Clearing the Air

Errol Morris on seeing through the fog.

More than one critic has come away from Errol Morris’ The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara noting the former secretary of defense’s resemblance to the post’s current holder, Donald Rumsfeld. But Morris, who spent dozens of hours interviewing McNamara and more time with him off-camera, has grown to see McNamara less as a Machiavellian manipulator than an idealist who betrayed his own ideals, which is to say, less Rumsfeld than Colin Powell. As Powell tied himself in knots to lend public support to the invasion of Iraq -- which plainly failed to meet the doctrine Powell laid out at the time of the first Gulf War -- and repeated the process last week to buttress the Bush administration’s WMD prevarications, so, Morris argues, McNamara knew the folly of pursuing military action in Vietnam, but supported the war because it was, quite simply, his job.

Powell, Morris says, "did himself in, out of a sense that you close ranks," and McNamara did the same. Using excerpts from taped White House conversations, The Fog of War makes a convincing (if not uncontroversial) argument that McNamara and Kennedy supported withdrawing the "military advisors" from Vietnam, but when Johnson became president, the focus shifted unilaterally to winning the war. "I always thought it was foolish of you to make any statements about withdrawal," Johnson says in a phone call to McNamara.

"To me, the mystery is, why did McNamara go along," Morris asks. "Because it was a calamitous ride, as we all know. It's a question that will always gnaw away at me, and I think gnaws away at most of the people who lived through this period of time. Why did McNamara continue to support these policies? Why didn't he quit? If he wasn't the real architect of all this -- if the war wasn't pushed on Johnson by McNamara, but maybe something close to the other way around -- why did he go along with it?"

It is, Morris freely admits, a question the film fails to answer -- unless the whole of McNamara's life can be considered an explanation. A college yearbook photo shows the man a journalist once described as "an IBM machine with legs" sporting the same haircut as he would in his mid-50s, the very image of a company man. But in his 80s, McNamara continues the public self-examination he began with the publication of In Retrospect in 1995. That book was attacked as McNamara's attempt to whitewash his culpability in Vietnam, and The Fog of War has met with similar assaults, particularly from commentators like Alexander Cockburn and Eric Alterman (who calls McNamara "a pathological liar and comically pathetic braggart"), outraged at McNamara's dissimulation and Morris' supposed failure to force McNamara to repent. The San Francisco Bay Guardian countered a positive review with an editorial purporting to address the film, but whose real target was made clear in its last line: "Shame on you, Robert McNamara."

The Fog of War is the pure interview film Morris had long been wanting to make, which is to say it is a story told entirely in the first person. Apart from a few off-camera interjections (and the aforementioned tape recordings), no one's voice is heard except McNamara's, and Morris' trademark Interrotron system allows McNamara to stare directly into the lens, and the audience to look him in the eye. Morris intended the approach for his last film, Mr. Death, but decided that he could not let his title character's Holocaust denial go unanswered. With McNamara, by contrast, Morris adopts a "give 'em enough rope" strategy, allowing him long stretches of uninterrupted monologue. It would not be surprising if factual errors slip into the mix -- although Morris contends the record does not support the traditional, almost monolithic, view that McNamara bullied a vacillating Johnson into escalating the war -- but the technique also allows reflections that a more confrontational interview process would not likely have produced. During World War II, McNamara served in an advisory capacity to Gen. Curtis LeMay, who ordered the firebombing of Tokyo which eventually claimed more than 100,000 lives. "LeMay said, "If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals,'" McNamara evenly reflects. "He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals."

"If the idea in mind is that you're involved in some kind of war crimes tribunal, then I suppose the questioning takes a different form," Morris says. "If the issue is to try to get McNamara to express his feelings about history, that's a different enterprise altogether. Allowing him to talk, to express himself about these things, seems to be at the heart of it. There are instances where he's not perhaps as forthcoming as he should be, or he holds back certain details, either wittingly or unwittingly. We are all guilty of it, of rewriting history, of revising history."

In a sense, it's not history that interests Morris, so much as belief: What did McNamara believe then, and what does he believe now? The film's "eleven lessons," which Morris allows are his interpolations of McNamara's words, seem uncannily relevant to the current world situation, although the interviews were filmed before Sept. 11, 2001: "Empathize with your enemy"; "Rationality will not save us"; "Belief and seeing are both often wrong." (Anyone familiar with Morris' oeuvre will recognize the sentiments.) Yet McNamara has consistently refused to draw parallels between his past experience and the present, or to comment on specifics, then or now. In the damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't situation, McNamara says, "I'd rather be damned if I don't."

The Fog of War only hints at Morris' frustration with McNamara's failure to speak out publicly against the administration's Iraq policy, despite what he believes is a precise understanding on McNamara's part of the mistakes they are clearly repeating. Morris has said he never wants to ask anyone a question they don't want to answer, but his exasperation on the point has been clear in the many interviews he and McNamara have done together to promote the film. "I spoke to someone recently about why he didn't speak out after he left the Department of Defense," Morris says. "I think in many ways because he never did leave the Department of Defense. In some sense, he still sees himself as secretary of defense." In fact, after nearly three years of repeatedly declining comment on the subject, McNamara recently broke his silence in an interview with the Toronto Globe and Mail, pronouncing himself "utterly disgusted" with the nation's position on Iraq. "It's just wrong what we're doing. It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

If McNamara makes no similar admission to Morris on the subject of Vietnam, it's because Morris never solicited it. "I've never looked at this as an apology film, for Vietnam or Robert McNamara," Morris says. "And I, for one, would like to point out, I don't particularly want to hear him apologize, because I don't think he can. I don't want to hear McNamara apologize for the deaths of 58,000 Americans and millions of Vietnamese. But I do think he can be asked to give an account of how and why it happened. Maybe such an account does absolutely no good in changing the way we see the world or changing our behavior. But something is going to have to change our behavior."

-- Respond to this article in our Forums -- click to jump there