Flak Magazine: Review of The Fog of War, 01.07.04

In 1995, Robert McNamara, secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and an architect of the Vietnam War, published "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam." Admitting that the war was "wrong, terribly wrong," McNamara's 414-page mea culpa argued that while the war's intentions were correct, it was executed poorly and, as a result, was doomed almost from the start.

The book ignited a firestorm of debate — after all, during the 1960s McNamara was one of the most reviled men in America, so much so that protesters tried to burn down his Aspen lodge — and it struck many readers as an insufficient apology for a war that caused almost 4 million deaths.

Eight years later, McNamara has reappeared as the subject of Errol Morris's latest documentary, The Fog of War. Morris, whose previous work includes The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death and those confession-style Mac ads, is legendary for subtly teasing out complex moral questions from his often ethically ambiguous interviewees, all the while giving them just enough rope to hang themselves.

So it would seem that McNamara would be an excellent subject for a Morris documentary; after all, for all his remorse, McNamara has also spent the last several decades skillfully dancing around history's wrath, pre-empting criticism by constantly reiterating just how complex a time Vietnam was, and by extension how complex a character he is. But instead of grilling McNamara, Morris, sadly, gives him a pass. In fact, The Fog of War plays so much into McNamara's self-narrative that it should have just been called In Retrospect: The Movie.

Those who have read "In Retrospect" will be bored, and frustrated, by the extent to which Morris allows McNamara to simply repeat the mantra trotted out in his book. No one else is interviewed; instead, Morris structures the film tightly around McNamara's 11 "lessons" about public service (No. 1: "Empathize with your enemy"). While Morris does dig up some interesting new material about the firebombing campaign against Japan in World War II (which McNamara helped plan), the film's central focus, Vietnam, is largely seen through McNamara's eyes.

Maddeningly, Morris never questions McNamara's worldview — namely, that great men are necessarily complex men, that just war requires unjust means and that Vietnam, for all its horrors, cannot be judged in hindsight. All these are views explicated by "In Retrospect" (and ethicists since the founding of their field), so it's a wonder why Morris thought they would be good grounds to retread. What's more, Morris allows McNamara to further his rather specious claim that by 1965 he had become personally opposed to the war and that, while at once merely a technocrat doing Johnson's bidding, he also argued vociferously for the war's end (how he did so, and when, is never explained). The dissonance between McNamara's view of himself and that of millions of anti-war activists during the 1960s is never parsed.

Some — Samantha Power in the New York Times, for example — have praised McNamara for his willingness to admit his faults; she writes, "he had a lot to lose by awakening the ghosts of Vietnam. By choosing to excavate the past, he has exposed himself to ridicule, resuscitated his lowest moments in public life and let an emotional genie out of the bottle." But McNamara is smarter than that. Indeed, what becomes obvious in the course of The Fog of War is how the film fits into McNamara's overarching strategy of personal redemption — exposing himself to criticism defuses that very criticism, and while it will never gain him sainthood, it will gain him history's next-best accolade: complexity.

At the same time, there's also a certain pathetic quality to McNamara's performance, an eagerness to impress that may say more about his character than any of his self-abnegating lessons. He attended Berkeley, he says, only because his family didn't have the money to send him to Stanford. And though he takes pride in the fact that he conditioned his Pentagon service on being exempt from the "Washington social scene," that doesn't stop him from not-so-subtly name-dropping his "good friend Katie Graham," the late Washington Post publisher and for decades the unchallenged doyenne of that scene.

The message of the movie — and of McNamara's self-narrative — is that war is too complex and awful for humans to comprehend, but that the horrid evil often perpetrated by good people (such as McNamara himself) during conflict must be weighed against their ultimate intentions. It's a tough question, but hardly original. The bigger question, though, and the one Morris painfully ignores, is the tipping point: At what point do good intentions cause so much evil that they cease being good? Do they ever? Or do people like McNamara, simply by claiming that they meant well, get exempted from criticism? It's an interesting and important question, but one that Morris, too enamored with the character and personality of McNamara, seems unwilling to ask.

— Clay Risen (clay@flakmag.com)