Documentary Film > The Fog of War
Robert S. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense between 1961 and 1968. He is considered to be one of the architects of the Vietnam War. When asked, he denies talking about his feeling of guilt, or the lack of it for that matter. After his resignation from his post, he was awarded with the Medal of Freedom and the Distinguished Service Medal. He has no regrets but he admits that every military commander who’s honest admits that they had probably made mistakes when applying military power. But, he adds, with nuclear weapons, there is no learning period, entire nations can be destroyed at the push of a button. When he says that we all learn from our mistakes, it sounds like something our present government should consider. This statement comes at the time of the US invasion of Iraq; but McNamara refuses to comment on it based on his belief that no former Secretary of Defense has the right to comment on the job of the present Secretary of Defense.
The film won an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2003. Errol Morris director first got the idea of interviewing McNamara in 1995 after publishing his biography In Retrospect. Morris said in an interview that he thought the book raised more questions than it answered. The film has an interesting structural base, the Eleven Lessons. These lessons seem to have been put in the film in the editing room to give it some kind of arrangement to the otherwise undivided story line. In the beginning of his carrier newspaper articles wrote only positive stories, called him names such as whiz-kid, while at the end he was called an IBM machine with legs, even an arrogant dictator. He recounts his carrier as a military adviser, a defense minister, and President of the World Bank. Now, at an old age he can look back with a perspective on his past actions, and derive some conclusions. He now tries to understand what happened. He wants to develop his lessons and pass them on; he feels he has a duty to the younger generation. There is plenty of old footage to give a credible base for his memories. We see newspaper articles, old photographs, and even his signatures on government documents. He was always a public figure; he’s used to being front of the camera.
He has a face of a poker player, and shows little emotion. One of his biggest regrets is the mishandling of the Bay of Pigs crisis. One year later he was one of President Kennedy’s advisors during the Cuban Missile Crisis. It seems that this event had an enormous effect on the young politician. He learnt many important tactics from Thomson, former Ambassador to the Soviet Union. He later realized that it was only luck that prevented both the USA and Russia from utter annihilation. Why is it that nuclear weapons could be “launched by the decision of one human being” even today? This is a rhetoric question with out an explicit opinion, one of the many in the film. He realizes that for today’s people it’s impossible to understand what happened, it was a Cold War time with pressure inconceivable for us. Another rhetoric question he poses is that, human race need to think more about war, about conflict, is it more war that what we want for the 21st Century? We know what his answer is.
The first jump in the otherwise linear timeline is when he goes back to his childhood and school years. He even smiles at times; and is clearly amused by his memories. He was brilliant even as a child, always top student in his class. He was the youngest ever to hold an assistant teacher position at Harvard. He mentions his studies of Plato and Aristotle, the two philosophers with the greatest contribution to ethics. Interesting to learn how much he admires them, especially if we know how much damage he’s done to humanity. One of his first jobs in the military was to analyze the efficiency of the air bombing in the WWII. With his help the army accomplished to kill 100,000 people, and destroyed 67 Japanese cities. Newspaper headlines from 1945 support his claims, as well as photographs taken from airplanes for a more dramatic effect. He’s not proud of what they did, but he honestly tells everything without showing much emotion. He doesn’t take responsibility, he was only part of a mechanism, and did his job the best he could. The first time we see his emotions is when he talks about the pilot who was killed in the bombing of Tokyo. After he tells us what happened, citing exact numbers, for a minute we can only see the ruins of Tokyo on the screen. As a continuation to the disturbing pictures, McNamara says it all happened before the nuclear bombs were dropped. We see no footage of that, indicating that he probably had nothing to do with it. He raises another question, are three any rules of war? He admits he could be tried as a war criminal had they lost the war.
Forty five minutes into the film, the reporter starts asking about Vietnam, and it remains the subject until the end of the almost two hours long film. McNamara was Secretary of Defense for eight years during the Vietnam War, longer than anyone before him. In 1963 he advised President Kennedy to withdraw the 30,000 military advisors from the region during the course of the next two years. Later that year, the president was assassinated, and his predecessor had different intentions. McNamara clearly respected the ex-president; he gets very emotional talking about how he picked the spot for him to be buried. What happens in 1964 we learn not from McNamara, but from an archived recording between McNamara and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Interesting solution from the director; the story becomes more credible hearing the facts from an objective source, - the tape recorder in this case. The director also included a short documentary within his documentary, where he used old footages of the reenactment of the attack in the Gulf of Tonkin staged within a week and a half after the actual incidents. McNamara doesn’t remember having asked to have it made; more likely is that those reenactments were made by the Defense Department to convince people that an attack on Vietnam is unavoidable and necessary. He admits it many times, such as when he talks about the launch of the Rolling Thunder on Vietnam, that their judgments were incorrect, even though they seemed right at that time. Forty years later we all know what consequences these erroneous decisions had. In the shadows of the Iraqi war, McNamara hopes that senseless killing of one another will never happen again. The shocking footages of the war only raise our doubts whether McNamara should be held responsible for what happened.
He now realizes what he and many others didn’t understand at that time. The war was lost, because Vietnamese were fighting for independence, and the Americans were fighting to enslave them. So they understood, but this belief gave them a huge psychological advantage. Does this happen in Iraq today? One of his most important thoughts that he communicates is that the US’s economic, political and military power should never be applied unilaterally on any country. If we can’t convince other nations to help us, “we better reexamine our reason”.
How much responsibility McNamara takes for what happened? Was he the author of the war, or just an instrument? As the camera is inches from his face, watching for every little emotion, he says that he was only serving the President the best he could. What he did aroused from the sense of duty he felt toward his nation. He clearly understands the moral implications of his actions, but he alone can’t be held responsible. “We must stop killing human beings” is what he always believed, but he also agrees with Wilson’s proposal; in order to end all wars, you have to win the war. The fact that sacrificing human life is unavoidable for a greater cause is the major paradox of his life. He was called a fascist, a two-faced, and an arrogant, egoistic and irrational dictator. But that was the time of the Cold War, things were different, and he acted the way he believed was right. He has no regrets. He helped avoiding nuclear wars, and a possibly even more devastating war with China. Just as he recoups his successes, the reporter asks him: “How many Americans were killed in Vietnam?”
He’s proud and sorry at the same time for the errors he made. But it is human
nature to make mistakes. We all make mistakes. The fog of war expression
implies that wars are too complex for us to comprehend. We even kill people if
necessary. It doesn’t mean we’re not rational, but reason has its limits. He
realizes that he’s an important figure in history, but at the same time he’s
deeply misunderstood. Does he feel guilty? He doesn’t want to talk about that.
This feeling of guilt will haunt him until the end of his life; this is his
cross that he has to carry all the way. He doesn’t even try to explain his
actions, or to change people’s belief he just tells us what happened. It is
something he has to deal with. I think he agreed to do the interview for a
reason other than to clear his name. He wants to look American people directly
in the face and tell them what happened.
Sources:
1 Info and Tidbits on the Fog of War. 28 April. 2005 <http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/fog_of_war/about.php>
2 Robert McNamara. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. 28 April. 2005 <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_McNamara>
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