Robert McNamara's Very Long Afterlife

1001 Movies To Watch Before Your Netflix Subscription Dies, Part 37
Errol Morris, The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara

President-elect John Kennedy tapped Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense mere months after he’d become the first Ford Motor Company CEO unrelated to the Ford family. McNamara’s experiences in World War II qualified him as America’s leading civilian authority on military matters, but McNamara admits, his business successes really attracted JFK’s attention. His attitudes as a corporate bean-counter originated in the Pacific Theatre, and carried over into Vietnam.

Documentarian Errol Morris pioneered an interview technique in which subjects speak directly into the camera, Morris himself is mostly silent, and he permits his subjects to keep speaking until they reveal something true and awful about themselves. McNamara, eighty-five years old when Morris interviewed him, proves well-suited for Morris’ technique. In post-production, Morris supplements McNamara’s interviews with advanced graphics, rare archive footage, and a stirring Philip Glass soundtrack.

McNamara unfolds his story thematically, rather than sequentially. In his telling, the story begins not with Vietnam, nor his years spent fighting in the Pacific, but with the Cuban Missile Crisis. These thirteen days define his memories of government service, because they demonstrate the give-and-take necessary, and also because they demonstrate that the most rational actors will behave in ways that seemingly defy reason. War, McNamara discovers, turns sane people irrational.

From there, he unfolds his life backward and forward. He briefly touches on his early life, and his Harvard teaching career, before diving headlong into World War II. There he served under General Curtis LeMay, one of history’s most effective commanders. LeMay taught McNamara important lessons about efficiency, about computing relevant data to achieve desirable outcomes for his side. Despite his tough-talking rugged reputation, LeMay was an early technocrat.

But LeMay, with his officers’ complicity, also pioneered techniques of Total War which targeted civilian populations. McNamara confesses to organizing a bombing sortie over Japan that, he says, killed over 100,000 civilians in one night. “Were you aware this was going to happen?” Morris asks. McNamara replies: “Well I was, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.” He continues: “He [LeMay], and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals.”

Only after this lengthy preamble does McNamara graduate to the conflict everyone associates with his leadership: Vietnam. He describes a conflict premised on false ideas, political saber-rattling, and useless patriotic fervor. President Johnson justified the advance bombing of North Vietnam in recompense for an attack which, McNamara reveals, later proved never to have happened. “Believing and seeing,” McNamara says sanctimoniously, “are both often wrong.”

Errol Morris (left) and Robert McNamara

In interviewing McNamara, Morris reveals a man riven by incompatible desires. McNamara wants to take accounting of his life’s accomplishments, good and ill; yet he repeatedly kicks responsibility for his greatest failures up the chain of command. He believes in efficiency, data, and accountability, yet also distrusts rationality and evidence. He desires to be completely honest, yet stands behind the importance of lies told forty years earlier.

Throughout his tenure, McNamara describes conflicts inside the administration. He and President Johnson had very different visions of how to prosecute the war. Curtis LeMay, by this time Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, believed in completely wiping out any resistance, and advocated nuclear annihilation of any opposition. McNamara hated this idea, believing that you can learn from mistakes in conventional war, but not nuclear war.

Occasionally, McNamara displays humility enough to recognize the times he believes his own propaganda. Besides admitting his war-criminal behavior in Japan, he also describes meetings in the 1990s with Fidel Castro and members of the North Vietnamese government, when he discovered his opponents believed almost the opposite of what the war information machine insisted. Rather than realize what he didn’t know, McNamara often accepted his own agitprop, with catastrophic consequences.

Working together, Morris and McNamara distill his experiences, conflicts, and doubts into eleven portable lessons. (They actually found twenty-one, but needed to cut for time; if you watch the DVD, the other ten are buried in special features.) Taken together, these lessons display a worldview that appears optimistic for the long term— McNamara sometimes sounds remarkably dove-ish— but bleakly fatalistic about the present.

Recorded in 2003, when America was getting into its biggest overseas conflict since Vietnam, Morris clearly intended this movie to comment on subjects outside itself. It certainly does that. Like the best literature, it ultimately isn’t about its nominal subject, it’s about us, the audience. It’s about what we accept and tolerate, and what we consider finally intolerable. And what, like McNamara, we’re willing to paper over.