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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... 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 the embassy in Athens and had been dispatched to Belgrade to assist the ambassador ...
... wife , Lucy , and to his family ; to Dartmouth College ; to the woods and fields of Maine ; and to his country . This devotion is reflected in the pages that follow . Ellis Briggs was born December 1 , 1899 , in Watertown ...
... wives had at - homes on Sunday afternoons during the winter . So did the wives of assistant secretaries of state . We were encouraged to attend these affairs and to pass cakes and teacups in circumstances of the utmost gentil- ity ...
... wife's steamship ticket . In those days an officer's transportation and that of his family was paid by the government only if the State Department trans- ferred him . No matter how long you had been abroad , you paid your own way when ...
... wife and I visited the Canal Zone commissary and purchased , along with other supplies for house- keeping in Lima , $ 10 worth of Canal Zone matches . They came neatly packed in sealed containers , each container conspicuously labeled ...
Contenido
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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 |