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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Resultados 1-5 de 77
... friends of departing West Coasters , celebrating on the veranda overlooking the swimming pool , were carried to the next port — Salaverry or Chimbote or Talara — and were teased about it for the rest of their Peruvian service . The ...
... friendship was about to be severely tested . Sven Karrel conceded that I was within my rights in importing the matches . Diplomats had special privileges . As consul general of Sweden , he understood my situation . But he could not ...
... friend Mrs. Smith for an ex- tended visit . She engaged a suite at the Hotel Bolivar , one hundred yards down the street from the embassy . Just where Mrs. Smith fit in was never altogether clear . Reportedly , Uncle Alec and her late ...
... friends smoothed many rough edges ) , and , by no means last or least , Mrs. Smith , whose contribution has too long been unrecorded . Looking back , the rest of our stay in Peru was a pleasant anticlimax . Am- bassador Moore departed ...
... friends of the president , were accord- ingly encouraged to establish their own plantations in Brazil and Liberia , re- spectively , and meanwhile the American government shook an indignant finger under noses in London and The Hague ...
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 |