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 59
... military and intelligence activities in Greece , Ambassador Briggs was making a more significant contribution to the health of Greek democracy than his critics realized . This concern to play by the rules and to keep the conduct of ...
... Military Transport Command , retiring with the rank of brigadier general . After that Harris was president of Northwest Orient Airlines , during which service he rescued me , when I was American ambassador to Korea , from President ...
... military attache of the Chinese legation , a first lieutenant in the Chinese army . Since we were usually too far away to be able to hear speeches — a not unmixed blessing - we used to play tic - tac - toe on the tablecloth , marking ...
... military attache , which the ambassador ignored . Alto- gether the effect was as edifying to the arriving travelers as it must have been electrifying to the citizens of Peru who first saw it.2 At the special diplomatic landing where the ...
... military bar- racks pending plebiscite day . The Peruvians said that every time a Peruvian was finally qualified , two Chileans were accepted . Perched on his battleship , like a pelican on a buoy , General Pershing had no way of ...
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 |