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 63
... effort required to get Wash- ington to see events abroad clearly , to act on them decisively , and to contain the vast , self - serving bureaucratic apparatus that impedes effective action — all continue to clog the wheels of American ...
... effort . In 1925 the oral ordeal was compounded by the custom of taking five applicants at a time for their interview . While one was examined , the other four sat side by side on a bench , tense and fidgeting , each praying that the ...
... effort was made to match posts with preferences . Between the submission of our post preferences and the announcement of our destinations , Consul General Dawson did a moderate amount of proselytizing . It was thus no surprise to me ...
... effort ought to be made to get the problem of Tacna - Arica off the agenda . The dispute over these two barren provinces had been playing for so many years that no one could remember when Peru and Chile had not been denouncing one ...
... efforts to mediate the dispute were made by the inter - American family , but one after another the peacemakers burned their fingers or , in the case of General Pershing , infected a tooth , and gave it up . The Tacna - Arica dispute ...
Contenido
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7 | |
15 | |
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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 |