The Fog of War
It’s been a while since I last saw “The Fog of War”. For those of us too young to actually have experienced the “cold war” there are endless ways to be told about the time in question. Few however have hit me as deeply as “The Fog of War”. Robert S. McNamara was in his mid eighties during the course of the interviews that, in essence, is this documentary. It is a compelling story of a man who’s been there, done that and had to live with those actions. In “The Fog of War” we are presented with 11 lessons from his life and they’re hard to brush aside as “just words” when McNamara talks.
A lot of people have their own perception of the man Robert Strange McNamara. No matter the perception, this will shed light over it. When you see him as an old man, and realize he could give any orator a run for his money, you can’t help wonder how he must have been in his prime. No wonder he could polarize a room by entering it.
Anyway, it’s not a history lesson. It’s one mans subjective take on 80-odd years of experience. It’s one mans subjective understanding of people, nations and their relationships. It’s one mans subjective take on wars and their consequences. With that being said, McNamara is an amazing man to listen to. When you couple this with taped recordings between of him advising the presidents he served under, you just blink a few times. When Lyndon B. Johnson says explicitly that he wants to “kill some of them” with regards to Vietnam there is a pause before McNamara replies that he’ll see what he can produce to achieve that goal.
And McNamara makes few excuses. He tries, mostly with great success, to explain why certain choices were made. One of the lessons is that “Rationality will not save us”, rational leaders both in Kremlin and in Washington tried to avoid war over Cuba, but the lack of information available to both sides made talking difficult to say the least. Or as a line given to McNamara in the movie “Thirteen Days” goes with regards to the blockade “This is not a blockade. This is language. A new vocabulary, the likes of which the world has never seen! This is President Kennedy communicating with Secretary Khrushchev!”
He might not have said those words in real life, but after watching “The Fog of War”, you imagine he just might have said just that. The lessons are hard, and painful, and as he says, he tries to learn from his mistakes, we all do. You repeat them a few times and then learn. But he also says that there will be no learning with nuclear weapons, we make one mistake and we obliterate nations. This, as he said, is what they were trying to avoid.
Considering all the flak he’s taken over the decades I was also surprised at McNamaras ability to talk about fairly sensitive issues without much anger. We see him fight tears and smile, even laugh, we see him somewhat agitated, but we never see him upset or angry at anything said to him, if anything, he’s angry with the lack of human learning, his own included. It is truly an amazing journey into a mans mind and it is a gift to us all that Errol Morris shot the movie.
During the interview, McNamara wishes to highlight the following for us, and I thought I’d pass it along:
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.
T.S. Elliot, “Little Gidding”