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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... sides to every question . I first met Ambassador Briggs in Belgrade in 1959. He and his wife , Lucy , were on their way to their new post in Athens in a Mercedes purchased the week before in Germany . I was a young second secretary at ...
... side by side on a bench , tense and fidgeting , each praying that the panelists — who included the undersecretary of state and two of the four assistant secre- taries — would not run out of easy questions before it was his turn to be ...
... side San Martin at Ayacucho . You saw the dust splash of bullets on adobe when Maximilian fell at Queretaro , and you were there on the Malecon in 1898 when the Maine steamed past Morro Castle toward manifest destiny . You saw the first ...
... the building , on the third floor on the west side ; and on the fourth floor , overlooking the White House , was the ornate suite held available for General John J. Pershing , commander of United { The Foreign Service School } 11.
... side of the building . The secretary of state stood in the middle of the front row , flanked by the undersecretary and the four assistant secretaries . Around and behind them were the chiefs of the geographic divisions , each with a ...
Contenido
1 | |
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 |