April 2005 Newsletter

Mr. Secretary: A Review of Errol Morris’s The Fog of War

By Moss Roberts and Marilyn B. Young, New York University

“Never answer the question that was asked of you. Answer the question that you wish had been asked of you. It’s a good rule.” --Robert S. McNamara

Errol Morris’s documentary The Fog of War is organized around eleven lessons that Robert Strange McNamara derived from his experiences as a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force in World War II and as secretary of defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. In this review, we test some of these lessons by examining what McNamara said and did then and what he thinks now.

“I’ve been part of wars….”

Morris’s main interest is the Vietnam War, and the introductory frames of the film show the young McNamara standing and pointing didactically at a map of Vietnam with his pointer. He is every inch the war bureaucrat, suited, as always, in what Baudelaire calls “the necessary garb of our suffering age, which wears the symbol of perpetual mourning on its thin black shoulders.” The scene shifts from the map lesson to the operational theatre, in this case sailors at sea tending their weapons. The next logical image, showing the sailors’ target, does not follow; instead, Morris begins the film proper with his main subject, now in his mid-eighties, squarely facing the camera, his long fingers admonishing Morris–and the viewer--with great energy. He speaks in a tone that both pleads for understanding and exerts authority. “Any military commander, if he is honest with himself, will admit he has made mistakes in the application of military power,” he says. “He’s killed people . . . unnecessarily, hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands, even 100,000 [he is thinking of the firebombing of Tokyo]. But an atomic bomb destroys whole nations.”

His point is that nuclear war dwarfs the horrors of conventional war and continues to threaten humankind. He believes that in 1962 he and the Kennedy administration saved the world from nuclear war. Whatever he feels about the rest of his career, McNamara takes pride in the way the Cuban missile crisis was defused. Here McNamara and Morris offer Lesson Number 1: empathize with your enemy. Peace was maintained because “we got inside [the Russians’] skins. We understood that Khrushchev had to be able to say that he headed off a U.S. invasion of Cuba before he could remove the missiles.” McNamara credits the former U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, Tommy Thompson, with having had the strength of character to oppose Kennedy’s initial belligerence toward the USSR. Yet the rest of The Fog of War demonstrates McNamara’s inability to follow Thompson’s example. Obedience—he calls it loyalty—is his credo. He has been part of two wars, but his role, he protests, was to serve his commanding officers: General Curtis LeMay in WWII, Kennedy and Johnson during the Vietnam War.

“If we had lost [World War II] we could have been tried as war criminals. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals…”

McNamara’s memories of the firebombing of Japanese cities at the end of WWII follow his account of the Cuban missile crisis. The sequence is powerful. McNamara declines the pose of moral superiority assumed to justify allied atrocities in WWII to speak bluntly about what war means to civilians. He consistently uses the words “burned to death” and corrects himself when he slips and says “bombed.” In Tokyo, the United States “burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in a single night— men, women, children.” Were you aware of this, Morris asks him? “I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it,” McNamara replies. Morris asks why incendiaries were used, but McNamara sidesteps the question. The real issue, he asks, is whether “in order to win a war should you kill 100,000 people in a single night by firebombs or any other way?” LeMay’s answer, McNamara adds, had been an unequivocal “yes.”

Characteristically, McNamara’s attempts at moral reasoning abort. He neither agrees nor disagrees with LeMay but instead describes the toll the attack on Japan took: sixty-seven cities destroyed, two with nuclear bombs. He names the Japanese cities and their U.S. equivalents, by population and by area destroyed: 58% of Yokohama, McNamara intones, a city the size of Cleveland. As he speaks, the bombs, represented as numerals, descend in slow motion, soundlessly, without landing, upon aerial scans of the devastated areas. They fall slowly, then faster and faster, the data flitting by. McNamara’s lesson? “Proportionality should be a guideline in war.” (In the DVD supplement this is Lesson Number 1.)

“In the minds of some people” (but not himself), the use of two nuclear bombs was overkill, McNamara says. Nevertheless, he doesn’t “fault Truman.” Answering a question he had not been asked, he merely says that the “U.S.–Japan war was one of the most brutal in human history,” and he advises Morris to look beyond tactics to the failure of humanity to grapple with the rules of war. But does not this statement undermine the concept of agency and therefore responsibility, drawing no distinction between victim and perpetrator? McNamara says he agrees with LeMay: had the U.S. lost, “we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” But then he asks, “what makes it immoral if you lose and not if you win?” The camera moves closer to McNamara’s clean-shaven, sad-eyed, compressed face. He does not answer his own question. Morris seems to honor him for having asked it. The question of Vietnam has now reappeared, silent as Banquo’s ghost.

Morris’s next frames quote taped telephone exchanges between Johnson and McNamara in the spring of 1964. They are fretting over public relations tactics. Then suddenly we are back in the present moment. Morris’s voice is distant and tentative, as if the director were afraid McNamara might turn skittish. “At some point we have to approach Vietnam and I wonder how you can best set that up for me,” he says. McNamara’s eyes shift away from the camera and back again. “It’s a hard question,” he answers after a long pause. “We have to approach it in the context of the Cold War—but first I’ll have to talk about Ford [the words tumble out]. I’ve got to go back to the end of the war.” Logical enough: after all, 1945 was the real beginning of the Vietnam War, when the U.S. government began to support the return of French forces. But McNamara is not thinking of Vietnam. At this moment he is remembering himself as a victim, because autumn 1945 is the time when he and his wife were stricken with polio. He does not dwell on their illness, however, but moves the story swiftly forward to his years at Ford, where he tried to reduce auto injuries and fatalities by promoting safety features like seat belts and cushioned dash boards. Ten handsomely illustrated minutes go by before McNamara returns to the business at hand.

The discussion then focuses on the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin in early August 1964, which the administration exploited to convince Congress to issue a war resolution. McNamara had earlier misrepresented the Cuban missile crisis by failing to provide the context of U.S. sabotage in which it arose. Similarly, he now avoids any mention of the provocative behavior of U.S. and South Vietnamese forces that preceded the only Vietnamese PT boat attack in the Gulf. Instead, he recalls Johnson’s stated belief that the Vietnamese attack was a deliberate escalation that indicated “they would not stop short of winning.” The point is puzzling: why would they be fighting, if not to win? After a pause McNamara says, “We were wrong.” The Vietnamese attack on August 2 did not signal deliberate escalation; and the second attack, on August 4, never occurred at all. The report of that attack stemmed from a misreading of sonar data. “We see what we want to believe,” Morris suggests helpfully. Emphatically agreeing, McNamara adds another lesson, sometimes “belief [and] seeing, are both wrong.” Neither McNamara nor Morris asks what causes beliefs to be wrong.

Throughout this and the following sequences McNamara blames the escalating war squarely on President Johnson. His own role is supportive, but also questioning. However, in a forthcoming study, Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam, Gareth Porter argues the opposite, that McNamara and the National Security Council insistently pushed a reluctant president towards ever more daring and decisive military action and may even have concealed relevant information from him.

”Each of us could have achieved our objectives without the terrible loss of life.”

McNamara is blind to the realities of U.S. foreign policy; for him, the Cold War absolves the United States from any charge of colonialism. He expresses astonishment at the Vietnamese belief that “we had simply replaced the French as a colonial power . . . [That] was absolutely absurd.” Even today the simple truth about his government’s colonial policies, obvious to people around the world, escapes him. When he meets his Vietnamese counterparts in Hanoi, almost thirty years after leaving office, McNamara asks what they thought they had achieved with all that death. “You didn’t get any more than we were willing to give you at the beginning of the war. You could have had the whole damn thing: independence, unification.” This statement is as false as it is condescending. Vietnamese and U.S. goals were opposed, not identical. McNamara’s meaning, it emerges, is that for the United States, Vietnam was not a war of colonization but a Cold War front or, as McNamara puts it, a “Cold War activity.” The former foreign minister of the DRV spoke from a more local perspective and mocked McNamara’s ignorance: China was Vietnam’s historical enemy, and Vietnam had never been a Chinese pawn. The Vietnamese fought for their independence; the United States tried to enslave them.

Despite the lesson that McNamara says he drew from the Cuban missile crisis, “empathize with the enemy,” he still cannot empathize, cannot get inside the skin of the colonized. Neither McNamara nor his colleagues at the war table showed anything but boundless indifference to the Vietnamese, or for that matter the Cubans. Does McNamara intend the audience to believe that Johnson’s war council, and he himself, could have forestalled the escalation of 1964-65 by empathizing with the Vietnamese? If so, it is a case he does not make. Indeed, the manner in which McNamara laughs off the idea that the Americans were conquerors like the French, as he does when meeting with Vietnamese historians and officials in 1995, suggests that he will never be able to see the United States and the war as the Vietnamese did and do. At best, his visits to Vietnam and to Cuba can be read as gestures towards empathy in hindsight, gambits in his ongoing effort at self-justification.

Reflecting on the Hanoi meeting, McNamara insists that the United States must never engage in unilateral military action. No ally supported the United States in its war in Vietnam, he claims, forgetting the three hundred thousand South Korean troops and smaller contingents of Australians, Filipinos and other nationals who fought there. “If we had not acted unilaterally, we wouldn’t have been there.” But what if there had been greater international support for the Vietnam War, as there was for the Korean and other U.S.– dominated wars? Would that alone have justified it? Unilateral action has always characterized U.S. foreign policy, as it has the foreign policies of other nations.

Morris asks McNamara if he felt that he was “the author of stuff, or that you were an instrument of things outside your control.” Neither, McNamara answers. “I was serving an elected president and my responsibility was to help him carry out policies he believed were in the interests of the country.” Although he has long been out of government, he also uses this answer to explain his reticence on the war in Iraq. At a Berkeley campus forum on The Fog of War held in February, 2004, MacNamara tells the host, Mark Danner, and fellow guest Errol Morris that he has declined more than 170 invitations from reporters to share his thoughts on Iraq. When he deflects Danner’s invitation as well, Danner confronts MacNamara with a statement he had given to the Toronto Globe and Mail a week before. “It’s just wrong what we’re doing [in Iraq],” MacNamara had said, “It’s morally wrong, it’s politically wrong, it’s economically wrong.” To the American audience he refused these plain truths and justified himself on the grounds that his criticism would endanger American soldiers. The opposite is as true for Iraq as it was for Vietnam.

MacNamara has arrived where he started but knows the place no better, unable to live up to T.S. Eliot’s words of wisdom from a poem that he professes to admire: “We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time (“Little Gidding”).

“We have certain ideals, certain responsibilities. Recognize that at times you will have to engage in evil, but minimize it.”

McNamara draws this moral from Sherman’s torching of Atlanta, LeMay’s fire bombing of Japan and, surprisingly, Norman Morrison’s self-immolation. Morrison, he reminds the viewer, was a Quaker who burned himself to death in front of the Pentagon. He was carrying his infant daughter and in McNamara’s version of the story (which is at odds with Paul Hendrickson’s detailed account) released her only in response to a bystander’s appeal. At the time of his death, Morrison’s wife had issued a statement that moved McNamara: “Human beings,” she said, “must stop killing other human beings.” It’s a belief McNamara says he shares, but he then observes again that evil must be done “in order to do good.” This is a “very, very difficult position for sensitive people to be in. Morrison was one of those people. I think I was.” He does not explain what good the war wrought. On one subject McNamara maintains his silence: asked what effect the anti-war movement had on his views, McNamara denies there was any, adding brusquely that it was a “tense” time within his family and that he won’t discuss it further.

Whatever he believed, McNamara resigned, or was fired, or both, in the midst of the Vietnam and Cold Wars. In a “beautiful ceremony,” Johnson gave him the Medal of Freedom, but when McNamara tried to express his thanks, he could not speak. In contemporary footage, he seems hardly to be able to stand up straight. As Johnson eyes him intently from the side, McNamara manages only to say that he “cannot find the words to express what is in his heart” and that he would “respond on another occasion.” In 1995 he finally did so. “We were wrong, terribly wrong,” he wrote. “We owe it to future generations to find out why.” It seems likely, in retrospect, that what was in McNamara’s heart in 1967 could not be spoken or expressed because he had lost faith in the cause.

In the epilogue McNamara is behind the wheel of his car; sitting beside him as they drive, Morris presses him to explain why didn’t he speak out after his resignation. “I’m not going to say any more than I have,” McNamara replies curtly. “These are the kinds of questions that get me in trouble. You don’t know how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. Some people think I’m a son of a bitch.” Morris is relentless here. Does McNamara feel any guilt or responsibility? McNamara stonewalls. “I don’t want to go any further in the discussion. It just adds to the controversy. It’s too complex.” Morris, with a pang of empathy for his subject, suggests that “you’re damned if you do and damned if you don’t.” “Yeah,” McNamara agrees, “and I’d rather be damned if I don’t.” These are McNamara’s last words in the film.

Released during the war in Iraq, The Fog of War raises many conveniently forgotten questions for what Gore Vidal calls “the United States of Amnesia.” McNamara’s lessons—proportionality, empathy, skepticism—have immediate and obvious significance. His appearance in this film, in the course of which he reveals so much of his divided self, is a gesture not lightly made, nor should we take it lightly.