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Most people have some idea of what an ambassador does, but few are aware of what life and work is like for the career Foreign Service folk who populate our missions abroad and provide continuity and guidance to the policy makers in Washington. This book more than fills that gap. It is the story of one Foreign Service Officer’s career as he works his way, rung by slippery rung, up the ranks as an ambassador’s apprentice. With candor, insight, and humor, Everett (Ted) Briggs recounts what it was like to be the most junior officer at the US embassy in La Paz, Bolivia (gasping for air at 12,500 feet above sea level); an aide to the top State Department official in occupied Berlin, when the wall went up; consul general in Angola when revolution in Portugal ended five hundred years of colonial rule; and deputy chief of mission in Paraguay and Colombia at the start of the so-called war on drugs. Interspersed among foreign assignments was duty in Washington, stressful from a financial standpoint but good for the career and for the five Briggs children. Briggs’s memoir is rich in description of people, some in high places, and of the shifting environment in which he found himself. His comments on issues and policies are particularly cogent and timely. As he says in his preface, May [this book] help make the nuts and bolts of diplomacy more understandable (if not necessarily plausible) and provide a few verities for future generations of aspiring diplomats to ponder.
