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
... affairs and to pass cakes and teacups in circumstances of the utmost gentil- ity . That may not have been the origin of the expression " cookie - pusher , " but admittedly it did little to dispel it . Fledgling diplomats likewise paid ...
... raised our glasses to Mrs. Coolidge and Cornelia Bassel . The details of the affair were not altogether clear the following morning . Then , clutching our steamship tickets and our diplomatic passports { The Foreign Service School } 135.
... affairs of the United Kingdom , Canada , Australia and New Zealand , and the Union of South Africa were being dealt with by officers senior to me who knew something about the areas they served . Great Britain , for instance , was the ...
... affairs came under my microscope . The Department of the Interior , with ju- risdiction over Alaska , became seized with the notion that the economy of the territory would benefit from the introduction of musk oxen then resi- dent in ...
... affairs are subject makes it impossible to describe in advance a proposed action that will take cognizance of all of them . If you do , as Dean Acheson once observed , at some point Liechtenstein exclaims , " The hell with it ! " — and ...
Contenido
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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 |