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 83
... problems prevented him from serving as ambas- sador in an eighth capital , Madrid , where the Kennedy administration pro- posed to send him at the time of his retirement . Therefore , in a literal sense , the personal history of Ellis ...
... problems to the latest figures on Greece's balance of payments . Ambassador Briggs was already a Foreign Ser- vice legend , and his reputation as a warm - hearted but formidably demand- ing curmudgeon had preceded him . The journey ...
... problem his attention . " Get you a card to the University Club if you want . Small rooms , good swimming pool . Noisy . " He named a bachelor apartment on I Street . Then there were , he said , some new apartments , very elegant , near ...
... problems . Those chiefly con- cerning the United States in the mid - 192os had to do , as they do today , with national security . The disarmament conference of 1922 had settled the naval ratios of the Great Powers , but other ...
... problem in Peru , " the ambassador told me , " is the Indian problem . " Not the primitive tribesmen of the Amazon jungle ; those Indians , he said , were comparatively few in number . He meant the Indians of the sierra , the indigenous ...
Contenido
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7 | |
15 | |
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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 |