The Fog of war
Cooper, Rand Richard
ifiIVZE311K aGY.4^vRS.1f;IT dx"A!£:uTAlegileiVe"9 dE hWc4 :ibvRf9F S E R It iil E 3 N Tit:M Mal KM ?KAM BOB, WE HARDLY KNEWYA Robert McNamara & 'The Fog of War' iewers aren't likely to have...
...I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it," he answers...
...Perhaps...
...To this end, the author proposes a necessary two-way dialectic between theology and the world: an ongoing dialectic ultimately essential to both church and world...
...What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win...
...His forte, in business and in the military, was statistical analysis, and montages of newspaper articles from the early 1960s allude to his famously "brainy" personality and "computer-like mind...
...We don't have clear definitions...
...Maybe McNamara is getting hammered on behalf of them all...
...It's as if the question has rudely interrupted a pleas-ant reverie over lost youth and innocence...
...The result is a series of interviews combined with footage of the calamitous historical moment in which McNamara rose to power...
...I'm at an age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions," he says...
...Again and again McNamara leads with an apology, then follows with an excuse—what Vietnam War journalist Sydney Schanberg has mordantly called his "ambidextrous explanations...
...he bounces right back into defensive mode, angrily refusing to answer...
...The Fog of War continues this study of intelligence gone awry...
...A searing confession...
...Morris's specially equipped camera, the Interrotron, works by superimposing an image of the questioner—who's actually in another room—over the lens, so that the interviewee converses directly, and unusually intimately, with us...
...The Fog of War charts McNamara's lifelong precociousness: whiz kid at Berkeley, youngest professor ever at Harvard Business School, and president of Ford Motor Company at forty-three—for just five weeks, it turned out, after which Kennedy named him to his cabinet...
...Repeatedly Morris catches McNamara unhooking himself from his own actions, disabling his capacity to judge himself...
...What is morally appropriate in a wartime environment...
...Do you feel guilty...
...We are the strongest nation in the world," he says...
...Recalling the horrific case of a Quaker protestor who immolated himself in front of the Defense Department in 1965, he has the audacity not only to sympathize, but to identify with him personally—both "sensitive human beings," he observes, in a "very very difficult situation...
...The Fog of War gives us a scary look behind the lesson, back to the man before he knew it: the warmaking man who believed in the ability of the human mind—his own superior mind—to comprehend it all...
...Set to a hauntingly anxious Philip Glass score, the film was both stylized and serious—a hyperreal nightmare that assembled a point-by-point indictment of a corrupt Texas legal system...
...he asks...
...Morris reconstructed different versions of the killing, fashioning a Rashomonlike inquiry into innocence and guilt...
...His goal, he tells Morris, is to "try to understand what happened...
...We were wrong, terribly wrong," Mc-Namara wrote...
...Yet the film's portrayal is by no means wholly unsympathetic...
...McNamara is darkly fascinated by the tragedy of nudear weapons, those products of human genius that threaten humanity with extinction...
...Rationality will not save us," " he warm with the quizzical surprise of someone who spent his life assuming it would...
...Or maybe it's his special gift for is-suing halfhearted and self-serving mea culpas, an apologia disguised as an apology...
...Asked whether the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam constituted a crime against humanity, McNamara typically equivocates...
...Some have complained that Morris goes easy on McNamara, letting him get away with too many prevarications...
...he turns Vietnam into little more than a glitch in My Brilliant Career...
...Death) profiled Fred Leuchter, the execution systems engineer who earned notoriety for attempting to dis-prove the existence of gas chambers at Auschwitz...
...McNamara oversaw the con-duct of the Vietnam War until his abrupt firing in 1967, and his life since has followed what looks like a path of contrition—advocating for third-world development as longtime president of the World Bank, and, in the mid-1990s, is-suing a memoir, In Retrospect, that seemed to apologize for the disaster of Vietnam...
...Every time the discussion leads McNamara to the brink, he backs off, scooting down an escape hatch into rhetorical argument, turning personal confession into academic speculation...
...Looking back, he express-es awe at the devastation: up to 90 per-cent of the residents of two dozen major cities killed, including more than one hundred thousand in Tokyo alone—"men, women, and children," he emphasizes...
...There's something grotesque in McNamara's speaking about himself the way a doting mother might about her son...
...Morris's newest effort, The Fog of War, provides a similarly engrossing study in culpability...
...Surely no other architect of the Vietnam War—be it Mc-George Bundy or Dean Rusk or William Westmoreland or Henry Kissinger—has come close to matching McNamara's at-tempt to account, if not atone, for the wrong of Vietnam...
...Was there a rule then that said you shouldn't bomb, shouldn't kill, shouldn't burn to death one hundred thousand civilians in one night...
...War is so complex," McNamara informs us...
...it's beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables...
...The Dialectica Development of Doctrine l .iletitodofogicai Proposal by Charles Dickinson $25.00 Hardcover to order call 313.624.9784 Dove Booksellers 13904 Michigan Avenue Dearborn, Michigan 48126 www.dovebook.corn If Christianity—without losing its soul—is yet to avoid losing touch with the world, it must constantly update itself by dialogue with all the intellectual currents of today...
...I'm very proud of my accomplishments," he attempts tosum up, "and very sorry that in the process of accomplishing things, I made errors...
...Perhaps more than any other figure, McNamara exemplified the ascendancy of "the best and the brightest," the meritocratic, intelligence-testing managerial elite that JFK brought to Washington...
...We feel we're seeing right into McNamara, through his too-eager, vaguely reptilian smile, and it's a little bit creepy...
...At his advanced age, he still can't avoid a smirk of satisfaction at recalling being named to Phi Beta Kappa in his sophomore year of college, or at being awarded—amid the unfolding debacle of Vietnam—the Medal of Freedom at the White House...
...The film surveys the life and times of Robert S. McNamara, secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson...
...We owe it to future generations to explain why...
...The result is a subtle, disconcerting study of moral and intellectual powers in conflict within one man...
...Then: "I'm not really sure I authorized Agent Orange—I don't remember it—but it certainly occurred, the use of it occurred while I was secretary...
...he asks...
...SONY PICTURES CLASSICS mara was an officer working as a statistical analyst...
...And yet when Morris asks, "Do you feel responsible for the war...
...What kind of law do we have that says these chemicals are acceptable for use in war and these chemicals are not...
...This aura of self-indulgence may partly explain why McNamara's not in-substantial effort of coming to terms has met with so much vehement denunciation over the past decade...
...I don't believe we should ever apply that economic, political, and military power unilaterally...
...McNamara consulted with LeMay on the strategy of mass firebombing in Japan...
...It's disturbing that despite all the ostensible chastening of his own intellectual hubris, McNamara still seems so highly self-regarding...
...Captured by Morris's camera, such arrant self-deception becomes a mesmerizing gall...
...He's certainly smart enough...
...Morris is interested in brilliant minds, their capacity for inspired creation on the one hand and dark fixation on the other: an earlier film of his (Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control) profiled four eccentric enthusiasts, including a topiary gardener and a robot-builder, while another (Mr...
...Morris read the book and persuaded its author to talk on camera...
...As we survey the charred ruins of Tokyo, Morris, off screen, asks whether McNamara considers himself implicated in the carnage...
...For all his ostensible desire to tell the truth, when it comes to the hardest Rand Richards Cooper Commonweal 2 2 February 13, 2004 points, McNamara proves slippery...
...Part of the creepiness lies in the clash between the lessons he says he has learned, and the personality of the man himself...
...With a grim shudder he looks back to the Cuban missile crisis, when all that pre-vented nuclear war, he says, was luck...
...As for McNamara himself, at eighty-five, the man has his own agenda...
...Like McNamara's book, The Fog of War is divided into lessons—cautionary maxims concerning statecraft and the use of power that place him, in the context of today's politics, well left of center...
...Morris is a brilliant filmmaker, but he is not a historian," charges Eric Alter-man in the Nation...
...ifiIVZE311K aGY.4^vRS.1f;IT dx"A!£:uTAlegileiVe"9 dE hWc4 :ibvRf9F S E R It iil E 3 N Tit:M Mal KM ?KAM BOB, WE HARDLY KNEWYA Robert McNamara & 'The Fog of War' iewers aren't likely to have forgotten Errol Morris's ominous and dreamlike 1988 documentary, The Thin Blue Line, which took up the case of a Texas drifter wrongly convicted of killing a cop in a nighttime roadside shooting...
...And I think he was right," comments McNamara...
...He goes on to describe a conversation after the war in which LeMay reflected that if America had lost, he, Mc-Namara, and others would have been prosecuted as war criminals...
...Not quite...
...He also warns repeatedly of the unique menace of nu-clear weapons...
...Toward the end of the film, McNamara quotes the lyrical closing lines of T. S. Eliot's "Gerontion," that invoke life's long journey toward understanding, and chokes up with emotion...
...And, at times, outrageous...
...His smooth corporate style contrasted dramatically with the gruff belligerence of top Pentagon brass, such as General Curtis LeMay, a cigar-chomping warrior who headed the Air Force during World War II when McNa'Let me explain, again...
...My own sense is that there's plenty to make one uneasy, not just about the history, but about the man himself—his combination of an exceptional intelligence with overweening pride, a mediocre con-science, and a rather limited imagination...
...or at least I did...
...Commonweal 2 3 February 13, 2004...
...In any case, we begrudge him his poetry and his pathos...
Vol. 131 • February 2004 • No. 3
