Rationality Will Not Save Us
At the opening of The Fog of War, the brilliant new documentary from director Errol Morris, a composed, sharply groomed and middle-aged Robert McNamara prepares to brief the press on the Vietnam War. He asks if the chart he’s set up is visible and whether the cameras are ready to roll. It is an efficient reminder that McNamara is no media novice. He’s been interviewed thousands of times. He knows how to evade the questions he doesn’t want to answer and how to answer the questions he would prefer had been asked. Now, at 85, face to face with one of our country’s most accomplished documentarians in a feature-length interview, what will he say? And will it be new?
Morris’ opening acknowledges the skepticism that must attend any examination of McNamara, a man who has for years been excoriated for his role in the Vietnam War and for his apparent unwillingness to own up to it. But it’s merely a precursor to the smart, penetrating choices Morris makes.
Morris comes neither to praise McNamara nor to bury him; instead, he invites the former secretary of defense to show us how things looked to him as they were happening and how they appear to him now. It is a film about the lessons of a single life, albeit a life that influenced the lives of many others. As a result, The Fog of War never falls neatly into any single or obvious camp of opinion.
There is news here. For the first time, McNamara discusses his relationship with General Curtis LeMay, the commander responsible (with the help of McNamara’s efficiency data) for firebombing 67 Japanese cities in 1945, killing nearly a million Japanese civilians and burning huge portions of their cities to the ground. And Morris uses recently released tapes of telephone conversations between President Lyndon Johnson and McNamara that reveal ongoing attempts by McNamara to withdraw the troops and, later, to stop the bombing of North Vietnam.
But mistakes, McNamara tells us, are inevitable: “Rationality will not save us…. Belief and seeing are often wrong.” Still, McNamara seems to believe that reason is the route to moral clarity, even as he constantly acknowledges reason’s limits. ” The fog of war” is McNamara’s phrase describing the impossibility of seeing clearly in the midst of conflict, and McNamara’s personal struggles with morality seem equally clouded. “In order to win a war,” he asks, “is a nation justified in killing 100,000 civilians in one night? Would it be moral to not burn to death 100,000 Japanese civilians but instead to lose hundreds of thousands of American lives in an invasion of Japan?” Indeed, these are gruesome moral questions.
The film is technically superb. Morris has teamed again with composer Philip Glass, whose repetitive, keening score haunts the film. In the interview segments, Robert Chappell’s camerawork is breathtaking. Like us, his camera attempts to locate McNamara; like us, the camera is never certain that it can.
