McNamara was in office during two of the most important parts of late twentieth
century history as seen through western eyes; the Cuban Missile Crisis, and
the Vietnam War. He was a key player in the US Administration during both,
although he will most likely be an almost unknown to any Briton under the age
of 50.And that is perhaps the problem with this documentary; McNamara carries little
weight or importance with him to the UK. It is true that he is a sprightly
octogenarian who speaks fluently, with conviction and with a mind for detail,
making a pleasant change to the near daily assault of Bush stupidity and
gormlessness, and the premature senility of Reagan in earlier times, but there's
no real difference here to having your grandad bang on about how he fought the
Nazi's and liberated Europe given the first opportunity to get on a soapbox.
It is true that McNamara was there, with Presidents when momentous decision
were taken which could change the world, and his revelations of just how close
the world came to nuclear annihilation during the Cuban crises may send shivers
of fear down American spines, but it's something that anyone with a passing
interest in those events ought to already know. If this fact came as news to
the American public then that does send shivers down my spine.
As a foreigner judging McNamara from the documentary, with little knowledge of
the man himself, he comes over as someone who stands on the left of politics,
with a warning that the world is teetering on the edge of disaster; one false
or mistaken move and we will pull ourselves collectively into a dark chasm of no
return.
But we get to see or hear almost nothing of the man justifying himself,
explaining why he did what he did and explaining the reasoning behind his
decisions. We see what he did and when. He moralises and details the surrounding
events but he never really reveals his inner self. At the end of the film we are
really none the wiser about McNamara. His opposition to an ongoing war in
Vietnam is made clear, but he is unwilling to explain why, when he left office,
he never spoke out against the war. We see the tip of an iceberg but are left
unsure as to what is below the surface. He appears to be guilt-ridden on
behalf of America for the slaughter they inflicted upon Japan in the second
world war, and questions the need to have dropped an A-Bomb at all, let alone
two, but he struggles with the question as to whether it was better have killed
100,000 Japanese civilians, than to risk American lives in an invasion had they
not done so. He accepts that he would have been judged a war criminal had the
US lost the war, but neither stands by his own actions nor condemns them.
When he tells us that we may have do a little evil to do good, he seems to be
offering us, not so much an apology, but a statement of fact, and hiding his
actions behind it. If it's an excuse for his actions, then it's a poor one,
and one that McNamara fails to justify.
McNamara comes over as someone who wants to get something off their chest but
has been unable to come to terms with what it is they need to unburden. He
poses many questions, such as this "proportionality", but he has no answers
that he will give. You would be just as enlightened by any college late-night
debate as the students complain of the wrongs in the world and moralise on how
to put it right. You would get one thing however that McNamara does not give;
possible solutions. He is strong on complaint and on reporting, but not on
affirmative action.
His warnings are however clear, and very pertinent in today's world, but they
have been said by many others as well, and have been better put. His most
acutely accurate observation was that America fought the North Vietnamese
in one war, while the North Vietnamese were fighting another war entirely. As
McNamara says, you have to empathise with your enemy to understand them, and it
is clear that America has a sad history of being unable to do so. In Vietnam,
America dug itself deeper and deeper in the mire, fighting an enemy that was not
going to give in. As with Cuba, America never really understood what was at
stake; that the North Vietnamese would fight to the death, and Cuba would have
nuked itself and a large chunk of America into oblivion had the US Army invaded.
But such revelations on warfare are hardly new; Sun Tzu says pretty much the
same, and far more than McNamara, in his 4th Century BC treatise, The Art of
War.
A documentary and analysis of Sun Tzu and his treatise, and how it applies to
modern day conflicts, would make for interesting viewing, but McNamara doesn't
come close.
Another old git rattling on about the woes of the world is not, in this case,
Oscar material, and the life and times of a domestic US politician holds little
interest outside America for all but the most interested in US political
affairs. For someone so close to the seat of power, McNamara reveals nothing to
make a British audience sit up and take notes.
Morris does a fine job in weaving interviews with McNamara, archive footage and
some clever graphics together, and Philip Glass's original score, although
repetitive in places, brings a roundness to the piece.
Originally intended as a made-for-TV documentary, that is perhaps all that
The Fog of War is at the end of the day; nothing special.
