Before Michael Moore (“Bowling for Columbine”) there was Errol Morris, a filmmaker who has made a career of producing documentaries about some of the most compelling people around. His critically acclaimed 1988 film, “The Thin Blue Line,” about falsely convicted killer Randall Adams, resulted in his subject being freed from death row.
And before Donald Rumsfeld there was Robert S. McNamara, now 87, who was, as secretary of defense during the Vietnam War, the most reviled man in America. Thus, when “The Fog of War,” Morris’s new documentary about the life, career and ideas of McNamara, culled from 23 hours of interviews, was released last Friday, it was time to go find out what anecdotes and commentary the once reviled, but now indisputably one of the most pivotal personages of the 20th century, had to say about himself.
Morris, who stays off-screen, employed the so-called Interrotrom technique, a modified teleprompter whereby the subject addresses the camera directly, instead of looking to the side at his interviewer, seeming to speak to us eye to eye, a touch scary when you notice the intensity in McNamara’s face and gestures — the face and gestures of a man who knows that at one time in his life he wielded, and relentlessly employed, so much power.
Even before Vietnam, McNamara was a war planner, “part of the mechanism,” as he calls it, that launched extensive firebombing runs over 67 cities in Japan in 1945, resulting in the killing of 100,000 people in one single night. And it all happened before the atomic bombs were dropped. “We burned to death 100,000 people,” McNamara intones. He adds, interestingly enough, that Curtis LeMay, the air force general at the time, told him that if the United States had lost the war, they would both have been prosecuted as war criminals. Even more interestingly, McNamara does not follow up on that by saying that he disagreed with the notion.
The most telling part of this 107-minute documentary deals with McNamara’s years as secretary of defense under President Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis and under President Johnson during those most divisive years in modern American history, the Vietnam War, which large segments of Americans opposed, including, ironically, McNamara’s own family.
Morris knows how to produce a cerebral film that in the hands of a less accomplished documentarian could easily have turned into a snoozer. He does it by interposing his subject’s remarks with archival footage and bringing visual metaphors to life on the screen, whose power of insinuation is guaranteed to knock you off your feet — along with that pocket flashlight and steno notebook on your lap where you’re sitting in a dark theater. The domino theory, where all those darn dominoes were supposed to fall in Southeast Asia the moment American troops left Vietnam? It’s there on the screen, editorialized without a word being uttered either by the former secretary of defense or a voiceover.
Now, in the cold light of hindsight, McNamara tells us that the policies he and his cohorts pursued in Vietnam, to go after those wily peasants, were ill-conceived, ill-informed, ill-fated and, as he put it, lacked “proportionality.”
Yet Morris, an interviewer who is known never to let up on probing his subject’s inward preoccupations, lets McNamara off the hook by not asking him about his own feelings of guilt, given his admission that “mistakes were made.” Perhaps the most riveting moment in the film is when McNamara muses over the unnecessary killing of those 100,000 Japanese in 1945 that prompted Gen. LeMay to suggest that had America lost the war, he and others, along with McNamara himself, would likely have been tried as war criminals: “What makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?”
Oh, yes, that old trusted canon about how history is written by the victors. But more significantly, “The Fog of War,” along with McNamara’s reflections in it, can be seen, at a seminal level of relating to this inspired documentary, as an eloquent statement about the political, philosophical and cultural roots of the inhuman, about the paradox of how wanton violence, even barbarism, can spring in some intimate way from the very core of humanistic civilization. We should care, for we all become complicit in that which leaves indifferent.
