Errol Morris' Fog of War

the film is perhaps most interesting for excavating, in part and not wholly convincingly--more on that later--the milieu out of which this guy and others who shaped cold war foreign policy came. he was a kind of technocrat, perfectly embodying the spillover between industry academia and the military.

what bugs me most--and i don't mean this as a criticism of the fil necessarily--is how much he claims innocence of the historical and political phenomena he was encountering in vietnam. when he said that he didn't understand the vietnamese hostility toward the chinese; or the fact that th e north vietnamese saw it as a liberation struggle...why not? books had been written, editorials published, etc. well before america's involvement in the region. were his circumstances and intellectual horizons really so circumscribed that mcnamara missed this completely? or is his claiming innocence--and by extrapolation the innocence rumsfeld et al may claim 30 years hence--just a way of bucking responsibility?

the film lacked a thorough enough feel for the period to throw these questions out--it remains mcnamara's story. which i believe was morris's intention and it might be a worthwhile one. why bother to make another film castigating our vietnam policy when so many exist already (or do they?)?

etc

morris felt that (1) the film wasn't about the holocaust but about fred and
his mind; (2) why should he need to debunk the theories that are so
reprehensible and ridiculous on their face? it's almost an insult. and yet,
when he showed this cut to a class, the students began asking about the
truth of some of leuchter's claims (perhaps their being on screen lent
them a kind of believability they wouldn't have had otherwise--as with
statistical charts, sometimes the form of rhetoric is more persuasive than
the substance) and the professor eventually recommended that morris
take an active role in the film in debunking leuchter's claims. eventually
morris agreed that this was his duty.

i wonder if the fog of war doesn't pose a similar problem. for morris and
for myself and for many others the wrongness of the vietnam war, and the
blindness of those in power who waged it, is a cardinal truth. but for
others it's not so clear, or perhaps it's simply not so clear where morris stands to people not familiar with his background. les inrockuptibles, for example, dismissed the film rather haughtily as a means for mcnamara to absolve himself from guilt and responsibility.

should morris have made an effort in this film to actively challenge the assertions of his subject? i'm not certain but fairly positive that morris probably maintains doubts about mcnamara that are similar to my own. but this isn't made clear in the film, and in that sense inrockuptibles has a point. the questions i suppose are, does the film (despite its impregnable style and singlemindedness) provide the audience with the tools to dismantle mcnamara's intentions? should this even be its object?

morris has often categorized his films as less didactic than as epistomelogical inquiries. this is an approach that has been widely celebrated, as it can be made to conform with contemporary distrust of the documentary form and manipulative and naive in its objectivist viewpoint. but i wonder whether it isn't also a kind of cop out.

i should add that i have enormous respect and admiration for morris and his films

I saw it last night and liked it, but was compelled mostly by McNamara's personality and the well-used archival material -- one of the most interesting things for me to see how the smirking, self-assured McNamara of the 60s had changed into the man we see on screen. And then of course I found all the peeks behind the scenes of these military conflicts fairly fascinating.

Morris certainly doesn't probe McNamara on some points like perhaps he could have, but the Onion review makes a good point, I think: "Some have complained that Morris lets him off too easy, but great journalism isn't about nailing someone; it's about evoking the truth in all its thorny contradictions, and few can honestly claim to have a handle on McNamara, not least the man himself." The question becomes, however, did Morris even succeed in showing those contradictions very clearly?

(It's perhaps an unfair comparison, since they're very different movies about different subjects, but I think Capturing the Friedmans is a wonderful example of a doc that embraces the essential contradictions of its story in a way that's remarkably disarming. I never felt that way in The Fog of War.)

this is too easy too

what does "evoking the truth" mean?

i think this film certainly fails to present a clear enough context in which to understand macnamara's failings. perhaps this mirrors his own limitations.

Meanwhile, McNamara speaks out on Iraq directly.

I have nothing but respect and love for errol morris and his films. I've almost seen them all now.

One of the key lines in the movie, I think:

McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in [General Curtis LeMay's] command in March of 1945. In that single night, we burned to death 100,000 Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women, and children.

Morris: Were you aware this was going to happen?

McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that in a sense recommended it.

It's an excuse. It's also very probably true. It's too easy to say that a moral and upstanding person would have walked away from the command of LeMay, who was clearly a bloodthirsty warmonger. For one thing, this was WWII, and no good American walked away from WWII. It was a noble cause, after all. And for another thing, this was Robert McNamara, one of the brightest and best kids in any class or organization he'd ever been in, one of the greatest minds the military or indeed the country had at its disposal. His intelligence and his ability was tightly tied to his pride and his sense of self. If one of the most immoral Army generals of all time asks a guy like like that to help him maximize his efficeincy in killing japs, under those circumstances, you better believe a guy like that is going to do it.

he is astonishingly intelligent and honest in the film but missing, at least in public, what might be correct posture of remorse.

-Amateurist

No, he doesn't show the kind of remorse that would be accepted by the public. But that's not to say that he doesn't show remorse -- I think he does, many times in the film, only it's hidden behind his lifelong veil of intelligence, "wisdom," and know-it-all-ness. This is the only way he can express remorse. You have to meet him halfway to see the remorse sometimes, but it's certainly there.

This is not a man accustomed to admitting he was wrong. This is, in fact, a man who is only now getting used to the cold fact of how wrong he has been, and who likely still has a long way to go. That's one of the things that makes this movie so compelling. He sputters, he overexplains, he exhibits a lot of the conversational quirks that tell the smart observer that the person is either outright lying or incredibly uncomfortable. Morris lets his camera observe this behavior as much as he can, and with McNamara, you get the feeling that Morris had to virtually pry this kind of conversation out of him. But he did.

What makes it even more compelling is how right McNamara is most of the time. If you take out his lame equivocations about his role in Vietnam, or his degree of influence in the Johnson administration, or his failure to condemn the war after he left the office of Secretary of Defense, what remains is a very sane assessment of what's wrong with politics and the military.

Soo we have this guy, incandescently brilliant even at his age, speaking about foreign policy in a way that makes you want to appoint him to Secretary of Defense right now. Expect that he was already once Secretary of Defense, and made of it one of the biggest bungles in American history. Not that it was all his fault, but that's another thing about this movie. It makes you want to look for larger causes for what McNamara did than just McNamara. Which is both ridiculous and, in a strange way, very rational. Just the way he'd want it.

What I most take away from this movie is that intelligence fails. So does ambition. McNamara is a living illustration of his own rule, rule #2: Rationality will not save us.

Talking to Castro:
"Mr. President, I have three questions. Number one, did you know the nuclear warheads were there? Number two, if you did, would you have recommended to Khrushchev in the face of a US attack that he use them? And number three, if he had used them, what would have happened to Cuba?

"He said, number one I knew they were there. Number two, I would not HAVE recommended to Khrushchev, I DID recommend to Khrushchev that he use them. And number three, what would have happened to Cuba? It would have been totally destroyed.

"That's how close we were...

"And he went on to say, 'If you and President Kennedy were in a similar situation, you would have done the same thing.' I said, 'Mr. President, I hope to God we would not have done that. Pull the temple down on our heads? MY GOD!'"

Finally saw this.

Lots of good comments above. I thought one of the film's most interesting points was about the uses of data and abstraction - that the nation was in fact using these data systems to choose its "best and brightest," and that what made them the "best and brightest" was largely their facility with dispassionate "problem solving" -- often using similar kinds of metrics to those that were used to choose them. And that ultimately that kind of problem-solving intelligence was effective at achieving very specific "objectives," while not necessarily improving big-picture judgment at all. And also that even the use of abstract "moral philosophy" often provides convenient cover for horribly immoral actions (something I think we see immensely in the current administration) -- e.g. LeMay's calculation that it was a necessary evil to firebomb Japanese cities in order to avoid American military deaths.

I haven't read "The Best and The Brightest" but I wonder if it poses the same questions or has similar implications - that the kind of training an elite education provided (still provides?) is good for making efficient and dispassionate long-distance killers out of normal, feeling humans (although the same training can also produce an efficient and dispassionate improver of "quality-of-life" figures)

that the kind of training an elite education provided (still provides?) is good for making efficient and dispassionate long-distance killers out of normal, feeling humans

And also that it creates chess-game thinkers who can miss obvious truths about a world that isn't entirely like a chess game.

One other thing also, regarding the remorse/blame thing -- I do think the film shows McNamara to have a hard time getting past his pride in his *achievements*. He's not comfortable tainting his own sense of accomplishment too much.

I wasn't sure about some of the film's aesthetic choices - lingering on the beauty of bombs falling or a close-up of a tape machine. The images were visually thrilling, but I wasn't always sure what purpose they served or how they helped to either illustrate or complicate what was being spoken during those shots.

i should see this again -- i loved it at the time, but i remember IRAQ hanging very heavily over the whole thing. of course this is inescapable but it made it hard to assess.

Lesson #1: Empathize with your enemy.
Lesson #2: Rationality will not save us.
Lesson #3: There's something beyond one's self.
Lesson #4: Maximize Efficiency.
Lesson #5: Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
Lesson #6: Get the data.
Lesson #7: Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
Lesson #8: Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
Lesson #9: In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
Lesson #10: Never say never.
Lesson #11: You can't change human nature.

^^ i mean, shit

this movie is great but yeah implication especially during its time of release was Rumsfeld = McNamara v.2.0

An analogy that holds up extremely well, I think!

but they were so different! it's sort of like comparing kissinger to the neocons -- that's a worse comparison actually cos they were polar opposites. rumsfeld played wonk (all that RMA stuff, wow, remember that?) but i don't think he was a true war nerd -- certainly the logistic stuff mcnamara could do is totally beyond don r. mcnamara had an unshakeable faith in his own reason, morality bent around it as needed. rumsfeld et al had an unshakeable faith in their own moral cause, with 'reason' bent by that kind of rhetoric as needed or just equated with appeasement. it's a very different kind of fanaticism.

and FOW was an examination of how even 'hard reason' is plain wrong a lot of the time, as i understood it.

I agree there are big differences - but their rhetoric has some disturbing similarities that make the comparison hard to avoid

When McNamara was in the cabinet I was aged 7-14. I was 21 when Saigon fell. So, when I watched this recently, the most interesting thing was not the history (Curtis Lemay, Tokyo fiirebombing, his whiz kid background, etc.). I knew that stuff. The fascination was watching how McNamara had constructed a story that his conscience could live with, and the careful evasions of certain questions that this required.

Not to put too fine a point on it, we sacrificed 55,000 US combat deaths, and killed upwards of 1,000,000 Vietnamese, all because LBJ didn't want his balls gnawed off by rightwing red-baiters and once the concocted propaganda reasons for the war became offical, no one in a position of responsibility wanted to admit the error or repudiate the war.

McNamara is still disavowing responsibility in the film. All the things he told LBJ in private he could have resigned and gone public with. He chose not to and got a cozy perch running the World Bank as his reward. When that many lives are at stake, this is just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

also not as effective in making P Glass tolerable as other EM films.

The fascination was watching how McNamara had constructed a story that his conscience could live with, and the careful evasions of certain questions that this required.

For whatever it's worth, that was also the fascination when I watched it, and I am not old enough to have been through the history first hand, so much.

glass is great!

All the things he told LBJ in private he could have resigned and gone public with. He chose not to and got a cozy perch running the World Bank as his reward. When that many lives are at stake, this is just wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong.

-- Aimless, Thursday, January 10, 2008 1:34 PM (2 months ago) Bookmark Link

But how would resigning have saved any of those lives at stake?

The fascination was watching how McNamara had constructed a story that his conscience could live with, and the careful evasions of certain questions that this required.

It's maybe four seconds of film, but his waving away Morris's question about the Bay of Pigs is priceless.

But how would resigning have saved any of those lives at stake?

Since he didn't break with Johnson in public, this question effectively asks me to imagine a counterfactual history, which is not especially useful. My argument is more based on moral grounds, his oath of office and his duty to the public, than knowing what the practical effect would have been.

However, suffice it to say that McNamara's resignation over the Vietnam War in 1966 might have made the subsequent escalation much, much harder to sell to the public and could have made it easier for the middle class to reject the war much sooner than it did.

Yeah, it's pretty hard to say, I guess. I do think he comes off as being more concerned with his own *achievement* than larger moral questions. He kind of came off as a guy who remained a bright boy all his life, too dazzled by the attention and praise his superiors were showering on him to ask larger questions

saw this tonight, think kenan's first post is otm

also think that to claim mcnamara has 'constructed a story that his conscience could live with' might be oversimplifying it (or maybe overcomplicating it). he reiterates throughout that he saw his role as that of a problem solver- the president had the decisions to make, as the embodiment of the will of the people or w/e. i don't see any reason to doubt that this was the reality as he lived it at the time.

It's called compartmentalization. He worked all day at his job and then disavowed any responsibility for his actions. He was no peon or simple cog, lost in a vast organization, remote from all power. He was the Secretary of Defense, fer chrissake. That level of job requires taking responsibility.

It's interesting that you can be one rung down from ultimate power and still not feel like you're exercising executive power. It accords with my own work experience in a way, in that even when I've been to all intents and purposes running some project or other, I've always felt that the calls are being made by somebody else. There must be people somewhere who feel like they're the top of the chain, but I'm not one of them.

can you be secretary of defense and not compartmentalize? can you be a good one and not comparmentalize? can you be secretary of state and not defer to the president while disagreeing with him? it struck me that mcnamara was not unaware of his role in events, and that there is a difference in saying that he has constructed a story he can live with and acknowledging that there seems every possibility that he lived it perfectly fine without having to construct it after the fact.

i can't even be a mediocre housing officer without compartmentalisation. in itself it's not a condemnation, it's a recognition that a professional (or vocational, or sporting, or performing) role is not and will not be the sum total of a person, or in some cases might call for a person to be more than their sum total in the representation of an institution or organisation or a body.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NptUMuDAljA

Secretary Rumsfeld can eat a bag of dicks.

bout to watch the rumsfeld one 'the unknown known'

He comes off as a real dick.

So did McNamara to me as well so maybe I'm not intended audience.

i liked this btw
i think there are a couple of moments at which it's frustrating to ~cut to a damning clip~ instead of to hear morris flatly call out rumsfelt - say when he bullshits about the administration having no hand in affiliating saddam with al queda - but it's still pretty strong i think. just so upsetting. i generally think morris has got pretty schmaltzy stylistically, & that isn't so much a problem, here (or, the visuals & music aren't as intrusive as they are in the last few) (although the score is kind of just ... like it's almost nothing it's so pro-forma), but it is periodically frustrating seeing how much he can do when he doesn't smother his footage, & what we're missing by his lack of restraint. there are those couple of moments of just sustained footage of rumsfelt, silent after he finishes speaking, & they really reverberate & connect, i think. but he's sometimes so keen to segue to a eutrophic cgi wordcloud that some of this effect is lost.

I had a mixed response, in part because I'm not sure what he wanted to DO with Rummy.

yeah that's a nice review, alfred, & your more succinct note on morris's kinda place there - almost just observing - is on point. i don't remember the fog of war awfully well but i think i thought it was well served by that distance; i think mcnamara is thinking out loud enough & says enough that we don't really need some kind of overt, michael moore-ish commentary or inquisition, like it's more interesting to just get the parameters of the guy's isolation & thought. with rumsfelt maybe it's just that that's so unbearable, the - right on! - father-in-law-ish tidiness, cohesiveness, of his system so infuriating. i don't know though, i thought it was good work, & it's perhaps weird seeing this kind of thing relatively contemporaneously. it isn't a daily show interview where we are hoping Our Guy is going to land a punch on John Yoo, it's a portrait, & it's okay that we are doing some of the lifting in pressing a judgment, there.

agreed alfred. i didn't get much from it except that he sent a lot of memos. morris kinda phoning it in with the time-lapse + danny elfman. i also don't like hearing his voice here, the tone is less putting rummy on the hot seat and more like just asking some questions and we'll get a beer afterwards.

i never don't love hearing errol morris's voice
like an unexpected wallace shawn cameo in an animation, just a treat for everybody