McNamara, icon of war, bares his soul

This is the fifth in a series of essays about great films from the first decade of the 21st Century. I'll pick a new movie each week leading right up to my final list in December 2009.

Fog of War plays like a Bond film. There’s political intrigue, black ops, secret meetings, international espionage, coded messages to the Kremlin, a doomsday clock and tape-recorded presidential meetings. It’s riveting on a level far beyond any 007 movie, so it will sound strange to you when I say that Fog of War is a documentary film, a minimalist one, that is filmed plainly and effectively using almost exclusively one camera setup, in front of which a sharply dressed older man talks directly to us.

The man is Robert McNamara. To some he’s the architect of the Vietnam War, and thus the designer of 58,159 American deaths. To others he’s a heroic figure; the man who used numbers to help end World War II, the man who, as secretary of defense, provided valuable consultation to John F. Kennedy during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

The movie plays both sides, because in McNamara’s eyes he was both, the hero and the villain. It was McNamara, the hero, who sent the National Guard to Vietnam protests with unloaded rifles. It was McNamara, the villain, who was consulting General Curtis LeMay when the decision was made to begin systematic firebombing of Japanese cities during World War II. As a result, more than 300,000 Japanese citizens were killed. “LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He — and I’d say I — were behaving as war criminals,” McNamara plainly says. “LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” These are brave questions from a man who has every right to be afraid of the answers.

The film, which won the Academy Award for best documentary in 2004, is directed by Errol Morris (Gates of Heaven, The Thin Blue Line), a careful and fluent documentary filmmaker. He films his main subject here with a special camera that allows McNamara, still with his trademark slicked-back hair, to look directly into the lens in an engaging, conversational way. The film is essentially his dialogue with Morris, who we occasionally hear setting up stories and asking questions, some of which don’t get answered (“I’m done talking about that,” McNamara says to an off-camera Morris regarding blame during Vietnam). For the most part, though, McNamara shares openly from his past, and from his famous Eleven Lessons, which include: No. 1 – Empathize with your Enemy, No. 5 – Proportionality should be a guideline in war, and No. 8 – Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning. Since the movie was released, I’ve kept a hand-written list of his rules on my computer monitor and I find it more valuable than my AP Style Guide.

McNamara applies his rules to his own history and offers their origins in Fog of War, which tells his story out of order, from his involvement in Lyndon Johnson’s deteriorating Vietnam debacle to World War II and then forward again to the Kennedy years, when he fought the Soviets and then buried his great leader, to which he sheds a tear and tells the story of how he and Jacqueline Kennedy picked out the presidential plot at Arlington National Cemetery. As if all this wasn’t enough, McNamara was also the president of Ford Motors and head of the World Bank.

The narrative really excels during McNamara’s discussion of the Cold War — “Cold War … hell, it was a Hot War.” At one point, during the Cuban Missile Crisis chapter, he holds up his fingers an inch or so apart and announces, “This is how close we came to World War III.” As McNamara speaks, Morris uses archival footage to show the low-level flyovers of Cuba, the naval blockade, gathering troops in Florida and, using a loup and light table, the negatives of the actual Soviet missiles on Cuban soil from the reconnaissance flights. McNamara hauntingly declares, “There is no learning period for nuclear weapons.” He nearly learned that the hard way during those 13 days in October 1962.

Many of these stories are nearly footnotes in the McNamara biography once Vietnam is brought up. Vietnam was his legacy and curse. He and JFK were worried about Vietnam falling to the communists, but not more worried then getting mired in a war that was unwinnable. As advisors were being sent in, plans were in the wings that could be drafted up to bring everyone home before a full-scale war started. Then Kennedy was killed and LBJ ascended to the throne and began sending young people in by the thousands. In public McNamara was playing the dutiful Secretary of Defense, but behind closed doors he was asking Johnson the tough questions. The film leaves the many comparisons to Donald Rumsfeld and George W. Bush wide open.

Is the film an admission of McNamara’s guilt for Vietnam? I don’t think so. I think it’s his vindication, and maybe his confession. As the secretary of defense he was no doubt running the day-to-day war, but it was Johnson who was so petrified of defeat. The film plays audio recordings of Johnson’s cabinet meetings where he explicitly says the Kennedys (John and Bobby) were all wrong trying to plan an exit strategy out of Vietnam. The falling dominoes terrified Johnson, and McNamara did his best to quell Johnson’s fire to no luck. Eventually McNamara left the Pentagon, though still today he doesn’t know if he quit or was fired.

Of all the figures of the 20th century, I find McNamara one of the most compelling. Some of history has vilified him, as is no doubt warranted, yet the film shows a different character: it shows an articulate and well-expressed man who was put under great pressure from some of the century’s darkest times. He made some bad decisions, but I don’t think he ever made the same mistakes twice. And what he did get wrong he was willing to admit to at the end of his long, illustrious life. The film neither sides with or against McNamara; it just frames him within his own words and actions, which play out louder and with a ferocity that no history book can deliver.

Robert McNamara died July 6 of this year at the age of 93.