The Fog of War

Synopsis: Robert McNamara, was the Secretary of Defence for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson from 1961 to 1968. During this time he was a valued adviser on the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War. Eighty-five years old when this film was made, McNamara reflects on the past by identifying a list of eleven lessons from his life. His final lesson, you can’t change human nature, underpins his philosophy. He takes advantage of the benefits of hindsight to recount his story.

Robert McNamara is a fine looking older man with strong views and a desire to be heard, which makes him a perfect subject for a feature length documentary. Don’t expect the usual array of friends, associates and enemies; McNamara is the star, and fortunately he has enough fascinating information to warrant centre stage. Archival footage reveals a younger McNamara, underlining just what a powerful figure he was in his own right. Director Errol Morris breaks with recent documentary convention in that McNamara talks straight to camera, a device that allows the audience to look into the eyes of a man who has had his share of critics and admits to making plenty of mistakes.

The title refers to the way in which the mechanics of war are so complex, that it is beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Listening to McNamara via taped phone conversations with both Kennedy and Johnson, the extent of these variables soon becomes apparent. Hard choices were made, and many lives lost as a result. McNamara had long been involved in America’s military culture – he had been part of the unit under General Curtis Le May in WW2, before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that was responsible for close to seventy towns and cities across Japan being bombed, killing off fifty percent of the population of these ‘targets’.

McNamara himself raises the question; what makes the slaughter of civilians immoral if you lose, and acceptable if you win? If the Americans had lost in WW2 against the Japanese, he points out that he and Le May would most likely have been considered war criminals.

It is clear that McNamara struggles with some of the choices he had to make in his role as adviser. He provides us with a very revealing insight into one of the reasons why the Cuban Missile crisis was averted. He refers to another of his lessons; that one needs to empathise with the enemy. In the Cuban situation the American Government had some idea of how Kruschev might respond. However when it came to Vietnam, they had no idea that the Vietnamese were fighting for their independence and were willing to sacrifice everything in that fight. The two sides were fighting completely different wars. There is much to learn from the past in relationship to what is going on in the present, and this film has at least eleven lessons that should not be ignored.

 

 

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