Warmonger Blues
In Errol Morris' The Fog of War Robert McNamara, the former US defense secretary, examines his Vietnam conscience. But with how much probity, asks J. Hoberman. Plus Morris talks to Paul Cronin
In their meetings last winter, the various US critics' conclaves saw more than a few votes for Best Actor cast in favour of an elderly neophyte. Untried but scarcely unknown, former US secretary of defense Robert Strange McNamara makes an indelible impression as the star and subject of Errol Morris' highly praised documentary portrait The Fog of War.
Morris is the great people-collector of the American documentary and in this case he landed a whopper. Unlike Eugene Jarecki's The Trials of Henry Kissinger, The Fog of War is not a brief against its subject. The prime architect of the Vietnam War does not stand accused - nor does he come across, as Kissinger did, as an amoral prevaricator. Rather, McNamara offers us his recollections within the elegant frame of Morris' movie, which is subtitled Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara.
The Fog of War draws on McNamara's 1995 memoir In Retrospect . Culled from over 20 hours of interviews, annotated with archival footage and declassified White House tapes, scored to Philip Glass' now axiomatic angst-drone, the movie allows the still-formidable octogenarian to reveal what he was taught by the Cuban missile crisis ("We came that close - that close! - to war") and to detail his lesser-known experiences as contributor to the World War II firebombing of Japan, and later as pioneer of the automobile seat belt.
Once upon a time McNamara personified the military industrial complex. A stellar technocrat and brilliant efficiency expert, this so-called walking IBM machine went from running the giant Ford motor company (the first non-family member to do so) to administering the even more colossal US Defense Department (where he was similarly credited with putting the Pentagon under civilian control). The young McNamara was the most iconic of Kennedy's New Frontiersmen. His bulldog look - slicked-back hair, rimless glasses - and arrogant pugnacity made him a star.
Four decades before Donald Rumsfeld, McNamara pioneered his successor's steely smile and jaunty certitude, which is only one reason why The Fog of War is almost ridiculously relevant. Indeed, opening as it did in many American cities on the same weekend as The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King , Morris' movie might have been subtitled 'Robert McNamara and the Ring of Power' - particularly as its wrinkled and bony subject appears as a sort of animated, Gollumised husk.
Although McNamara was clearly and profoundly corrupted by power, he remains the only senior American official ever to have admitted to an error under the coercion of his own conscience alone. Commenting on the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961, culture critic Harold Rosenberg remarked that, in an ontological sense, the accused man in the dock is never the same individual who committed the crime. Is The Fog of War a mea culpa ? And if so, whose? Is it McNamara's apology or is it Morris' apology for McNamara?
There can be no doubt that McNamara is pleased with the movie. His self-congratulatory maxims ("empathise with your enemy"; "in order to do good, you have to be willing to do evil"; "maximise efficiency") - bromides seemingly cribbed from Von Clausewitz, Machiavelli and the Ford managers' guidebook - are seemingly taken seriously. And since The Fog of War began screening in the US late last summer, the former secretary has occasionally toured with it in a promotional capacity. An appearance with Morris at Berkeley - McNamara's alma mater as well as Morris' - received extensive coverage in the New York Times : "Under the glare of bright lights, Mr. McNamara, 87, faced an audience of graying hippies, men with Vietnam draft lottery numbers still imprinted in their minds and an assortment of 1960's radicals who had devoted the better part of their youths to opposing him."
Morris may have been among those young radicals, but, distressingly, he generally allows McNamara to put his own spin on the Vietnam War. Following a line advanced by Oliver Stone among others, McNamara suggests that Kennedy was waiting until after the 1964 election to disengage from South Vietnam and blames Lyndon Johnson for the debacle. But Johnson's White House tapes - which is to say, the phone calls he bugged for posterity which were released in 1997 - tell a different story. In one of the first, made six months after Johnson became president, McNamara invokes the verdict of history in warning his new boss that the US can't allow itself to be "pushed out of Vietnam." That summer the exaggerated and bungled Gulf of Tonkin 'incident', which The Fog of War acknowledges without pressing McNamara on his long years of dissembling about it, served to stampede Congress into supporting Johnson's policy.
Not only a longtime critical darling but, thanks to his MacArthur fellowship, a certified genius - the philosopher-king of American documentary film-making - Morris more or less invented the ironic documentary 25 years ago with Gates of Heaven . His 1988 'found' noir The Thin Blue Line is a genuine masterpiece - one of the great American movies of the past several decades - but since then his work has been characterised by a snide yet pompous amalgam of tabloid sensationalism and lofty detachment. "No one does 'existential dread' as well as Philip Glass," Morris was quoted as saying in smug defence of The Fog of War . "And this is a movie filled with existential dread." But whose? Morris' feelings are nowhere apparent and McNamara shows not the slightest fear or trembling.
Rather than dread, The Fog of War is suffused with moral equivocation. Or, perhaps the existential dread Morris evokes is akin to that experienced by Hannah Arendt in the face of Eichmann's "banality". Still, I would argue that The Fog of War is important - as well as self-important. But it helps to know the history of the period.
Within months of his landslide 1964 election Johnson was under pressure from McNamara and National Security advisor McGeorge Bundy, another Kennedy holdover, to escalate American involvement in Vietnam. "Both of us are pretty well convinced that our current policy can lead only to disastrous defeat," Bundy warned Johnson in a 27 January 1965 memo. When, ten days later, the Viet Cong attacked a US base - leaving eight Americans dead, one hundred wounded and ten aircraft destroyed - Bundy reiterated that the prospect of "inevitable" defeat demanded "sustained reprisal" and McNamara wanted it understood that there would be "unlimited appropriation available for the financing of aid to Vietnam." This aid, which began in early March, included massive B-52 raids on military targets in North Vietnam, complete with carpet-bombing and napalm - an operation named Rolling Thunder that lasted for three-and-a-half years, right through the 1968 election.
The very lessons of empathy and restraint McNamara purports to have learned at Kennedy's side, eyeball-to-eyeball with Nikita Khrushchev over the Cuban missiles, seem to have been utterly forgotten a few years later. For, despite misgivings about another land war in Asia, McNamara was also committed to escalating the war on the ground - repeatedly informing Johnson that his only option was to expand American involvement in Indochina. There were 23,000 American soldiers in Vietnam at the end of 1964. A year later the number was 184,000. When Johnson left office in January 1969 American forces totalled well over half a million: this was McNamara's War, although by that time McNamara himself had retired from the field, getting himself appointed to head the World Bank.
For Americans, Vietnam is the war that remains to be resolved. Senator John Kerry, currently the leading Democratic challenger to George W. Bush, established his integrity as a decorated and wounded Vietnam veteran who became an outspoken - and consequently vilified - opponent of the war. Bush, on the other hand, used his family privilege to secure alternative service in the National Guard and then dodged even that when it proved inconvenient. McNamara's evasive behaviour was closer to Bush's than Kerry's. His resignation was not a demonstration of disaffection.
In 1967 Johnson realised that his efficiency expert had underestimated the war's cost by some $11 billion. Operation Rolling Thunder alone consumed over a billion dollars in 1966 - nearly ten dollars paid for each dollar of damage inflicted. Was McNamara lying to Johnson as well as to Congress? By November 1967 the secretary appears to have concluded that the war was a lost cause and contrived to have himself replaced - in part because Johnson thought that McNamara, whose own family now opposed the war, was close to a nervous breakdown. Typically, McNamara tells Morris that, only weeks after he was replaced, LBJ also opted out in deciding not to run for re-election.
This story is not exactly told. For Morris - who, like McNamara, studied philosophy at Berkeley - the former secretary is an epistemological case study. How does this old man know what he knows? And what makes him think that it's true? Explaining how the US landed in Vietnam, McNamara not only illustrates the lesson that "We see what we want to believe", but demonstrates its implicit hubris. One may be amazed to hear McNamara abruptly launch into a critique of American unilateralism. But one may also wonder how this octogenarian powerhouse can claim ignorance of historical dynamics (the long-standing antipathy between Vietnam and China, for example) that would have been readily available to any moderately aware high-school student in 1966.
In a devastating critique of The Fog of War published in Artforum , Gary Indiana characterises Morris' method as providing the "illusion of deepening insight" while mocking the film-maker's "flair for turning humans into talking sea cucumbers obsessed with philosophical or historical matters clearly beyond their intelligence." As Indiana wrote, McNamara's "callow, self-serving evasions and stridently complacent banalities have a deep affinity with Morris's insufferable delusion that his work digs deep below the surface of things."
McNamara's bad teeth and liver spots notwithstanding, the beauty of The Fog of War is entirely skin deep. "The idea is not to listen to what people say, but to keep them talking," Morris once told me - and talk McNamara does. The movie is framed by the former secretary's assertion that all military commanders make mistakes; his sense of guilt is apparent when he compulsively broaches the subject of war crimes, albeit in regard to his former commander and eventual nemesis, air-force general Curtis LeMay. But who remembers LeMay (a key architect of Cold War America existing in popular memory, if at all, as the inspiration for George C. Scott's idiotically bellicose general in Dr. Strangelove )? And who can forget Vietnam?
McNamara concedes that mistakes were made, but when asked why he didn't speak out against the war, he takes refuge in anguish: "I am not going to say any more than I have." Pressed by Morris to elaborate his feelings on the great debacle, McNamara can only protest that, given his double bind, he'd rather be damned for not speaking his mind. As the Frodologists of the 1960s might have put it, the former secretary carries the Ring of Power to the rim of Mount Doom, but he won't throw it in. One senses his pathetic need for forgiveness, if not vindication, despite his inability to assume personal responsibility or even admit to moral failure.
No matter what your opinion of McNamara, The Fog of War is a chastening experience. More than providing an old devil with an all-too-human face, the film offers additional evidence that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. Who was ever better or brighter than Robert McNamara? Yet as the Vietnam debacle demonstrated, intelligence hardly guarantees against its own failures.
In the deepest sense, The Fog of War is about the inadequacy of human intellect. McNamara helpfully supplies the movie's title - a phrase meaning that warfare involves variables too complex for the mind to grasp. And, in portraying his subject, Morris returns the favour. His movie does not dispel the fog of war so much as illustrate it.