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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... later had a distinguished career , until he retired in 1953 , as ambas- sador to Jordan . Among those he supervised over the years were Charles Yost , a career . ambassador chosen by President Nixon in 1969 to head the UN mission , and ...
... Later I realized that he could have duplicated the performance with a candidate from Yale - in - China , or a young man who had prospected for gold in Ecuador , or raised sheep in New Zealand . His outlook straddled the continents , and ...
... later , in a third floor room at 1775 Church Street , in the house of a Mrs. Fenton , whose contribution to my entry into the Foreign Service was sec- ond only to that of Angus Crawford . Angus described Church Street as " a lane ...
... later I had my first official message from the Department of State . Signed " Your obedient servant , for the Secretary of State , J. Butler Wright , Assistant Secretary , " it informed me that I had passed with a rating of 84.69 ( 80 ...
... later popularized by President Truman . A Midwesterner , he entered the Foreign Service via the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques ; in 1908 his first post was St. Petersburg , the capital of tsarist Russia , as vice and deputy consul ...
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 |