“I think the human race needs to think more about killing.” This sober advice comes from Robert McNamara in the compelling new documentary film “The Fog of War.”
Interviewed by the marvelously creative Cambridge filmmaker Errol Morris, McNamara at age 85 talks at length about his life and the wars (and near-wars) in which he was closely involved. The film held me transfixed for all of its 106 minutes and made me relive the traumatic times it depicts. As Morris himself says, “This is a movie filled with existential dread.”
Besides monumental issues of survival for nations and the civilized world, the documentary raises questions about the life of an individual man whose decisions led to huge and agonizing losses of life. How, in his later years, does he live with himself? After such a record of involvement with mass killing, how can he find any interior peace?
Errol Morris reportedly disagrees with those who see McNamara as not tortured by his past. But the filmmaker does not push him to reveal his inmost thoughts or to admit feelings of guilt. The aged McNamara never says to what extent he regards himself as a person responsible for acting immorally on a grand scale.
Though the Vietnam War looms large in the film, other events in McNamara’s career are shown to have significant consequences. While still in his 20s, the future Secretary of Defense was an officer on the staff of General Curtis LeMay, working to select targets in Japan for raids that firebombed 67 cities in 1945 and killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. (LeMay will always connected with the suggestion that we might bomb our enemies “back to the Stone Age.”)
McNamara also gives the 1962 Cuban missile crisis major attention. The former Defense Secretary attributes our narrow escape from nuclear war to blind luck rather than rationality. Yet, he credits a now little-known figure, onetime United States ambassador to the Soviet Union Llewellyn Thompson, for giving crucial advice to President Kennedy about how to deal with Khrushchev and ignore the Soviet hardliners.
The film takes its structure from 11 lessons that McNamara draws from his experience. For the missile crisis just cited, he advises: “Empathize with your enemy.” Yet he appears not to have done so himself. When, in 1995, he went to visit the wartime leaders of Vietnam, he was amazed to discover that his former enemies viewed the basic conflict in that country as a civil war rather than as part of a Communist campaign to take over southeast Asia.
From my days as an opponent of the United States’ role in that war, I remember clearly the realization I shared with other resisters that the war was indeed an internal struggle between North and South Vietnam. We also knew that the “domino theory” was altogether too shaky a reason to justify intervention. McNamara and Lyndon Johnson seem to have been ignorant of, or to have ignored, both these realities.
The film shows horrific scenes of bombing in both World War II and in Vietnam. How anyone could think it moral to firebomb or clusterbomb civilian populations puzzled me then and still escapes me now. But McNamara judges these actions with a relativity that has already attracted wide attention.
Recognizing that if we had lost World War II he might have been prosecuted as a war criminal, he asks: “But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” The question qualifies as valid but it suggests that he has been adopting an inadequate standard of judging morality in the first place.
The writer and social critic Roger Rosenblatt believes that McNamara is indeed tormented but at the same time unable to ask for compassion. Though in the film his eyes ask us to tell him how to live with himself, Rosenblatt says, he remains technological man, accustomed only to solving problems not to coping with moral issues. However, in this instance, only he can answer the agonizing questions of individual responsibility, no one else.
Were I close to him, I would reach out to him with compassion. Even though so much of his life has been implicated in the killing of fellow human beings, many of them of them innocent, he has done some beneficial things too, as the film brings out.
Among his lessons, number nine reads: “In order to do good, you have to engage in evil.” To me, this adage is flawed but I can understand something of what he means. My own response to McNamara’s situation is to see it as basically spiritual. Like all of us, he must come to grips with the mystery of evil and his part in it.
To an extent, we are all compromised by evil but, unlike the rest of us, he has been implicated in life and death issues on a grand scale. Anyone among us can offer him compassion if he asks; no one of us can offer forgiveness. That goes beyond our power but I believe (and this is faith rather than reason) forgiveness is available.
Richard Griffin