Rationality Will Not Save Us
Esther, John
Rationality Will Not Save Us Errol Morris Pursues McNamara into the Fog By John Esther Illustration by Lisa Haney As George Bush sets the United States on a course of multiple invasions, Errol...
...I think he's forthcoming and he's not forthcoming," says Morris about McNamara...
...Unlike the story told in Thirteen Days [a 2000 movie with Kevin Costner], this is not a story about how the Kennedys saved the world...
...And we wouldn't be in Iraq...
...It became an instant success with critics...
...It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong...
...What emerges in Mr...
...Well, I don't believe that...
...Johnson is bellicose, McNamara is uncertain...
...There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position," he said...
...In 1988, Morris left the jokes aside and made The Thin Blue Line, a film that led to the overturned conviction of death row inmate Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood...
...Death is not some bloodthirsty thug but rather a thoroughly pathetic primate on two legs...
...Here you have a man who believes that social, political, economic problems were susceptible to rational solutions...
...In 1946, he started work at the Ford Motor Company and became the first nonfamily member to run the company in November 1960...
...Rationality ultimately is not enough, he tells us with respect to the Cuban Missile Crisis," says Morris...
...After JFK was assassinated, McNamara stayed on with President Lyndon B. Johnson as that Administration plunged America further into Vietnam...
...Air Force during World War II...
...His second effort, about the inhabitants of a small town in Florida who lop off their limbs for insurance money ("They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially," Morris says), ran into some problems when his subjects allegedly threatened to kill him...
...McNamara alleges that Fidel Castro said he was willing to incinerate Cuba if America had not backed down...
...So Morris reworked the documentary and called it Vernon, Florida (1981...
...And maybe we should pay attention to that fact," says Morris in a recent interview...
...Did Morris forget Lesson 11...
...John Esther is a Los Angeles-based writer specializing in culture studies...
...There is nothing so pathetic about The Fog of War...
...I'm not sure the framers had this in mind when the Constitution was written...
...Morris believes the problem rests with a Presidency that has grown out of proportion...
...Leaders use the expression "the fog of war" as an excuse, says Morris...
...There's a very different view than Thirteen Days or John Frankenheimer's last film, Path to War, with Alec Baldwin playing Robert McNamara," Morris says...
...Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 film that chronicles the career of a manufacturer of death penalty machinery who became a Holocaust revisionist...
...People who have paid attention to documentaries over the past twenty years know who Morris is and what kind of impact his films can have...
...An investigative reporter-turned-filmmaker, Morris made his first film, Gates of Heaven, a hilarious spoof looking at how Americans relate to death vis-a-vis pet cemeteries...
...Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara...
...Morris blended his humor with pathos in the brilliant Mr...
...And in these conversations you hear something very, very different...
...I'm puzzled...
...Reflecting on the Presidency today, McNamara and Morris have harsh words to say...
...I would hope the movie would have some kind of influence, that it will call attention to the fact that these things in some similar form had happened in the past...
...I don't think he [McNamara] believes that either...
...Morris is being modest...
...If we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merits of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it...
...Despite the title of the film, Morris does not buy the idea that complexities, confusions, and uncertainties of war exculpate the individuals who make the decisions...
...Then came Morris's quirky 1997 film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which sparked a temporary fascination with the African mole-rat...
...You Can't Change Human Nature...
...These documents debunk the conventional wisdom of Johnson being anti-war and McNamara as bellicose...
...Legend has it that freaks, geeks, and kids looking for the underground rodents bombarded pet stores with phone calls...
...The Fog of War, which is broken down into eleven lessons, reveals McNamara's mindset...
...I think there are things he can't even allow himself to answer or maybe even think about...
...The belief that the cabinet serves the President and hence no one should speak out against his policy is really something disturbing about the movie because it clearly resonates with what is going on today...
...It's like "the fog of war ate my homework," he says, adding that people claim "war is so complex that no one's responsible...
...The familiar story is that McNamara dragged a reluctant President Johnson into war...
...It's a story that's repeated in Path to War...
...McNamara told the paper that Bush's unilateralism especially troubles him...
...A top student at Berkeley during the 1930s and then Harvard in 1941, McNamara went on to become a lieutenant colonel in the U.S...
...Rationality Will Not Save Us Errol Morris Pursues McNamara into the Fog By John Esther Illustration by Lisa Haney As George Bush sets the United States on a course of multiple invasions, Errol Morris's The Fog of War, nominated for an Academy Award, could not have come at a more important time...
...Morris plays McNamara's viewpoint against historical documents, including taped phone calls between him and Johnson...
...McNamara was involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962...
...On the one hand, we're told, 'really great Constitution, balance of powers,' " says Morris...
...The film deals with the bombings of nearly one million Japanese civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nearer-than-you-think nuclear war the United States almost had with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the machinations behind the invasion of Vietnam seen through the eyes of former U.S...
...We lucked out...
...On the other hand, we have a vastly powerful executive branch, made more powerful by the existence of nuclear weapons-the fact that the chief executive can press a button and destroy the world...
...One of the more startling revelations comes during Lesson #2: "Rationality Will Not Save Us," which discloses that America and the Soviet Union were much closer to nuclear war than the public was ever told...
...It's just wrong what we're doing" in Iraq, McNamara recently told the Toronto Globe and Mail...
...And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam because there wasn't one single major ally-not France or Britain or Germany or Japan-that agreed with our course or stood beside us there...
...Born in San Francisco in 1916, McNamara was always an ambitious fellow who wanted to sit in the number one chair in elementary school...
...In 1992, Morris brought physicist Stephen Hawking to a mass audience with A Brief History of Time...
...So when he says that 'rationality might not be enough,' there is something incredibly sad about that...
...After barely one month as head of Ford, McNamara joined President John F Kennedy's Administration as Secretary of Defense, the youngest man ever to hold the position...
...One month after the Tet offensive, in February 1968, McNamara received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Johnson before becoming the president of the World Bank, where he served until 1981...
...It brings to light the personal attitudes of those who make the biggest decisions for all of us while often remaining in self-denial over their own involvement...
...This is a story about how we could have very easily gone the other way...
Vol. 68 • March 2004 • No. 3
