The history of humanity teaches us at least two sad facts about war. One is that it brings tragedy. Another is it will be endlessly repeated.
These are among the disturbing truths we learn again in “The Fog of War,” Errol Morris’ fine, probing, haunting new documentary-interview with Kennedy-Johnson Defense Secretary Robert McNamara. It’s a movie–arranged by Morris in 11 “lessons”–that creates an essential portrait of two great wars and the men who made the decisions, with, at its center, an American dreamer stumbling into a national nightmare.
The title “The Fog of War,” recalled by McNamara from a Chinese saying, refers to the clouding of the mind that occurs in battle. But as McNamara opens up to the inquisitive Morris–an ex-University of Wisconsin history student who has become one of the most admired and original documentarians of our time–the opposite happens. The fog begins to disperse. We get a priceless inside look at how wars are fought, why and how military decisions are made and who makes them. The source here: a man of legendary energy and intellect who participated in World War II as a soldier, statistician and planner, and in Vietnam as America’s minister of war.
McNamara’s words and Morris’ images at first create a bio of a classic American “can-do” guy, rising from humble origins in the Depression to business success and political power. We see that California kid using his brains and drive to win success as soldier/statistician (in the World War II Air Force, where his commanding officer was later famous Vietnam hawk Curtis LeMay) and later as the president of the Ford Motor Co. (the name of the automaker as published has been corrected here and in a subsequent reference in this text).
Though 85 when Morris interviewed him for the 20 hours edited into this 96-minute film, he proves just as much the domineering intellect now that he was when JFK plucked him from Ford to be defense secretary. The ex “whiz kid” seems to remember everything and, more importantly, to question everything as well. Though he never “apologizes” for being a principal architect of the Vietnam War, explaining that all his decisions were made “to serve my president,” he is not locked stubbornly into rationales or defenses. He wants earnestly to understand the past–and profit from it.
As McNamara talks, Morris, with his quiet cinematic skill, mordant wit, wealth of fascinating archive footage and grim-toned Phillip Glass score, gives us a film both psychologically acute and historically revealing, dealing with deep moral and ethical concerns.
It’s a deeply disquieting view. During the Cuban missile crisis, McNamara recalls midway though “Fog,” we were inches away from an action–urged by LeMay, a commander whose bravery McNamara admired (and who was also allegedly the model for George C. Scott’s madly gung ho Buck Turgidson in “Dr. Strangelove”). That action would have ultimately caused widespread destruction and death on both sides; only one cogent argument from an unsung hero, ex-U.S. Ambassador to Russia Tommy Thompson, stemmed the tide. Thompson (no relation to the current Bush cabinet member), with his first-hand knowledge of Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and those around him, explained to JFK the importance of a face-saving gesture, persuading Kennedy to accept an early moderate-toned communique from Moscow and ignore a later, more bellicose one.
Decades later, McNamara hears from Cuban dictator Fidel Castro that if JFK had attacked Cuba, under the impression that Soviet warheads were not on the island along with the Russian missiles (in fact they were), nuclear war would have commenced–with much of the U.S. East Coast struck, along with all of Cuba.
This is one of the most important of the movie’s 11 lessons: Empathize with your enemy. It is an axiom, McNamara concludes, that was damagingly ignored in the later Vietnam conflict, where Johnson and his advisors failed to understand that the North Vietnamese saw the war as capstone to a centuries’ long war of liberation and not part of the “domino theory” that dominated American military thinking.
Best known for his sardonic and ingenious films on American eccentrics and outsiders (“Gates of Heaven,” “The Thin Blue Line”), Morris here takes us to the center of the American psyche and power circles. And there he finds just as much irony, confusion, angst and potential disaster.
Clearly, Morris intends us to draw the obvious parallels between the nation’s Vietnam War policies then and its Iraq war policies now–and that’s not hard to do. But his own views, as an ex-radical college war protester of the ’60s and ’70s now confronting the man on the other side, never become intrusive. McNamara on camera is allowed to state his own case and he remains ever the loyal servant of his presidents, however devastating his ethical arguments and intense moral questioning finally become.
“The Fog of War,” a brilliant film on an important subject, may change your view of McNamara–and perhaps of international politics and war. It is a profound examination of the troubling proposition that good or well-meaning people can help create horrible and evil events–and be swept along in the turmoil they unleash. As “Fog” shows, few lessons are more historically important, few more tragically ignored.
`The Fog of War’
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Directed by Errol Morris; photographed by Peter Donahue, Robert Chappell; edited by Karen Schmeer, Doug Abel, Chyld King; production designed by Ted Bafaloukos, Steve Hardy; music by Philip Glass; produced by Morris, Michael Williams, Julie Ahlberg. With Robert McNamara. Interviewer: Morris. A Sony Pictures Classics release of a Senart Films and @Radical.Media production; opens Friday at the Music Box Theatre. Running time: 1:46. MPAA rating: PG-13.