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.

When Rural News Becomes World News

Nebraska generally only makes national and world news when something awful happens. Charles Starkweather, for instance. But the most common reason Nebraska, where I live, makes the national headlines, is because weather becomes extreme, like when blowing snows close Interstate 80, one of America’s major transcontinental arteries, or droughts threaten meat prices. In spring of 2019, record snows followed by record rains destroyed a huge portion of my state.

I recall this, not to elicit your sympathy or tell anyone that they should pay Nebraska better attention, but rather, because my state isn’t alone. Just days ago, I discovered that similar history-making rains are currently destroying eastern Kentucky, a state with a similar economic backbone of agriculture and light industry. I remember, in 2019, complaints from flooded areas that mainstream journalists were ignoring the devastation. This year it’s happening again.

Many major journalism outlets don’t even have stringers positioned in the worst-hit regions for environmental destruction like this. Sometimes, on those rare occasions when Nebraska makes national headlines for weather-related devastation, national outlets will buy printed reports or camera footage from locally based reporters. The AP apparently keeps a paid stringer in Lincoln, in case something newsworthy happens. He doesn’t post very often.

Not that national venues ignore rural America altogether. Barely three weeks ago (as this posts), national-grade journalists flooded Iowa for the 2020 Presidential caucuses. They slavishly followed candidates (mostly Democrats) around the state, recording them knocking on doors, shaking hands, and ginning up morale among volunteers. Then the caucuses happened, the candidates moved on, and the journalists folded their tents and followed. The Midlands retreated to insignificance.

St. Louis-based journalist Sarah Kendzior writes that Americans living in “flyover country” grow accustomed to getting routinely ignored. Life in the middle of the map requires a reëvaluation of what we consider “fair,” Kendzior writes, because the difference between the richest and the meanest citizens is increasingly small. Those who muster enough money, or have so little they can affordably walk away, leave this region for coastal cities, which have something ours don't:

Jobs.

Please understand, this isn’t sour grapes. I understand that national and world news happens in major cities, which have access to money, instant media technology, and populations ready to attend camera-friendly events. Cities create a reciprocal relationship between reporters and events: things happen in places which have journalists ready to report. And journalists stand ready to report where things happen. This feedback loop makes simple sense.

But in the near future, what events demand reporting will probably change. Until now, human-made circumstances, like economics and technology, have demanded journalists’ attention, and journalists have obliged. Going forward, what we euphemistically term “acts of God” will make national and global headlines, and places with sparser populations will get first and hardest. Nobody is prepared in those areas to report; the media apparently expect somebody competent  to rush in later.

This pattern has already begun. Besides Nebraska, the entire Missouri and Mississippi River Valley system saw record-setting floods in 2019; the Mid-Atlantic region was socked by massive floods in 2018; the Lower Mississippi was devastated in 2017; and, to quote USA Today, “U.S. had more floods in 2016 than any year on record.” Devastating weather events are becoming normal… if you see and recognize the pattern.

A pattern which even I, a dedicated news-follower, completely missed until it hit my home last year. Floodwaters from the 2019 Nebraska floods came within eight feet of my front door. I was personally fortunate, because my building didn’t actually get infiltrated. Several friends weren’t so lucky; some were driven from their homes when water entered. One friend had her home flooded a second time while still conducting repairs from the previous flood.

In 2019, Nebraskans complained on social media that our state’s devastating floods got ignored in national media. This was perhaps an exaggeration; sources like the New York Times and Wall Street Journal did, indeed, run wire-service reports on the flooding. But the reporting usually got buried in “regional news,” only got two or three paragraphs in websites, and otherwise got nodding acknowledgement without much real, attention-grabbing coverage.

Now it’s happening again. Floods are socking eastern Kentucky, an area journalists ignore except during massive coal-mining disasters. The pattern becomes clear to those who see it: those places where the vanguard of environmental damage is happening, are least likely to have coverage. Thus it becomes easy to pretend life continues unchanged. Because destruction is happening, but nobody tells us about it.

Machiavelli, in His Time and Ours

Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli: The Art of Teaching People What To Fear

Sometime around 1513, disgraced Florentine diplomat Niccolo Machiavelli wrote a short treatise on government. Though published only posthumously, The Prince gained such influence that it attracted ire from Counter-Reformation clergy, and the Catholic Church banned it for centuries. Modern critics still argue about how seriously to take the book’s precepts. Everyone seemingly has an opinion, regardless whether they’ve read it, and Machiavelli’s name has become a political byword.

French historian Patrick Boucheron thinks Machiavelli, as a man, means something different than his most famous book implies. Machiavelli wrote amid tempestuous times, when the Renaissance, the Reformation, and the Italian Wars made life chaotic and unpredictable. And, Boucheron believes, we face similar tumult today. So time has come again to read Machiavelli, understanding his entire corpus, within his historical context. Boucheron accomplishes this eloquently.

Machiavelli emerged from Republican Florence, born into what we’d consider today the upper middle class: common citizens, that is, but relatively comfortable. But within his lifetime, the Medici family privatized Florence’s public domains, advancing the cause of nascent capitalism. Machiavelli used family connections to land a lucrative appointment to the chancery of the Grand Council, giving him a bird’s-eye view to civic governance— and to democracy’s rapid decline.

Even before the political texts which made Machiavelli immortal, he left copious written evidence, through his personal letters, state documents, and other writings. Boucheron reconstructs Machiavelli’s biography from the innumerable records he left, many of which survive in his own handwriting. Being neither gentry nor pedestrian, Machiavelli saw most of civic order with an outsider’s perspective. This was furthered by his extensive diplomatic journeys and international embassies.

But the Italian Wars saw Machiavelli’s beloved Grand Council abolished, and Machiavelli himself exiled to his ancestral estates. Reduced to country yeomanry, he rediscovered his childhood love of learning. He spent hours engaged in liberal arts studies, as Boucheron quotes him, conversing with the greats of ancient Greece and Rome. He would alternate between reading the classics, and writing his own books, which sought the connection between ancient literature and the Florentine Renaissance.

Patrick Boucheron

Boucheron combines biography with literary criticism to guide audiences through the complex thorn-bush of understanding Machiavelli’s work. Surely the man himself understood how difficult and morally complex his writings appeared. Famous among the populace for comedies like The Mandrake and The Golden Ass, Machiavelli preferred to couch his philosophy for commoners in art and imaginative literature; ordinary Florentines probably considered him a reclusive belle-letterist.

Meanwhile, political works like his authoritarian The Prince and his small-R republican The Discourses circulated among the city’s intelligentsia in manuscript format. Machiavelli attracted a following among the upper crust, and apparently conducted salons, discussing Latin classics for moneyed aristocracy. (Boucheron notes that Machiavelli never savvied Greek, which excluded him from true membership in Italy’s burgeoning patrician Humanist movement.)

Despite being an Ėcole normale scholar himself, and writing about one of history’s most controversial authors, Boucheron keeps everything in vernacular language, staying completely away from academic jargon. Perhaps this reflects this book’s origins as thirty weekly short radio broadcasts on French educational radio: form follows function. It may also reflect award-winning translator Willard Wood, who keeps both academic accuracy and linguistic clarity tied for number-one position.

Notwithstanding one false hope, Machiavelli never regained his political standing within Florence, as it flip-flopped between autocratic principality and madcap democracy. Since his most important works got printed for wider distribution only posthumously, we can only speculate how Florentine aristocracy perceived him. After all, as Boucheron notes, once his diplomatic dispatches stopped, the major source of Machiavelli’s life became his personal journal, which reflects internal turmoil over external acclaim.

Therefore Machiavelli descends to current readers, not as a person, but as a legacy preserved in others’ controversies. Critics debate exactly how literally to take his political positions, especially since he contradicted himself from one manuscript to another. Boucheron doesn’t eliminate this controversy, only to guide readers to participate in the debate more informed about the author. Even he admits, frequently Machiavelli intended less to be taken seriously, than to provoke an otherwise complacent audience.

This book’s main body runs barely 130 pages, and many pages are illustrated; few chapters exceed three pages. Eager readers could consume it in one ambitious Saturday, though I’d recommend spending longer in thought and rumination. An introduction written for the American edition admits Boucheron chose this subject specifically to address the Trump influence in global politics. Boucheron believes Machiavelli speaks to times as ungovernable as his own. Surely this counts as one such time.

The Enemy of My Enemy's Enemy is My... What?

Bernie Sanders

I shouldn’t pretend I didn’t know the American Left wasn’t a monolith. Despite growing up Republican, believing anything more progressive than Spiro Agnew was a threat to American greatness (or something), I’ve always understood that Leftism wasn’t a unified political front. But watching the 2020 primary has really revealed how little American Leftists have in common. We’re unified by what we oppose, not what we favor, and that scares me.

Like many ex-Republicans, I’ve long understood conservatives weren’t a united front. American conservatism is a loose coalition of religious traditionalists, Ayn Rand agnostic libertarians, strong-state war hawks, small-state fiscal restrictionists, and others. These conservative groups share occasional core beliefs, like the idea, explained by CUNY professor Corey Robin, that society’s power hierarchy exists naturally, and shouldn’t be monkeyed with. But overall, they’re as divided as they are unified.

But somehow, it’s only becoming obvious to me now that American progressives have this same division. Though we share an idea that fairness exists, and our economic and social order should be amended to reflect our values of fairness, we lack any through-line of what fairness actually means. The Democratic Party debates have highlighted this underlying lack of agreement, to say nothing of those too far left for the Dems.

What vision of fairness unifies the Left? I struggle to identify any consistent through-line. I’d like to imagine economic fairness looms large, since the last Democrat to win the presidency with a simple majority, Barack Obama, promised sweeping change during the 2008 housing bubble meltdown. Sure, his policies were somewhat less than revolutionary. But his promises of economic transformation fired the base, and got frequent non-voters to the polls.

Elizabeth Warren

Economic fairness, though, proves totally elusive. Trade unionists, the backbone of the Democratic Party’s coalition under FDR, fled during the Johnson and Carter administrations, leaving Democrats flailing for a generation. The group organized specifically around demanding fairness in pay and workplace conditions, currently has limited apparent interest in progressive voting. This probably reflects Reagan-era union-busting, but I think it runs deeper.

American trade unions have traditionally been White, male, and dominated by citizens. Despite the AFL being founded by an immigrant, Samuel Gompers, unions have frequently held an unacknowledged subtext of racism, sexism, and nativism. Beginning in the 1960s, when Lyndon Johnson threw the Democratic Party’s support behind Civil Rights, while tying it to an increasingly unpopular Asian war, unionists began leaving the party.

Thus, arriving at my construction job daily, I see manual laborers with hourly wages—the people most likely to be displaced by the current administration’s economic policies—wearing red ballcaps, or having “Trump 2020” hand-painted on their hard hats with acrylic paint. Because the party traditionally dedicated to economic fairness, has also affiliated itself with other forms of fairness, which their traditional base sees as an attack.

Racial fairness, for instance, requires letting Black and Brown people into jobs which unions historically protected as all-White. Fairness for homosexuals, transgender people, and other Queer groups, can feel threatening to people who define themselves as assertively male, heterosexual, and nuclear-family-oriented. And, not incidentally, the political Left has long attracted atheists and agnostics, while White traditionalists often lump religion, especially Christianity, as a core identity issue.

A brief overview of Leftism reveals a coalition deeply sundered. Karl Marx’s writings reveal deep-seated prejudiced against not only obvious enemies, like the rich, but also less-obvious foes. Marx hated smallholders and farmers, whom he called “lumpenproletariat.” He openly described non-Whites as “primitive” and “savage.” Marx’s later followers, including the Black Panther Party, have needed to read his writings selectively, to expunge his deep social conservatism.

Donald Trump

Right now, the two leading Democratic contenders talking about economic fairness, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, are members of groups which traditional unionists marginalize. Sanders is Jewish and agnostic; Warren is a woman. Though I suspect many of my coworkers would nod sagely if I read these candidates’ platforms aloud, once I mentioned their names, my coworkers would retreat into their nativist cocoons.

No wonder centrists and lite-beer Republicans, like Biden and Buttigieg, persist so adamantly.

Democrats will probably win in November, because opposition to the spray-tanned monstrosity in office will coax frequent non-voters to the polls. But that isn’t enough to build a persistent coalition. Unless American progressives find ways to link their various definitions of fairness together, 2020 will prove a fluke. Leftists are linked, right now, by the walking embodiment of what we hate. But we’ll never survive unless we can unify over what we actually love.

I’m Officially Sick of the Oxford Comma!

I’d never heard the term “Oxford comma” before my final year of college. Looking back, that seems weird, because as a student who wrote at an advanced level from an early age, I’d gotten front-loaded into upper-grade writing classes and taught a panoply of grammatical rules throughout school. Only as a college senior, writing a paper for a theatre history course, did a professor circle my missed comma and ding me points for unclear writing.

Since the advent of social media, though, the Oxford comma has become an issue of serious, or anyway po-faced, contention. On one side, Oxford comma proponents shout loudly that it’s the only barrier between meaningful writing and complete gibberish. On the other, “common use” grammarians call this rule pretentious and unnecessary. The most common form of pro-Oxford rule derives from internet memes, because memes are good for simplistic arguments. One common meme looks like this:

Except for one thing: no reasonable person would think the writer meant Washington and Lincoln are rhinoceri. My fifth-grade spelling textbook explained list commas thus: within the list structure, commas hold the place otherwise occupied by the word “and.” Since the final two list items are already separated by the word “and,” the comma is strictly optional. Not that it was necessary, but neither that it was wrong; it simply boiled down to aesthetic choice.

In my experience, there’s two types of grammatical rules. The first is rules we identify by describing how ordinary people use language in ordinary circumstances. We’d call it “a rule,” for instance, that English word order is fundamentally Subject-Verb-Object, “I kick the ball.” We’d note occasions which reverse that order (“The ball is kicked by me”), but we’d consider this non-standard, because it’s wordy and awkward, and we’d give it a special name, “passive voice.”

The second type, is rules we decree from above, and expect others to observe. Invented rules like “You can’t end sentences with a preposition,” or “You can’t split infinitives,” are invented by grammar mavens to create a more specific and precise language. But we feel strong aversion to these rules, partly because we understand they’re artificial: I know you can split infinitives, because I’ve done so many times. But important people tell us we can’t.

Recently, an article crossed my desk entitled Take That, AP Style! Court of Law Rules the Oxford Comma Necessary. The argument isn’t new; the link was nearly three years old. It’s common knowledge that legal documents are ruled by rigid grammar, which courts enforce to eliminate any suggestion of ambiguity. Iron-clad rules are necessary in law. But do we want lawyer-ese to set our civilian writing standards? Must all writing resemble your student loan agreement?

My friend who shared this link wrote: “THE OXFORD COMMA IS CIVILIZATION. This is a hill I will die on, or gladly make *others* die on. And now it is a part of legal record!” I’d question whether my friend’s own writing matches his supposed style, since internet writing encourages hyperbole. Surely my friend doesn’t literally intend to kill anyone over punctuation. Yet if legal contracts are our grammatical model, he’s required to gird himself for battle.

This isn’t academic vapor, friends, battles over grammatical rules matter. Specifically, they matter because they determine who gets to participate in civil debate and leadership. Historically, grammatical “rules” are invented by aristocracy, or those who consider themselves aristocracy, to make language so obscure that ordinary people, with their public-school educations, can never understand. By this technique, the poor, second-language learners, and others who will never savvy all the aristocracy’s rules, will never ascend to leadership.

In fairness, my friend, a schoolteacher, will say he must enforce stricter rules than I, because he must instruct children in the expectations they’ll face in careers, media, and technocracy. As a former teacher myself, I appreciate that. But as I told my students, grammar “rules” aren’t rules like baseball, where we follow rules because they’re rules. Grammar rules are more like etiquette, knowing how to show others respect by living up to their expectations.

When one damn comma becomes life-or-death, and we shame people (or, as in the meme, treat them like they’re too stupid to understand context) over a literal stroke of the pen, we’re functionally silencing those who don’t conform. We’re telling the poor, and people with learning disabilities, that they have no place in public life. We’re creating a more hostile public sphere. And that’s something I, a teacher at heart, can never accept.

See also:
The Grammar Police State
me write essay on talk nice for you