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 6-10 de 58
... Spanish , and both languages were spoken in the purser's office . The barmen were Chinese , unintelligible in either language but good at arithmetic . Our arrival in Callao was memorable . We were met and informed that as a welcome to ...
... Spanish means both " the flame " and the Andean beast of bur- den . Each box had a bright yellow label with a likeness of the animal upon it . And each box cost at retail the equivalent of four American cents for half the number of ...
... Spanish Inquisition . Ours was not in the Plaza de Armas , but three thousand feet up , on the flank of one of the coastal mountains . It was a diplomatic tri- umph for Sweden , although the United States emerged with honor . We had a ...
... Spanish with an El Paso accent , French with a Parisian accent , and English with a Texan accent . My first experience with him , when I reported to Room 300 , was overhearing a telephone conversation with , as it later turned out , Mrs ...
... Spanish Republic after the overthrow of King Alfonso XIII . The ambassador , a literary figure , was to be received ... Spanish ambassador , but the corre- spondent already knew about Salvador de Madariaga ; he had called at the Spanish ...
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 |