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
... to members of the ship's crew going ashore , thus saving many headaches , but somehow that never worked with the passengers . Thus the consulate general in Lima had a case or two every time a { In the Footsteps of Pizarro } 31.
... tially a nocturnal animal , he enjoyed the glitter , the movement , and the late hours . He himself never drank anything alcoholic , but he knew the prestige value of serving superior wines , even if half his 34 { PROUD SERVANT }
... never altogether clear . Reportedly , Uncle Alec and her late husband had once been business associates , and after his death Uncle Alec had helped her with her investments . She was twenty years younger than Mr. Moore ; her clothes ...
... never heard of a Norwegian claim to Greenland , and no one else in the division had either . The research staff up- stairs speedily vouched for the existence of the Norwegian claim ; they pre- pared an erudite and lengthy memorandum ...
... never been higher . ) Ambassador Laughlin was so staunchly loyal to the monarchy that he refused , almost until the day of the king's departure , to believe that the Republicans had any appreciable backing . Wiley knew better , and said ...
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 |