April 2005 Newsletter
The Perils of Personal Redemption: Assessing Errol Morris’s The Fog of War
By Mark Philip Bradley
Whether confronted with the earnest somnolence of a Ken Burns PBS special or
the in-your-face reductionism of Michael Moore’s latest offering, historians,
myself included, are often prickly about the genre of the historical documentary.
Painfully aware that such films attract a far larger public than their own work
ever will, the very reach of the documentary audience worries the conscience
of the historian. Among their common complaints: “they didn’t
get the facts quite right,” “the visual footage substitutes for
sustained analysis,” or “the approach is too shallow.” Errol
Morris’s The Fog of War has proved to be something of an exception.
There has certainly been some criticism, generally of the “Morris didn’t
push McNamara enough” variety, but in the main the film has received a
polite and sometimes quite favorable reception from the discipline. Those responses
puzzle me, not so much because Morris’s film doesn’t succeed on
its own limited terms. It largely does, often powerfully illustrating the complexities
of McNamara’s efforts to come to terms with his past. But as history The
Fog of War ultimately fails to place the wars for Vietnam and McNamara’s
part in them in the broader sweep of post-1945 American and international history.
The American war in Vietnam in the 1960s has been at the center of McNamara’s
almost decade-long redemptive quest. It began with the mea culpas of
his 1995 In Retrospect—“we were wrong, terribly wrong”—and
was followed up in Argument without End (1999), which was based on
McNamara’s efforts to bring American and Vietnamese policymakers together
in Hanoi to explore what he termed the “missed opportunities” on
both sides. Neither project had the impact McNamara intended. In Retrospect
was greeted with hostility from many observers, especially Vietnam war
veterans, who asked why McNamara did not voice his doubts when they might have
made a difference: when he was still at the center of Vietnam decision making
or immediately after he left the Johnson administration. The premises of the
Hanoi oral history undertaking brought a sharp and revealing critique from the
Vietnamese participants in it. Perhaps there were missed opportunities on the
American side, they claimed, but not for the Vietnamese. If there were lessons
to be learned they were largely in the inability of Cold War U.S. policy makers
to recognize the decolonizing wave in the Third World, of which the Vietnamese
struggle for independence was one instantiation.
The failure of these projects clearly shapes McNamara’s presentation of
the role he played in America’s Vietnam policy in Fog of War,
and Morris casts an only partially critical gaze on that presentation. McNamara
takes on the “why didn’t he say so earlier” critique by foregrounding
the doubts he raised about Vietnam as secretary of defense. Here Morris largely
plays along, juxtaposing selected taped conversations in which McNamara voices
his hesitations to Kennedy and Johnson with McNamara’s more recent revisionism.
What goes missing in both cases, of course, is McNamara’s simultaneous
support for the rigorous prosecution of the war. If he voiced doubts at particular
moments, much of his private and almost all of his public statements were considerably
more hawkish.
The conceit of “lessons” that frames the film, though a good fit
for illuminating McNamara’s relentless didacticism, might also be viewed
as an extended apologia, one which Morris does little to interrogate critically.
In the lessons McNamara articulates—whether centered on the perils of
World War II strategic bombing, the Cuban missile crisis, his quest for passenger
safety at Ford Motor Company or the escalation of the war in Vietnam—he
seeks to convey his own extraordinary Olympian detachment, common decency and
public-spirited good sense. Tellingly, McNamara uses General Curtis LeMay as
his foil in this endeavor. LeMay, McNamara tells us, may have enthusiastically
directed the strategic bombing of Japan with its massive and unnecessary loss
of life or urged the use of nuclear weapons in Cuba and Vietnam despite the
potential for an atomic apocalypse. But not McNamara. Indeed, the unspoken implication
is that major policy debates in the United States revolved around the clash
between LeMay’s barbaric aggression and the statesman-like humanity of
McNamara. We can all be glad that that McNamara usually had the upper hand (and
we should be indebted to him for his efforts). The main lines of American diplomacy,
of course, did not hover around this imagined LeMay/McNamara axis, and choosing
LeMay as his alter ego is a bit like saying “well, compared to Genghis
Khan’s reign my watch looks pretty good.” Indeed it does, but what
does that really tell us? Morris obliges McNamara by never even hinting at these
contradictions.
LeMay aside, there is an oddly insular and sometimes distorted quality to McNamara’s
telling of the cases that inform his lessons of war. For example, his rendition
of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents does make it clear that they were considerably
more ambiguous than they were made out to be by U.S. policymakers, himself included,
at the time. Echoing the careful conclusions of Edwin E. Moïse’s
close study of the incidents in Tonkin Gulf and the Escalation of the Vietnam
War (1996), he admits that the second incident probably didn’t happen.
“Belief and seeing,” McNamara intones, “are both often wrong.”
And yet he makes no mention of the escalating clandestine American war in North
Vietnam itself and how it might have precipitated the first Vietnamese attack.
In McNamara’s telling there is no place for real American culpability,
only for the somewhat murky confusion of the fog of war.
There is also the matter of the sheer number of lessons themselves—there
are eleven altogether (with an even more elaborate, and often confusing, parsing
of them in the special features section of the DVD version of the film)—and
their ultimate utility. Even in the most thoughtful reaches of the Bush administration,
an admittedly slender territory, it is hard to imagine Colin Powell or Condoleezza
Rice keeping all of them straight. As Gary Trudeau might write: “Damn,
what was number 9. CONDI!?” “It’s OK Mr. President, I can’t
always remember either.” More seriously, if we strip the United States
of culpability for the Gulf of Tonkin incident and blame the fog of war, how
can its lessons help us understand, for instance, the current administration’s
willful misreading of the intelligence on Saddam Hussein’s weapons of
mass destruction or the distressing parallels between the congressional blank
check that followed the Gulf of Tonkin incident and the recent show of support
for the use of force against Iraq in Congress?
While Morris leaves the problematic nature of McNamara’s lessons largely
unexamined, he is considerably stronger in shaping a deft psychological portrait
of the conflictual desires that appear to have shaped McNamara’s past
actions and his more recent drive for redemption. One the one hand, McNamara’s
imperiousness, his self-regard and the sureness of his wearying insistence that
he had and has the right answers to the big questions comes across very sharply
and help us recall that many of McNamara’s contemporaries saw him as arrogant.
In the sleek and arresting use of visual imagery that characterizes the film,
Morris rapidly (almost eye-poppingly) projects the largely pejorative adjectives
the popular press used to describe McNamara’s meteoric rise to power in
Washington. In addition, McNamara’s retrospective voiceover details his
service to Ford and in Washington in ways that at times support the critiques
of his contemporary critics to a surprising degree.
But Morris also shows a less familiar side of McNamara and reveals insecurities
that seem to lie just beneath the surface. Perhaps the most striking example
of these, which leaves the viewer torn between empathy and scorn, is displayed
when McNamara describes his role in the decision of where to bury President
Kennedy. His clear regard and even love for Kennedy comes across in quite moving
ways. Fighting back tears, he narrates how he came to choose Kennedy’s
burial site at Arlington National Cemetery. And yet there is an air of self-importance
here, as McNamara is determined to let his listeners know that of all the Kennedy
retainers it was he that the president’s widow turned to in carrying out
this symbolically fraught task. McNamara also emphasizes repeatedly that the
site he selected was the “most beautiful” one at Arlington. If the
audience has any doubt, he marshals the testimony of experts: the park ranger
in charge of the cemetery agreed with him, as did Bobby Kennedy, who later told
McNamara his brother had remarked on the beauty of the spot in one of his visits
to the cemetery. In highlighting this brief story, Morris displays the ways
in McNamara unconsciously reveals many of the essential contradictions of his
personality. On the one hand, he conveys McNamara’s boundless capacity
for loyalty and his deep admiration for the presidents whom he served; on the
other, he shows McNamara’s endless craving for recognition and Svengali-like
insistence on his ability to make the right choices. But he also reveals the
more unexpected and endearing fragility underlying McNamara’s sense of
himself and his public displays of confidence. One cannot help but think, couldn’t
the site he selected for the burial have simply been beautiful? Did his choice
really require the validation of experts?
Morris, however, does not always appear to know what to do with this nuanced
portrait of McNamara and how it might help us understand the Vietnam
War and McNamara’s place in it. The trope of redemption reappears
in the final frame of the film and hovers over it. In a familiar and tired cinematic
convention, we are portentously told that “Robert S. McNamara served as
president of the World Bank from 1968 to 1981. Since his retirement, he has
continued to work on problems of poverty, world health and economic development.”
This ennobling coda conceals more than it reveals. Under McNamara’s leadership,
the bank and its place in America’s larger modernizing project in the
non-Western world have been the subject of sustained and persuasive critical
scholarship that unpacks the ways in which the failed high modernist schemes
of American development experts paralleled the political and military dimensions
of American Cold War diplomacy toward the Third World. (See, for example, Nils
Gilman’s Mandarins of the Future [2004]). In many ways, McNamara’s
tenure at the bank was less an occasion for his redemption than a continuation
by other means and on other fronts of the policies that brought American defeat
in Vietnam and prompted the suffering of millions of Vietnamese civilians on
all sides of the conflict.
This larger context matters, not only for understanding the problematic nature
of McNamara’s lesson-driven vision of the past, but more important, for
contextualizing its larger significance. In the end, the Vietnam War was not,
as his critics argued during the war, McNamara’s war. If personality and
agency are a necessary part of assessing the war and McNamara’s culpability
in it, so too are the more capacious structural frames of state and society
in Cold War America. McNamara was perhaps an über representative of the
broader social and intellectual currents circulating in and shaping the contours
of post-1945 America. In critical ways his approach to the world reflects the
larger patterns of the culture of manliness so eloquently captured in Robert
D. Dean’s Imperial Brotherhood (2001). Moreover, McNamara was
both a product and an agent of the exceptionalist can-do attitude that, as Dan
Rodgers argues in Atlantic Crossings (2000), conditioned the paradoxically
parochial globalism of Cold War America.
The Fog of War, as they say, doesn’t go there. Perhaps it would
be asking too much of a film produced in a climate in which the cultural politics
of the Vietnam War and its legacies remain highly unstable. And by contrast
to the frustratingly one-dimensional and quasi-utopian narratives that govern
popular representations of World War II, like the “Boys of Pointe du Hoc”
and the “Greatest Generation,” Morris’s film does convey a
more measured understanding of McNamara and the world he confronted. But if
it captures aspects of the perils of McNamara’s struggle for redemption,
The Fog of War only gets us part of the way toward apprehending the
larger processes that brought McNamara and American society to war in Vietnam
and the place of the war in the domestic and international history of the last
half-century.
Mark Philip Bradley is associate professor of history at Northwestern University
and author of Imagining Vietnam and America: The Making of Postcolonial
Vietnam, 1919-1950 (2000). He is currently working on a global history
of human rights politics in the twentieth century and, with Robert Brigham,
a history of the American war in Vietnam.
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