In 2005, United States Ambassador to The Bahamas John Rood remarked that there seemed at times to be \u201ctwo Fred Mitchells\u201d \u2014 the polite and polished public Mitchell and the more private, but more revealing Mitchell, according to one of the cables in The Nassau Guardian\u2019s treasure trove of diplomatic documents secured through WikiLeaks.<\/p>\n
Because of his position as foreign minister for most of the years covered by the cables, Mitchell is mentioned in the documents more than any other person.<\/p>\n
The view of Mitchell is a mixed bag.<\/p>\n
One U.S. diplomat wrote of Mitchell, \u201cHe is one of the government\u2019s sharpest and most active ministers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The cables expose fascinating, behind the scenes insights into how country-to-country diplomacy works, and in unpolished details, how the Americans truly viewed Fred Mitchell.<\/p>\n
Their assessment was amazingly candid.<\/p>\n
One embassy official wrote in one of the cables: \u201cIn public, FM Mitchell studiously avoids commenting on scandals and making overly-provocative speeches.<\/p>\n
\u201cA pretentious and intellectual man, he prefers to remain above the fray in these situations.\u201d<\/p>\n
Mitchell has a desire to be seen and heard in the international arena, wrote a diplomat in another cable.<\/p>\n
A U.S. diplomat observed in a 2004 cable:\u00a0 \u201cDespite a life-long career as a politician in a country where politics is personalized to the extreme, neither kissing babies nor making small talk comes naturally to Mitchell.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe prefers to deal with agendas expeditiously and then engage in philosophical discussions or reviews of international relations drawing on his seminars at Harvard\u2019s Kennedy School.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Americans recognized these qualities in Fred Mitchell, although they seemed deeply concerned about the foreign policy stance on a number of issues, which he drove. In some ways, the Americans viewed Mitchell as unhelpful.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
While they often felt he was “unhelpful”, secret Wikileaks cables show that U.S. Diplomats viewed Fred Mitchell as one of the Bahamas government\u2019s sharpest and most active ministers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":{"facebook_10223285771444175_51037792744":""},"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[40,60,113],"class_list":["post-9025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-headlines","tag-government","tag-plp","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bahamasb2b.com\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}