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 84
... soon receive the first of the new Ford trimotor aircraft — the last word in safety , comfort , and convenience . Moreover , the first one would be named Santa Rosa for the patron saint of Peru , and would be christened by the archbishop ...
... soon found myself swamped by my regu- lar chores plus nighttime coding and decoding . There were no coding ma- chines and , except for a few of the largest posts in Europe , there were no code clerks . Messages were enciphered and ...
... Soon the idle chef had a fight with the butler and resigned his job , where- upon the counselor of embassy hired him . The counselor had been in the service thirty years , against my four . I nev- ertheless told him that , no matter ...
The Memoirs of a Career Ambassador Ellis Briggs. Soon Lima society had another reason to enjoy the goings - on at the American embassy : the arrival of Uncle Alec's friend Mrs. Smith for an ex- tended visit . She engaged a suite at the ...
... 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 the chance that Secretary ...
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 |