The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara

Sun, 02 Jul 2006 04:44:39 GMT

Robert Strange McNamara was United States Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1968. He is popularly blamed for leading a reluctant Lydon B. Johnson into the Vietnam War. This beautiful and powerful documentary by Errol Morris explores Robert S. McNamara's life experience as a scholar, an army officer reponsible for the analysis of statistical and operational data related to world war 2 USAAF B-29 bombing operations in the Pacific theatre under General Curtis LeMay, as a senior executive at the Ford Motor Company, and as the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Cuban missile crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam conflict.

The 11 lessons

Empathize with your enemy.

Rationality will not save us.

There's something beyond one's self.

Maximize efficiency.

Proportionality should be a guideline in war.

Get the data.

Belief and seeing are both often wrong.

Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.

In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.

Never say never.

You can't change human nature.

The documentary addresses the imbalances of the popular perception of McNamara, who actually recommended withdrawal to Kennedy, a position that later Johnson describes as wrong. Taped archives of telephone conversations and cabinet meetings show that in effect Johnson orders McNamara to escalate the war; later public statements by McNamara in support of the war appear to be the statements of a cabinet member in support of the executive descision of his President. But the documentary is more than an attempted rehabilitation of McNamara. It is an attempt to draw, through the film documentary form, a modern-day philosophy of the conduct of conflict.

Filmed in a powerful self-reflexive and meditative style, the documentary doesn't attempt to engage in an argumentative discourse, and at the same time it exposes its structure and filmic conventions while allowing the viewer to create their own judgements of the actions of McNamara and those he served both for, and with. One of the most powerful sections of the film are not the parts dealing with the Vietnam conflict, but rather his service in the Army under the command of General Curtis LeMay. McNamara was part of the military command which conducted the large-scale destruction of Japan with the B-29 bomber, in the final years of the Pacific War.

Robert McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in [General Curtis LeMay's] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.

Errol Morris: Were you aware this was going to happen?

Robert McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.

...

Robert McNamara: 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.

...

Robert McNamara: LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

This remarkable admission is startling; earlier McNamara, during the exploration of the first lesson, had explained that while both he and Kennedy had wanted to avoid a war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, the top American military personnel, including Curtis LeMay, had wanted to bomb the crap out of Cuba, thereby most likely providing the spark that would ignite nuclear war with the Soviet Union.

To produce this simultaenously beautiful work of art and history, Errol Morris employs a stunning trick: his invention, the 'Interrortron'. In essence a modified teleprompter, it allows the interview subject to directly address the viewer's line of sight, as opposed to the off-camera line-of-sight typically used in traditional documentaries. Added to the eerie effect of Robert S. McNamara directly talking to you, the audience, Morris also employs a beautifully selected and edited set of wartime and post-war documentary film footage of the type highly familar to those of us who lived through the Cold War. American scientific, military and television pictures aptly illustrate each of the eleven lessons in the film. The music of Philip Glass wonderfully to the emotional and intellectual traces of the film. Morris has described the music of Philip Glass as one eminently suitable for his documentary;

If the central theme of this movie is the inexorability of history versus the question of whether one man can make a difference, can change the course of historical events, there is something about Philip's music ( ... ) that mirrors this, that mixes chance with a kind of inevitability. I may not be explaining it very well, but it provides a powerful metaphor, a musical metaphor, for the rest of the movie. [Senses Of Cinema, Making History: Errol Morris, Robert McNamara and The Fog of War. Interview by Tom Ryan.]

There is no 'voice of god' narrator in this documentary telling you what to think. Unlike some of his documentary-making collegues, Errol Morris doesn't use the medium to expound from a pre-figured ideological position on the topic at hand. It is as if Morris's opinions become more complex, more ambiguous and highlighted with doubts and qualifications the more he goes into the process of making the film. The film itself is a exploratory investigation into the topic, an exposition of the data which does not hasten to draw conclusions, but rather, illustrate an important historical, and much mis-understood, figure, his reasons and his actions at the centre of one of the most pivotal periods in modern history (certainly in the 20th Century).

In the end, I was left moved and humbled by the experience of viewing this film. McNamara is not the cartoonish war-monger of 1960s propaganda. He is a complex man, a scholar of warfare as well as a practitioner of it, loyal to his Commander-In-Chief. As a child of the Cold War, as part of that generation who had grown up with the omnipresent threat of instant nuclear annihilation, and later as one of its many youthful soldiers, the questions it raises about the lessons we have and have not learned from that vast and terrifying enterprise are very disturbing indeed. Although it never set out to do so in the first place, this film raises many uneasy thoughts about the informed nature of the American Presidency and its allies during its recently headlong rush into the modern day quagmire of war in Iraq. Are our modern leaders aware of these questions? Have they studied, and even are they up to studying, the Eleven Lessons that Errol Morris illustrates from the life of Robert Strange McNamara, Harvard Scholar, Lt Colonel in the US Army Air Force, President of the Ford Motor Company, President of the World Bank, and United States Secretary of Defence?

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The Fog of War: Eleven lessons from the life of Robert S. McNamara