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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... ment and variety ; a port is always a place where things happen . It was the terminus of the great Central Railroad ; it was the gateway to Lima . The har- bor was protected by San Lorenzo Island , a barren shoulder rising a thou- sand ...
... ment of commercial aviation on the west coast of South America . The thrill over this achievement was a universal phenomenon . Peru was ripe for the age of aviation . It took ten days for a { Young Mr. United States in the Port of ...
... ment landings . The first crossing of the Andes had already been made , by a pilot- mechanic named Slim Faucett , but it was more of a stunt than a promise , and he crash - landed on a strip of sand beside an Amazon tributary . A pro ...
... ment , and the time for its was now . ( 4 ) The only negotiated settlement that made sense was to divide the area , giving Chile the southern province , Arica , and giving Tacna to Peru . Moore calculated that Chile , with the poorer ...
... ment , are attractive to mice , especially Dutch mice , something apparently well , if not favorably , known to the trade , including wholesale caraway seed importers . Word of the enthusiasm of Dutch mice for caraway seeds reached the ...
Contenido
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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 |