ELEVEN LESSONS FROM THE LIFE OF ROBERT S. McNAMARA
**** (out of ****)
Featuring interviews with Robert McNamara
Directed by Errol Morris
2003
95 min PG13
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2003
1) Empathize with your enemy.
2) Rationality will not save us.
3) There’s something beyond one’s self.
4) Maximize efficiency.
5) Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
6) Get the data.
7) Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
8) Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
9) In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
10) Never say never.
11) You can’t change human nature.
—from “The Fog of War”
My father has a saying: “the only thing you can learn from history is that people don’t learn anything from history.” “The Fog of War,” the new documentary from Errol Morris (“The Thin Blue Line,” “A Brief History of Time”), is about an old man trying to impart what he has learned to a younger generation. The old man just happens to be one Robert S. McNamara, the Secretary of Defense for John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, a major Cold War player, a World War II veteran, once the presidents of both Ford Motor Company and the World Bank, instrumental in the firebombing of Japan, and in part responsible for the American presence in Vietnam.
Will most of what he has to teach the younger generation stick? Probably not. Next to me at the advanced screening there was a couple that seemed to be snickering more than it ought. The two of them giggled at the sight of punch cards and must have thought the film was about a cunning, ironic youngster named Errol Morris pulling a fast one over a decrepit, ridiculous member of the stodgy old guard. Is that what “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara” is about? Not at all. But I think McNamara knows that his warnings and advice will probably not be heeded. That, after all, is Rule #11: you can’t change human nature.
Morris’ film is essentially a long interview with McNamara, divided into eleven lessons, and spliced with news footage from the times in question, as well as any other appropriate images Morris can get his hands on. Morris is said to have gathered twenty hours of chatting with McNamara and has pared it down to ninety minutes. We get the sense that many of his images are an attempt to condense words of McNamara’s that were cut from the film for the sake of time. At 85, McNamara is still amazingly spry, verbally agile, and even witty. He quips about the problems his strange middle name caused during the courtship of his wife. He claims to remember things from when he was only two-years-old, and he remembers a lot more from the 1960s.
Morris, whose voice pops up from off-camera every now and then, has employed a device known as the Interrotron for his interviews. The machine functions like a teleprompter, which allows newscasters to read text and look into the lens of a camera at the exact same moment. But, instead of words, the Interrotron projects a live-video feed of Morris’ face, so that his subject feels as if he or she is talking only to Morris while looking directly into the camera. The device’s name was coined by Morris’ wife, who “liked the name because it combined two important concepts—terror and interview” (FLM Magazine, Winter 2004). The result is the uncanny feeling that McNamara is talking directly to us, and what he says is utterly fascinating. I can’t stress the “old teaching the young” metaphor enough. Most interviews we see, on television for instance, are scripted and rehearsed. Yet here McNamara is remarkably candid, like a great uncle we don’t see very often, who’s cornered us at some dull family gathering to impart all his wisdom and confess his mistakes.
Before speaking at length about Vietnam and the Cold War, McNamara’s moral algebra is explained: you kill as many of the enemy while suffering as few US losses as humanly possible. To this end, from World War II through the LBJ administration, McNamara applies a cold calculation that would make John Forbes Nash proud. In one of the movie’s many scary sequences, Japanese cities that were decimated are compared to American cities of comparable size, so that we can grasp how much devastation is caused. The destruction of 51% of Tokyo is comparable, if memory serves, to the obliteration of 51% of New York. Yet these statistics were not made after the fact, years later, but by McNamara and General Curtis LeMay themselves, before the bombing even began. (Morris retouches images to show bombers dropping numbers.) “If we had lost the war,” McNamara says, “we would have been tried as war criminals.” Men like LeMay and all the LeMays through history inspired that scene in Malick’s “The Thin Red Line” in which a colonel wants to know, mathematically, how many men a captain is willing to let die in order to gain a hill.
Then comes the Cold War—Jesus, what a mess. I can’t do “The Fog of War” justice in describing the Cold War atmosphere it creates, except to say that generals like LeMay were actually convinced of and counseling JFK that the Commies were going to test their nukes on the far side of the Moon. Yeah, the Moon in space. Yet the movie is not cynical. We may feel divorced and detached from history, and we may sometimes feel that events are not decided by individuals but by monstrous military-industrial complexes and other invisible hands. But when it came down to crucial moments, the personalities of men like JFK, Castro, and Krushchev really did decide history. McNamara tells a story about two messages that came from the Russians during the Cuban Missile Crisis within minutes of each other. One was soft. One was belligerent. McNamara urged Kennedy to respond to the softer one, while the hawks urged a belligerent response to the belligerent message. Kennedy took McNamara’s advice and the result was, well, I’m alive to write this today. “We were this close,” McNamara said, and we can’t see any space between the two fingers he holds up to make his point. It was just luck.
Page two of "The Fog of War." Back to home.