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 59
... month cram course . ) Here , he said , was a schedule of reading . I could buy the books at Brentano's on F Street . His lectures would start the following Monday morning , 10 to 12:30 , five days a week . When I in- quired whether his ...
... months 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 ...
... months in the State Department before a new officer was sent to his first foreign assignment . Until after World War II , the Foreign Service School remained an unpretentious institution , concentrating on unraveling con- sular ...
... claim regular wages ; he often re- turned to the United States as a " workaway , " at twenty - five cents a month , for which he was supposed to perform regular duties . In practice the consul had a good deal of leeway 18 { PROUD SERVANT }
... months , there was hot water only on Saturdays . Lima is in the tropics , twelve degrees from the equator , but from May through October — the months of winter mist and fog along the coast — the dampness in unheated houses is pervasive ...
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 |