When the Academy Awards are given out this weekend, I will be rooting for “The Fog of War” to be chosen best documentary. I consider it not only a masterpiece of cinematic art but also a sobering statement about our chances of survival in a world continually threatened by lethal violence.  

Robert McNamara, on whom the film focuses, testifies eloquently to lessons of the catastrophic history in which he had a part.  

To be sure, McNamara’s failure to meet moral challenges can seem to disqualify him as a character witness. His part in the firebombing of Japanese civilians by the hundreds of thousands in 1945, and his refusal to speak out against the American role in the Vietnam War when he knew it to be misconceived,  remain severe blots on his integrity.

Yet, in his middle eighties, this sharp observer of 20th century history raises issues that remain vital to present-day America. His moral reasoning may be deficient, but he recognizes clearly how some of his experience can help clarify the dilemmas facing us now.

To me, two of the most important conclusions that flow from McNamara’s experience are the need to choose wise leaders and, once we choose them, the importance of the media and members of Congress and other citizens keeping a critical watch over their actions.

It still shocks me that McNamara and the president he served, Lyndon Johnson, did not know that the Vietnam conflict was basically a civil war and that, even if Vietnam fell to the Communists, the rest of the region would not necessarily follow.

Yet in the film McNamara says he was astonished to discover the first of these facts only in 1995 when he visited the former Vietnamese leaders. He could have obtained the same knowledge in the 1960s from many Americans who had studied the history of Southeast Asia.

For Johnson to have manipulated the United States Senate to pass the Tonkin Gulf resolution, with only two votes against, still ranks as a terrible failure of responsibility on the part of the president and senators elected from every state. It was a striking instance of American citizens believing in the propaganda of our own national government.

If this reminds you of a more recent military adventure, it reminds McNamara also. He calls it a mistake for the United States to invade a country when other nations that share our basic values do not agree with us. Speaking from sober experience, McNamara says: “The application of military power is so complex that the human mind is incapable of controlling all the variables.”

Another conclusion drawn by McNamara deserves pondering. This believer in taking a hardheaded approach to problems now says “Rationality will not save us.” That lesson comes from the Cuban Missile Crisis when, on three different occasions, “we came within a hair’s breath” of possibly having hundreds of millions of people wiped out and much of civilization destroyed.

Only luck, along with some last-ditch wise leadership, preserved us from that fate. The danger exists today, McNamara believes, with enormous stockpiles of nuclear missiles available for use by various nations.

Providing structure for the film, McNamara lists eleven lessons learned from his experience. Number six reads “Get the data.” This imperative is hard to argue against, but getting the data does not necessarily solve the problem. He himself provides another rule that says “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.”

McNamara seems to have placed too much trust in “facts” and not enough in wisdom, insight, law, and morality.  Granted, being able to pull off massive air raids over Japan was a great feat technologically, but it bypasses the moral issue about the legitimacy of firebombing civilians.

The former defense secretary also raises the issue of proportionality. War has become so horrible when powered by previously unthinkable machines that you have to ask what purposes make it justifiable. McNamara believes that “in order to do good, you have to engage in evil,” a truly sobering thought.

I have some sympathy with this latter viewpoint. Supported by my spiritual tradition, I find something fundamentally askew in the world, even in the best of times. As history continues to show, the human family seethes with passions that are frequently out of control, and we are highly unlikely to change our basic character any time soon.

Much discussion has gone into McNamara’s failure to apologize for mistakes that were so catastrophic to millions of people. Many people are bothered because he has not asked forgiveness for his part in massive killing. I recently met a neighbor who still feels furious with McNamara for the deaths of so many of his friends in Vietnam.

I sympathize with these views but, flawed as he remains, Robert McNamara has offered reflections that can benefit us all. Some of them are obscured by the fog of war and the complexity of things. But they may help us deal with the propaganda, manipulation, and duplicity so widely applied by our leaders today.

Richard Griffin