The Fog of War

I watched the Errol Morris documentary "Fog of War" on DVD again last night, so now I've seen it twice. As a reviewer says on IMDB.com, "It chronicles the life of former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara, who served under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations." Actually, it chronicles McNamara's life simply by interviewing the man himself in front of a special camera (invented by Morris to put interview subjects more at ease) for several hours.

As it turns out, this makes for a riveting film (good enough to win an Oscar for Best Documentary). McNamara was born in San Francisco in 1916, so he has lived through a lot, most importantly World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the war in Vietnam. I'm not going to summarize any more because this is a film that's been out now since 2003, but what I don't understand is why this movie didn't generate more public dicussion than it did, especially here in the U.S.

McNamara, unlike members of the current Administration, is actually willing to admit that he made some mistakes when he was in office. He also talks about the "proportionality of war," largely in reference to what the U.S. did to Japan during WWII (we burned 78 cities in Japan to the ground by blanketing them with incindiary bombs and then, of course, dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). I'm not here to argue over whether our actions can be justified or not, but what McNamara says is interesting. Basically, he acknowledges that if we had lost that war, several American commanders, including him, would probably have been tried as war criminals for their actions.

It is clear as you watch this film that McNamara's conscience does weigh heavily on him, as it would any "sensitive human being" (his term) who had to make the kind of decisions he had to make during his career. I would like to see us start to learn from our mistakes instead of continuing to repeat ourselves.

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