ON FILM: Fog of War lays bare McNamara's icy logic

By Philip Martin

LITTLE ROCK — "In order to do good you have to be willing to do evil." - Robert McNamara

The July 6 death of Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and chief architect of the Vietnam War, sent me back to a DVD of Errol Morris' 2003 Academy Award winning documentary The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S. McNamara.

It's a very good film, terrifying in some ways, as it allows us a window into a pathology every bit as alien to most of us as the Mike Tyson depicted in James Toback's Tyson (a documentary that has already opened in Northwest Arkansas and could hit Little Rock theaters soon).

While ostensibly an "in-his-own words" portrait of the former headof Ford Motor Co. who became the technocratic war manager for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson, The Fog of War is more an epistemological investigation of the limits of human understanding than it is a brief for McNamara.

Watching and listening to the chillingly collected McNamara recount the decision process that led to the escalation of the Vietnam War, it is impossible not to recall Donald Rumsfeld's observation that there are "known unknowns" and "unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know."

The Fog of War is a cautionary tale about the hubris of Great Men, and the history they commit. Facing down Morris' Interrotron - the converted teleprompter that projects a real-time image of the interviewer's face rather than a script - McNamara comes off as earnest and thoughtful, yet almost desperate in his need to control the conversation.

Though he was 86 years old when he sat for Morris' camera, he still projects an image of precocity, as though he yet feels the need to be thought of as one of the best and the brightest. (David Halberstam meant the phrase, which served as the title of his 1972 book on the Vietnam War, to be ironic. He referred to McNamara - whom he came to hate - as the "can-do man in the can-do society in the can-do era," the ultimate banal accountant of death.)

In Morris' movie, McNamara knows exactly what he means to say, and he's determined to say precisely that and not an iota more. In the first moments we watch and hear as he reflexively contends for authorship of the film - he's telling the director that, although he was apparently interrupted in midsentence by some technical glitch, there's no need to start over, that Morris can simply "fix it up some way."

That Morris chooses to begin in this way may be seen as a petty bit of journalistic revenge-taking, but it's as close to a cheap shot as the director allows himself. Itpasses quickly and the thought McNamara wants to articulate - that Morris wants to use as a keynote for the film - is people make mistakes and sometimes the price is dear. But the trick is to learn from these mistakes, to not make them over and over again.

The irony is that the undeniably brilliant McNamara, although willing to accept he has made mistakes (he won't say what they were) seems incapable of implementing his own lessons.

In an anecdotal, conversational tone that suggests frankness and belies his image as a kind of buttoned-down actuary, McNamara holds forth on his long and remarkable career, a bravura performance that takes on the form of a soliloquy only occasionally punctuated by Morris' shouted off-camera questions.

So we hear McNamara talk about the role he played in developing the seat belt while he was an executive at Ford as well as such events as the firebombing of Japanese civilians during World War II (a strategy he admits would have resulted in his being tried as a war criminal had the United States not prevailed), the Cuban missile crisis and, above all, the nightmarish farce of the Vietnam War.

It is a brilliant performance that comes right to the verge of an apology while maintaining a chilly clinical detachment from the horrors he describes. McNamara makes a very human monster, a flawed man who regrets that "in order to do good you have to be willing to do evil." He openly courts our empathy while insisting his actions were rational and morally defensible. He's unwilling to accept responsibility for the consequences of the policies he designed and implemented. Nor will he discuss his possible feelings of guilt.

Morris intercuts the interview with archival footage of bombs falling, period photographs and sound bites from recently declassified White House tapes. Yet unlike some of his previous work, Morris resists the impulse to stage any re-enactments or use the supplemental material to make ironic comments on McNamara's spiel. Philip Glass' insistent, mournful score gnaws away in the background, a throbbing conscience.

Morris gives the old man a chance to say what he can, and what McNamara says is inadequate to repair so much as his reputation, much less our barely scabbed-over wounds.

But graceful, elegiac The Fog of War fixes McNamara in our collective imagination as a tragic hero, a victim of his imperfect comprehension of the world, who failed at a critical time to recognize his own frailties and failings. He did what he could, but failed to understand he was only human.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

MovieStyle, Pages 35, 40 on 07/24/2009

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