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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... diplomat , spanning the pre - World War II and war- time years , and the height of the cold war . Briggs reached the ... diplomatic missions and dealing with difficult situa- tions . But his greatest virtue was his honesty , his passion ...
... diplomats in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . The Rogers Act of 1924 combined the theretofore separate American diplomatic and consular services and established for both uniform rules of appointment and promotion based for ...
... 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 ...
... diplomat of the old school , effectively refutes that canard . He was expelled from his first ambas- sadorial post ... diplomats , whether it be Nelson Rockefeller and Trujillo , Franklin Roosevelt and " Uncle Joe " Stalin , or Richard ...
... diplomatic service . He held up a pudgy paw . " Don't tell me . That is one of the key questions on the oral examina- tion . They never miss it . The successful reply should be brief , diffident , and under no circumstances should you ...
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 |