are worse than they were when Ellis Briggs left the Foreign Service . The pity is that there are ...
... 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 exercise. 1 1 Angus and the Acolytes.
The Memoirs of a Career Ambassador Ellis Briggs. bureaucratic harassment , along with tobacco , lack of exercise , and other in- dulgences , possibly shortened Angus's career , but they did not detract from his reputation . 1 I called on ...
... bureaucracy in time to get back aboard ship . Vessels had been missed while cases were being disposed of . In Callao , as vice consul I had been able to persuade the Grace office to supply Peruvian matches to members of the ship's crew ...
... bureaucracy . Ninety percent of the contents of my " in " basket was shortly marked " File , " and that was generally the end of it . In short , I had all of the British Empire except the parts that counted . The affairs of the United ...
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 |