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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... diplomacy . Or , as he might have said as he watched with mounting exasperation the resurgence of patronage and the erosion of professional standards in the years after his retirement , a history of the rise and fall of modern American ...
... diplomacy and the theorizing of pundits , Ambassador Briggs was not especially reflective or intellectual in his ap ... diplomatic mission and make it work . But his greatest virtue , I think , was his possession of what Harold Nicolson ...
... diplomacy in general — are representative attitudes of his generation of diplomats . You find the same themes in the memoirs of George Kennan , a very different kind of person who nevertheless operated from many of the same premises ...
... ( 1957 ) , Farewell to Foggy Bottom ( 1964 ) , and Anatomy of Diplomacy ( 1968 ) . Lucy Barnard Briggs Lucy Therina Briggs Everett Ellis Briggs Angus and the Acolytes Although many decades have passed since xvi { Preface }
... diplomacy . Those whom he accepted were therefore pleased by his recognition of their superior potential , but I cannot remember many petitioners whom he turned down , and I do recall several durable candidates who attended his classes ...
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 |