Proud Servant

The Memoirs of a Career Ambassador

Ellis Briggs

• Publisher: The Kent State University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781612771588

"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.

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Angus and the Acolytes

Although many decades have passed since that spring term in Washington when I burned incense at the shrine of Angus Macdonald Crawford, the image of that remarkable man remains: an articulate, intolerant, and sedentary Buddha, with a lame foot in a built-up boot, and the rasping cough of an overweight smoker. During the 1920s, Angus prepared almost half of all the candidates who succeeded in passing the State Department’s Foreign Service examinations. Since only a small proportion of those who took the tests attended Angus’s classes, his was no small achievement.

His attitude was mercenary. He taught to make money, and he was good at it. As a dispenser of organized information in the fields of government, history, and foreign affairs, in bouillon-cube concentration and with a lasting flavor, he had no peer. He understood the sweep of events and the impact of decisive personalities upon them. He had an encyclopedic knowledge and a sense of proportion that led him to reject inessential details; his sardonic humor garnished an account with an incident, often frivolous or discreditable, that brought the scene alive and made it memorable.

In the international arena he admired winners: Bismarck over Napoleon III, Cavour over the Hapsburgs, Lenin over Tsar Nicholas, Senator Lodge over Woodrow Wilson. He had few tears for the vanquished. The crusading spirit that had already begun to tarnish American foreign policy possessed no charms for Angus Crawford.

There was nothing in the rumor, fostered by envious competitors, that Angus had a special pipeline into the Department of State, much less that he had advance access to the examinations. What he did have was a collection of past examination papers that he studied with care and astuteness, seeking a pattern that, in conjunction with his comprehension of current events, might furnish clues to impending questions. He became so successful that eventually the State Department selected an erudite ex-Princeton professor with a mandate to devise an Angus-proof set of examinations. This bureaucratic harassment, along with tobacco, lack of exercise, and other indulgences, possibly shortened Angus’s career, but they did not detract from his reputation.¹

I called on Angus Crawford one spring morning in 1925, with the sun warm on the Potomac and the privet buds already turning the hedges bright green around Georgetown gardens. Angus, in his lair on New Hampshire Avenue, was snorting over his double chins and tapping one cigarette after another on the arm of an overstuffed chair that resembled, when he sat in it, the throne of an irascible monarch. He told me, civilly enough, that it was his custom to reject for his courses those who after an interview seemed to be unpromising material for diplomacy.

Those whom he accepted were therefore pleased by his recognition of their superior potential, but I cannot remember many petitioners whom he turned down, and I do recall several durable candidates who attended his classes several years running and never did manage to enter the Foreign Service. Such persistent clients were uncommon, however, for he was unsympathetic toward failure even though the tuition dollars of one candidate were as negotiable as those of another.

Angus began by asking me questions. I replied that after getting a bachelor’s degree, majoring in English and history, I had spent two years as an instructor at Robert College in Constantinople. There followed two years of freelancing while I awaited the enactment of legislation that would, I hoped, render State Department service a slightly less precarious livelihood. After the passage in 1924 of the Rogers Act, establishing the American Foreign Service, I recognized the need for more systematic preparation than I could generate alone, several years away from undergraduate textbooks. Hence my visit.

Angus grunted, and his questions became more specific. Why had the British in 1920 been so stupid as to back the Greeks in their disastrous Anatolian adventure against a Turkey rejuvenated by Mustafa Kemal Pasha? What was my impression of the Allied control of Constantinople as a form of international administration? How about the missionaries and their irrational belief that the Armenians — Michael Arlen excepted — were worth saving? And did I take seriously a Near East petroleum thing called the Chester Concession?

At the time I assumed Angus had some special interest in the Levant, a personal familiarity with events in that area. Later I realized that he could have duplicated the performance with a candidate from Yale-in-China, or a young man who had prospected for gold in Ecuador, or raised sheep in New Zealand. His outlook straddled the continents, and his curiosity, seasoned with the belief that most politicians were knaves, was as omnivorous as the appetite of a raccoon.

I replied as best I could. I said that in the Near East the British were still infected, a century after his exploits, by the romanticism of Lord Byron: maybe, I ventured, the star of empire had started to decline. I declared more confidently that if there was a worse form of administration than multilateral control of a conquered capital by the victors, it had yet to be devised; inter-ally rivalries were reducing Constantinople to a shambles and the Turks, emboldened by the fall of Lloyd George and the discomfiture of Lord Curzon at Lausanne, were already talking about moving their capital to Ankara, in the middle of nowhere in Anatolia. As for the missionaries, they were becoming an anachronism. They would soon bend to the rising winds of nationalism or be swept away by them. The Chester Concession, I hazarded, was a manifestation of the eagerness of the West for oil. If the oil was there, in the barren and quarrelsome Near East, capital would be forth-coming one way or another. (This was some years before solid gold Cadillacs began replacing stallions in Arabian stables.)

Angus grunted again and asked, more amiably, why, if I nourished those heretical views, I wanted to enter the diplomatic service. He held up a pudgy paw. “Don’t tell me. That is one of the key questions on the oral examination. They never miss it. The successful reply should be brief, diffident, and under no circumstances should you fail to include a reference to your dedication to the responsibilities of public service. So between now and July dream up a good answer.”

He collected $100 in advance, remarking that an additional $100 would be due on the first days of May and June. (One hundred dollars was not confetti in 1925; the yearly tuition of Ivy League colleges came to less than the cost of Angus’s three-month cram course.) Here, he said, was a schedule of reading. I could buy the books at Brentano’s on F Street. His lectures would start the following Monday morning, 10 to 12:30, five days a week. When I inquired whether his lectures covered all of the subjects required by the State Department, his snort was disparaging.

“Except arithmetic. If you haven’t learned to add and subtract, that’s too bad. And I don’t teach languages. Here’s a list of language teachers. They send me their names. I don’t recommend them. I suppose you picked up Levantine French in Constantinople. Don’t admit it. If you studied Turkish, don’t admit that either. Get yourself sent to Samsun, or Aleppo….”

He wrote down my name and asked where I lived — a question that presently left me further beholden to him. I said I was looking for something quiet and reasonably priced, preferably within walking distance of his establishment. Did he have any suggestions?

“Washington,” he observed, “has all kinds of places. Overbuilt during the war and hasn’t caught up with itself yet.” He gave the problem his attention. “Get you a card to the University Club if you want. Small rooms, good swimming pool. Noisy.” He named a bachelor apartment on I Street. Then there were, he said, some new apartments, very elegant, near DuPont Circle, “Good but expensive.”

When I repeated that something quiet and economical was what I had in mind, Angus heaved himself up and hobbled to an untidy desk where he churned up the papers. He unearthed a slip, which he gave me.

And that was how I came to live, until my first assignment abroad fifteen months later, in a third floor room at 1775 Church Street, in the house of a Mrs. Fenton, whose contribution to my entry into the Foreign Service was second only to that of Angus Crawford. Angus described Church Street as “a lane sandwiched between P and Q Streets, with an Episcopal church at the 18th Street end of it. Tell Mrs. Fenton I sent you. Don’t try to smuggle a girl in.”

Thither I repaired and was aware of my good fortune, for in addition to my room, Mrs. Fenton provided breakfast and supper for ten or a dozen other Foreign Service aspirants, young men camped in the neighborhood, and her dining room became a haven for nourishment as well as a platform where diplomacy has rarely been more ardently debated.

Her cook went marketing with Mrs. Fenton after breakfast. The meals they provided were magnificent, and how Mrs. Fenton managed to make any money out of us remains to this day inexplicable. These remarkable viands were consumed amid noisy and protracted arguments about barratry and hot pursuit, about Caprivi’s Finger and the Drago Doctrine, about the fate of the Romanovs and the grim boasts of the Bolsheviki, about the Fourteen Points, and about the notion, the validity of which Angus questioned, that Latin America was really important to the United States.

Thus the cherry blossoms were succeeded by the dogwood, and the dogwood in turn by the honeysuckle. By the end of May, the hot weather had descended on Washington, without the benison of air conditioning and with a smallpox scare that had the whole town revaccinated and itching. Angus reminded us that until the turn of the century — only twenty-five years before — the American capital was classified an “unhealthy post” by several countries, including Great Britain.

The written examinations were torture, not because they were so difficult in themselves — on the contrary, diligent application to Angus’s lectures paid off handsomely — but because of the Washington weather. The papers stuck to my forearm, and drops of perspiration blurred my answers. At the desk in front was a young woman named Polly, another of Angus’s clients, and I can still see her cotton dress sticking to her shoulders.

The oral part of the exam in my day was given at once, starting the day after the writtens ended, and it was open to any candidate who believed he had done sufficiently well on the written tests to warrant the effort. In 1925 the oral ordeal was compounded by the custom of taking five applicants at a time for their interview. While one was examined, the other four sat side by side on a bench, tense and fidgeting, each praying that the panelists — who included the undersecretary of state and two of the four assistant secretaries — would not run out of easy questions before it was his turn to be interviewed.

Six weeks later I had my first official message from the Department of State. Signed “Your obedient servant, for the Secretary of State, J. Butler Wright, Assistant Secretary,” it informed me that I had passed with a rating of 84.69 (80 was passing). It was shortly followed by another communication informing me that I had been appointed a Foreign Service officer, unclassified, “with compensation at the rate of $2,500 per annum.” In short, I was in.²

In 1938, shortly after Angus’s death, I wrote the following words about his impact on the acolytes of the 1920s:

It used to be the boast of the late Angus Crawford … that he covered in a single lecture “all the history of Latin America since 1800” — that everything the examinations had asked in upwards of twenty years was contained in that single lecture….

And as Angus Crawford boasted, so it was; for that lecture was Angus at his best, and his best was a memorable adventure. For two hours and a half, history marched before you like veteran soldiers on parade; you had the precise sequence of battalions, the movement and the color, the sense of direction and control. You forgot the man, heaving with emphatic gesture; you forgot springtime Washington and even the impending examinations — but you knew Miranda and Bolívar. You felt the wind that moves the reeds along the marshy shores of Lake Junín, and you rode beside San Martín at Ayacucho. You saw the dust splash of bullets on adobe when Maximilian fell at Querétaro, and you were there on the Malecón in 1898 when the Maine steamed past Morro Castle toward manifest destiny. You saw the first steam shovel tear the red earth when men severed the continents of Culebra. All these you saw and you sensed the drama…. You felt the pulse of nations stirring on a great continent.

Angus Crawford touched a map, and twenty countries were alive; it was an unforgettable adventure.³

Angus would probably have snorted, but I still say he was a magnificent teacher.

1. The former Princetonian was Joseph Coy Green, then serving in the Western European Division, who later had a distinguished career, until he retired in 1953, as ambassador to Jordan. Among those he supervised over the years were Charles Yost, a career ambassador chosen by President Nixon in 1969 to head the UN mission, and John Sloan Dickey, later president of Dartmouth College. At Princeton, before joining the State Department, Green had as students no fewer than twelve men who subsequently became ambassadors, including George Kennan, Walton Butterworth, and Livingston Merchant.

2. My first commission, dated September 22, 1925, was signed by President Coolidge and countersigned by Frank B. Kellogg as secretary of state; my last one was signed by President Kennedy and Secretary of State Dean Rusk, thirty-seven years later.

3. From the Foreign Service Journal, September 1938. Reprinted by permission.

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The Foreign Service School

The Rogers Act, intended to establish the American Foreign Service as a competitive, nonpolitical, professional career, was enacted in 1924, replacing the separate diplomatic and consular branches. Simultaneously there came into existence in the Department of State, in Room 100 on the ground floor of the old State War Navy Building, a modest enterprise called the Foreign Service School.

The idea behind the school was that it was wasteful to launch candidates who had just succeeded in passing the examinations straight into service abroad without prior home office indoctrination. Moreover, the effect of a first chief is always important to a beginner, and both the quality and the interest of American officials serving around the world varied from post to post and country to country. Accordingly, there was organized a course of several months in the State Department before a new officer was sent to his first foreign assignment. Until after World War II, the Foreign Service School remained an unpretentious institution, concentrating on unraveling consular regulations and on language instruction.

It was likewise decided that all new officers should go abroad as vice consuls. There were a number of reasons: consular work was more tangible than diplomatic endeavor, and it was also more measurable, in that a record was kept of the number of visas and passports issued, the number of ships arriving and departing, and the number of invoices certified, together with a description of the merchandise and the value of each shipment.

Consular work also brought those performing it into contact with people: foreigners seeking immigration visas as well as American citizens seeking passports, and foreign officials. Since success in diplomacy depends to an important degree on the ability to inspire confidence, the decision to start junior officers in consulates was sensible and designed to assess their future usefulness in diplomacy.

The first head of the Foreign Service School was a debonair bachelor named William Dawson, who wore a bow tie of the kind later popularized by President Truman. A Midwesterner, he entered the Foreign Service via the Ecole Libre des Sciences Politiques; in 1908 his first post was St. Petersburg, the capital of tsarist Russia, as vice and deputy consul general (an imposing title since abandoned). Seven posts and eighteen years later, now a full-fledged consul general, he was summoned to Washington. Intelligent, sympathetic, and interested in young people, Bill Dawson was in the best sense a professional diplomatist, dedicated to his career and to those who shared it with him.

Consul General Dawson decided that it would be desirable for us to become familiar with the principal foreign affairs matters confronting our government. He invited the chiefs of the six geographic divisions of the State Department to lecture to us: Western Europe, Eastern Europe, the Near East, the Far East, Latin America, and Mexico.

The division chiefs were well informed. We learned the status, and some of the details, of all manner of projects and problems. Those chiefly concerning the United States in the mid-1920s had to do, as they do today, with national security. The disarmament conference of 1922 had settled the naval ratios of the Great Powers, but other disarmament aspects remained major issues. Avoiding an arms race was a widespread preoccupation. So was the rehabilitation of ravaged Europe, especially Germany, ruined by inflation and by a vengeful treaty.

The State Department tiptoed warily around the League of Nations, with an eye on the isolationist...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• 1. Angus and the Acolytes
• 2. The Foreign Service School
• 3. Young Mr. United States in the Port of Callao
• 4. In the Footsteps of Pizarro
• 5. Uncle Alec Settles Tacna-Arica
• 6. Mr. Hoover’s State Department
• 7. The Love of Liberty Brought Us Here
• 8. Cuba with Jefferson Caffery
• 9. President Roosevelt Conducts Foreign Policy
• 10. The Secretary and the Undersecretary
• 11. Good Neighbors
• 12. Expropriation Is Stealing
• 13. False Calm in Chile Before Pearl Harbor
• 14. Everything, Literally Everything, Is at Stake
• 15. Dominican Republic: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
• 16. Pat Hurleys China
• 17. The State Department Struggles with Peace
• 18. Gaucho Interlude: The Good Old Days in Uruguay
• 19. A Turn to the Left: Czechoslovakia
• 20. Korea: The First War We Did Not Win
• 21. After Thirty Years: Peru
• 22. World Power or Fumbling Giant?
• 23. And Last a Monarchy: Greece
• 24. Pride Dwelt Upon — A Time for Reflection
• Index