McNamara’s Fog

My fascination with the Vietnam War was probably borne out of my initial fascination with Watergate. To my mind, these two events defined American politics, and by extension the American psyche, in the later part of the 20th century. The influence of these two events to the US domestically can still be felt even today. Bob Woodward made a convincing argument for this in his book “Shadow,” where he studies the effect of Watergate to presidencies subsequent to Nixon.

I managed to dig up David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest” from a Booksale branch but never got around to finishing it. So when I saw Errol Morris’ “Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara” (2003) on a website, I jumped at a chance to view it. I had caught parts of the documentary on HBO but I never got around to watching the whole thing.

The documentary revolves around McNamara’s time as president of Ford before moving to the White House as Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson administration. It uses as its main material an on-camera interview with McNamara himself, juxtaposed with images of the Vietnam War.

As an interview subject, McNamara likes to take charge of the discourse, moving in and out of different topics at his own pace. He is at times bewildering and touching, weaving in and out of the events of his life with the just the right amount of pride bordering on arrogance about his successes.

On his time with Ford, McNamara made no bones about leading the company into some success by pioneering safety devices in automobiles.

McNamara is chilling when it comes to the subject of war. “I think the human race needs to think about killing. How much evil must we do in order to do good.” On other times, he is dead-on about the deadly romance man has with war. “The indefinite combination of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.”

He says that any honest military commander will admit he has made mistakes in the application of military power. “He’s killed people - unnecessarily. His own troops or other troops. Through mistakes, through errors of judgment.”

On some points, McNamara can be as cold as ice. In response to a question on the decision to conduct an deadly air raid on Tokyo during the Second World War, McNamara icily declares: “I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it…(Colonel Curtis) LeMay said if we lost the war that we would have all been prosecuted as war criminals. And I think he’s right. He… and I’d say I… were behaving as war criminals… LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side has lost.”

The documentary starts to get interesting when McNamara starts discussing the Bay of Pigs and the Cuban missile crisis. “In my seven years as Secretary, we came within a hair’s breadth of war with the Soviet Union on three different occasions! Twenty-four hours a day, three-hundred sixty-five days a year, for seven years as Secretary of Defense, I lived the Cold War! During the Kennedy Administration, they (the Russians) designed a one-hundred Megaton bomb! It was tested in the atmosphere. I remember this.”

He is empathic about the importance of his role in the Cabinet. He reveals his own tug of war with Johnson on the Vietnam War. He says it was wrong to go to Vietnam but he is unclear about his own role, his attitudes and feelings about Vietnam. He evades the question by saying there are things the American public does not know with regard to US relations with China and Russia.

Anyone looking for answers to what went wrong in the Vietnam War from McNamara might be thoroughly disappointed as I was.

Out of the view of the camera, a person presumably Morris himself asks McNamara why he didn’t speak out against the Vietnam War after he left the Johnson administration.

“I’m not going to say any more than I have. These are the kinds of questions that get me into trouble. You don’t know what I know about how inflammatory my words can appear. A lot of people misunderstand the war, misunderstand me. A lot of people think I’m a son of a bitch.”

In his twilight years, McNamara could have used the occasion of the film as a “tell-all” and come clean, but he has not. This is ironic given McNamara’s anti-war stance, his present work for development and his own feelings about the US in Iraq.

But McNamara can be accurate and clear sometimes, a probable product of a deep reflection of his experiences. In one dialogue, McNamara goes into the very question of what will make the US go to war, or stay out of war.

“What makes us omniscient? Have we a record of omniscience? We are the strongest nation in the world today. I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political, or military power unilaterally. If we had followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn’t have been there! None of our allies supported us; not Japan, not Germany, not Britain or France. If we can’t persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we’d better reexamine our reasoning.”

Unfortunately for McNamara, his own government did not heed him today in Iraq, despite the fact that Vietnam should have shown the US that it can fail if it uses arms to settle an issue of foreign policy.

McNamara said he believes there is no eliminating war, much to the misfortune of mankind. “We’re not going to change human nature any time soon. It isn’t that we aren’t rational. We are rational. But reason has limits. There’s a quote from T.S. Eliot that I just love: ‘We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.’ Now that’s in a sense where I’m beginning to be.”

It is dramatic to see how the fog of the Vietnam War was never lifted. Its even more dramatic to see that seemingly, the fog has not lifted from McNamara’s heart.