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 44
... reasons : consular work was more tangible than diplomatic endeavor , and it was also more measurable , in that a record was kept of the number of visas and passports issued , the number of ships arriv- ing and departing , and the number ...
... reasons . The State Department was under no compulsion to honor these choices . Service was at the discretion of the secretary of state , which meant the Office of Personnel and the geographic divisions , which made known to Personnel ...
... reason why a seaman missed his ship varied with the ingenuity of the sailor . Some were left behind because " that bastard the bosun " lied about sailing time . Others claimed a Mickey Finn in " the one bottle of beer I had all evening ...
... reason , that if a fair plebiscite could be held , Peru would win ; therefore Peru was prepared to continue to agitate against perfi- dious Chile , vandal of the Pacific . Peruvian politicians made loud noises . The editorial pages of ...
... reason might now and then be raised . It seemed worth trying , and after considerable dis- cussion , President Leguia agreed . This initiative was fruitful largely because Chile sent to Peru an ex - president of the Republic , a ...
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 |