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 53
... guests for an inaugural ride over the city . To save weight , he would have to land and take off with as little fuel ... Guest , plus shotguns and ammunition and much equipment , for a duck hunt at the mouth of the Agabama River in Cuba ...
... guests of honor — seventeen were found to have crowded aboard . It took an extra half - hour to sort out that one , during which the president impatiently waited for the next race , and Harris and the third secretary of embassy ( which ...
... guest , saying to the guards , " El senor capitan del vapor Santa Luisa " ( or " El senor contador " if he was the purser ) . The two Peruvians would salute me and say politely , " Que pasen , senores , " which raised my stock with the ...
... guests in my house would not be good — they would put a box or two in their pock- ets and use them elsewhere . Probably not very important , but not good for the monopolio . Not good , but supportable . What really disturbed him , Sven ...
... guests could not tell the difference . Uncle Alec was not philosophical , nor was he concerned with someone else's social problems . About the plight of the Indians of the Peruvian sierra , Ambassador Moore , unlike Ambassador ...
Contenido
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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 |