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 78
... secretary of state himself . He was a considerate chief , naively impressed by having a graduate of the new Foreign Service School on his staff . The consul general was assisted by an imperturbable consul , Nelson Park , whose Spanish ...
... secretary in the Lima diplomatic corps . Inflation of titles had al- ready set in , and even the smallest countries like Costa Rica and Haiti had begun to rec- ognize no rank below first or second secretary . As a result , I was always ...
... Secretary Hughes intervened , pointing out that Peking was a legation , not an embassy . " Raise it to an embassy , " Uncle Alec demanded . When the secretary of state declined to cooperate , Madrid resulted . While there , Mr. Moore ...
... secretary , but looking back , I realize what an unusual opportunity it gave me to partic- ipate in operations that normally would have been undertaken by a more experienced officer . I found the work endlessly absorbing . As a vice ...
... Secretary Kellogg , who was soon to be re- placed by Henry Stimson and was ardently desirous of winding up the Tacna - Arica dispute during his own stewardship , would in effect disavow a quarrel between two American ambassadors . On ...
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 |