Errol Morris: After you left the Johnson
Administration, why didn't you speak out against the Vietnam War?
Robert McNamara: I'm not going to say any more than
I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me in
trouble.... A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand
me. A lot of people think I'm a son of a bitch.
Morris: Do you feel in any way responsible for the
war? Do you feel guilty?
McNamara: I don't want to
go any further with this discussion.
Errol Morris's new film, The Fog of War, a documentary
about the career and character of Robert McNamara, fascinates on
many levels. It is a study of a man in selective states of denial, a
man who one minute calls himself a "war criminal"--though not for
the usual reasons--and the next compares himself to a Quaker who
burns himself to death protesting the very war that he was planning
and directing. Morris, whose patented invention, the Interrotron,
turns a merciless camera's eye on its topic by all but forcing his
subject to look straight on at the camera at all times, told me he
chose McNamara as a subject for this innovative documentary because
"more than anyone else, he embodies the twentieth century." And what
a horrible century it was.
McNamara places his first memory as Armistice Day, 1918, when he
was just 2. It's hard to know whether to believe him, however,
because he is both a pathological liar and a comically pathetic
braggart. During the course of The Fog of War, we hear the
85-year-old man bragging about his grades in grammar school, his Phi
Beta Kappa standing in college, his brilliant record in graduate
school and his enormous salary as president of the Ford Motor
Company. To his credit, McNamara does not blanch from the record
when Morris confronts him with unearthed documents relating to his
role in Curtis LeMay's firebombing campaign against Japan. He says:
"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war
criminals.... He and, I'd say, I were behaving as war criminals."
But much of McNamara's testimony to Morris consists of legalistic
rationalizations and whitewashing of history--and while Morris asks
the right questions, he too frequently lets McNamara elide and abuse
the truth. For instance, McNamara gives every impression in this
interview of having advised John Kennedy on how to save the world
during the Cuban missile crisis. But in fact, he frequently changed
his mind throughout the crisis, arguing against the (secret) missile
trade that Kennedy eventually made to end the crisis peacefully. He
even advocated a plan calling for 500 daily conventional bombing
sorties of the Soviet missile sites and air bases for seven days,
followed by an invasion of Cuba. He did so despite the fact that, as
he admitted in the meetings of Kennedy's ExComm, "a missile is a
missile. It makes no great difference whether you are killed by a
missile fired from the Soviet Union or from Cuba." To McNamara, who
consistently resisted Kennedy's arguments for compromise, this
fateful step in which millions would likely die was necessary not
because the missiles represented a "military problem" but rather
because they were "a domestic political problem" owing to the
President's recklessly tough talk about Cuba.
The Vietnam dissimulations are even more egregious and too
numerous to delineate here, but Morris views these, too, almost
uncritically. After the screening of the film, he explained, in
response to my question about his treatment of the history, that
although he had been a protester against the war and had not changed
his position on it, he had changed his position on Robert McNamara.
He argued that the popular view of a "vacillatory Johnson and
advisers like McNamara breathing down his neck" for war was false.
Well, Morris is a brilliant filmmaker, but he is not a historian.
Having spent eleven years working on a doctoral dissertation and
forthcoming book devoted to these matters--When Presidents Lie:
Deception and Its Consequences--I'd say the old man has sold him
the same bill of goods he was handing out at Georgetown dinner
parties thirty-five years ago, when he would break down in tears
over the agony his sensitive soul endured at the thought of all that
useless death and destruction in Southeast Asia. (McNamara helpfully
points out that the 2 million Vietnamese killed in the war would be
equivalent to 27 million Americans, controlling for population
differences.) But Johnson did vacillate, over and over, before
committing himself and the nation to war. The great tragedy of his
career is that he saw it all coming and did it anyway. Given the awe
in which Johnson held Kennedy's brilliant Defense Secretary--perhaps
the most admired man in America following the assassination--nobody
could have proven more influential in stopping the war than the man
who now says he identified with a guy who set himself on fire to try
to stop it. Instead he continually argued for escalation despite
admitting that at no time during the conflict did he have anything
like a coherent plan for victory. His only explanation: "We were in
the cold war and this was a cold war activity."
Substitute the word "terrorism" for "communism" and you have your
contemporary historical tragedy made to order. The filmmaker Robert
Greenwald has put together an infuriating string of interviews with
former intelligence agents and national security professionals in
which it becomes clear that the Bush Administration is the Johnson
Administration without the self-doubt. (The film, Uncovered: The
Whole Truth About the Iraq War, can be ordered from MoveOn.org.)
Administration war planners purposely ignore the intelligence that
does not fit their preconceived notions and deliberately mislead the
nation--and possibly themselves--about their ability to bomb hostile
populations into Jeffersonian democracy. Like McNamara and Johnson,
they are destroying two countries at once: theirs and ours. Look for
Paul Wolfowitz, twenty years from now, to tell us, tearfully, that
he never really thought it was such a hot idea in the first place.