The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003)

A Documentary Directed by Errol Morris

Last night before putting a DVD into the player, I happened to flip onto "The Daily Show" when John Stewart was showing clips of Donald Rumsfeld's confrontation with Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst-turned White House critic. One could be tempted to think that Rumsfeld is the most controversial Secretary of Defense in American history. What would I give to find out, say twenty years from now after all the dust has settled from the political battlefield, what he really thought during his tenure in the Bush Administration and what conclusion he will have drawn from the decision he made then.

It just so happened that the next film in my Netflix queue was The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

Robert McNamara was Kennedy's Secretary of Defense, under whose watch the US entered the Vietnam War, and overseeing the Pentagon into Johnson's Administration, some in the contemporary press apparently called Vietnam, "McNamara's War."

Besides his unique perspective as the architect of the Vietnam war, McNamara's work as an analyst during World War II, his position as the president of Ford Motor Company, his presence in the Oval Office with John and Bobby Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and his term as president of the World Bank make him an intriguing subject of Errol Morris's documentary and offers a window into the major events of the mid-twentieth century.

"In my seven years as Secretary," he says in the film, "We came within a hair's breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! "

In a sense, McNamara was almost a real-life Forrest Gump. Of course, it wasn't dumb luck that got him involved in some of the most crucial events of the 20th Century. He was a highly intelligent, Berkeley- and Harvard-educated Forrest Gump, who earned his way into every position that he had. Despite his qualifications, it is staggering how one person can influence so much of the world's history. For crying out loud, he is responsible for putting seat belts in cars! Seat belts! How much more integral can you be. And for his contributions to the Ford Motor Company, he became the first president of the company whose last name wasn't Ford. But that was a short-lived position, coming only a few months before he got a call from John F. Kennedy.

During the film's interviews, describes his experiences as an analyst for General Curtis LeMay, who designed and implemented the bombing strategy of Japan during WWII, his time at Ford and his return to government service as the secretary of defense during the Vietnam era.

The archival clips of him during Kennedy's Administration reveals a person at least as arrogant as Donald Rumsfeld (to his credit, though, I think Rumsfeld has mellowed out in the last few years).

Although McNamara raises many moral issues regarding war and government included with his "11 lessons," his conclusions -- if you can call them that -- are intriguing but don't seem very substantial.

For example, in regard to the firebombing of Tokyo that killed over 100,000 civilians in one hight, he offers one of his 11 lessons is "Proportionality should be a guideline for war." But he never really addresses in proportion to what. The Japanese had raped and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians throughout Asia. That he doesn't mention this doesn't give us context to the moral question which he brings up but just leaves us hanging. What would have proportionality looked like?

He says, "LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he's right. He . . . and I'd say I . . . were behaving as war criminals. " The truth is they would have been killed just as many American, British and Australian POWs were. Many Japanese leaders were in fact tried and convicted as war criminals. In a sense, LeMay and McNamara were waging war proportionally.

He continues to grieve the injustice of the Vietnam War as if he were criticizing someone else's judgment leading Morris has to ask him, quite a few times, if he takes responsibility for those decisions. He passed some of them on, perhaps fairly, to Lyndon Johnson but we are left wondering what his responsibility was as secretary of defense.

What is frustrating is that McNamara never really defends his decisions. Nor does offer alternatives. He only offers vague platitudes like "Proportionality should be a guideline for war" that no one can really disagree with but really don't mean anything either. He can't seem to make a firm stand on anything and seems to mistake his wishy-washy answers for wisdom. The result is that his confessions seem to be nothing more than self-flagellation.

I know the questions he is dealing with are difficult. In response to certain questions about Vietnam, he responds that they are so complex and difficult to answer that he's damned if he answers them and damned if he doesn't and he'd rather be damned for not answering them. Fair enough. But questions like these do not go away, and future policy makers need the wisdom of people who have faced them before. In other words, people like McNamara.

I don't know if Morris views his film as a serious work of policy or as a portrait of a man who is haunted by the difficult decisions he has made in his early life. If it is the latter, he was quite successful. If it's the former, I don't think he's a very deep thinker.

In terms of the technical aspects of the film itself, I think the visuals were beautiful. The pieces of the film that were shot by Morris himself -- as opposed to the archival footage -- to fill the screen during the voice overs were very creatively done, almost to the point of distraction. Combined with Philip Glass's original score make this film a work of art. (Interestingly, I had pretty much only known Philip Glass for South Park minimalist "Holiday" musical).