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
... months but was preferable , in the eyes of the limeno officials , to the Pichis Trail crossing . Two other aviation pioneers in Peru were Collett E. Woolman and Harold Harris , who at the time of the Lindbergh flight in 1927 were busy ...
... month of my own money for the privilege of working for the United States abroad , my attitude might have been different . Ambassador Poindexter resigned , and Alexander P. Moore was appointed in his place . There was no rush of ...
... month , a nothing in the budget of an American household . He likewise conceded , politely , that my Canal Zone matches were intended for my personal use . His concern should not be mis- interpreted as implying that an American official ...
... months went by and he did not . He failed to write . Then we finally heard that President Hoover had named him ambassador to Poland . And one day I received a telegram instructing me to report to the Department of State for duty . I was ...
... months after signature . These worthy gentlemen may have lived like characters from Joseph Conrad or Somerset Maugham , but their prose was the prose of bureaucracy . Ninety percent of the contents of my " in " basket was shortly marked ...
Contenido
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7 | |
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 |