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

The last day of January marked the 50th anniversary of my father’s death. At age 55, he drew his last breath in a New York City hospital, in the presence of my mother, one of my brothers, one of my sisters, and me. It was an event that some of us never entirely recovered from and that remains deeply imprinted on my psyche.

John Griffin died of bleeding stomach ulcers, a disease then common among journalists, but no longer fatal now as it could be in 1954. Ulcers of this sort had long afflicted my father, a newspaperman who had faced deadlines and other career pressures throughout his adult life.

As first a reporter, then Sunday editor, and finally editor-in-chief of the Boston Post, he worked for a newspaper that had been one of the largest in the United States and the most important in New England. In the years after World War II, however, it began a decline that would lead to its demise in 1956.

When I was a boy, Dad would leave the house after an early supper and go off to work until after midnight. I remember him setting out for the trolley at the bottom of our street in Watertown, headed for Newspaper Row on Washington Street in Boston. As his career progressed, he worked more conventional hours, though he would often cover stories that required him to go away.

One such assignment took him away for several weeks. That came in 1939 when he sailed to Rome with Cardinal O’Connell for the election of a new pope to succeed Pius XI.  The choice of Eugenio Pacelli who took the name Pius XII turned into one of the most fateful in history, given this pope’s still controverted role in the war.  

For my father, the main focus of the ocean voyage was suspense as to whether O’Connell would reach Rome in time to vote. The Boston prelate had missed the two previous elections, arriving too late for inclusion among the cardinals who cast ballots. This time, as the Post’s correspondent duly documented, O’Connell made it to Vatican City just in time.

A year later, father followed the trail of Wendell Wilkie during the latter’s campaign for the president. How my father felt about this Republican candidate I do not know but it must have been evident early on that Wilkie would not dislodge Franklin Roosevelt.

In time, my father became a columnist as well, writing two columns a week in one stretch of ten years. It is perhaps unsurprising that his oldest son finds himself on a similar run some 50 years later. My dad also appeared regularly on a pioneering Boston television program, “Starring the Editors,” an activity that he seems to have enjoyed but that added to a heavy work load.

The death of her husband was an especially heavy blow for my mother. Alice Griffin, like many of the women of her time, was not prepared, either practically or psychologically, to go it alone after losing her spouse. She survived for another three decades herself but never entirely regained her ability to handle effectively her own problems and those of her family.

One of my brothers recently told me that he has never been reconciled to our father’s death. “The wound heals but a scar remains,” he said. I myself was 26 and already living away from home, so the death did not have quite the same impact on me.

However, the unexpected loss of my father registered deeply with me too. More times than I can count, I have replayed in memory the awful scene of his dying. I still regret my inability then to have expressed my love for him: the sight of him struggling to breathe and lying helpless as I had never seen him before overwhelmed the impulse I felt to speak to him.

Now, at age 75, I have lived 20 more years than my father did. How could my mother and my five younger siblings have been deprived of his presence when they so needed him? What brought it about that his best friend, Elliot Norton, lived to 100, almost doubling my father’s span of years? Why have I received the gift of longevity and not my dad?  And why did I never have the opportunity to talk with him about his life and mine as we both grew older together?  

These and other such mysteries will continue to haunt me no matter how many more years I live. However, at the same time I feel grateful to God for having had John Griffin as my father and I treasure the legacy he left me.

From the vantage point of 50 years later, I hold him in increasingly deeper affection and, as time goes on, I place even greater value on the heritage he passed on to me and the other members of my family.

Richard Griffin

Trying to be funny and winding up with something simply ignorant, stupid, and grotesque is not an outcome I would wish on anyone.  And yet, that is what happened to BBDO Worldwide, the advertising agency that created the Frito-Lay “Senior Moment” commercial aired on this year’s Super Bowl broadcast.

The current uproar about the Super Bowl centers on a tasteless half-time show (which I had the good sense not to watch) but I suggest some indignation should be saved for this commercial.

In case you missed it, the 30-second ad shows an old man and an old woman, presumably a couple, vying with one another to reach a bag of potato chips that had fallen on the floor. As the woman lurches toward the prize, the man reaches out, catches her ankle with his cane, and sends her sprawling.

As he totters by her, he presses his cane into her back to keep her down. When he captures the package, he looks back at her triumphantly.  With a gloating grin, however, she looks up at him and holds up a full set of his false teeth.

Does this seem funny to you? A group of MBA students at Washington University in St. Louis voted it the third best among this year’s Super Bowl commercials. This marked the fourth consecutive year in which the students held the competition, after evaluating the ads with faculty members and visiting advertising agency pros.

“Who would have thought ole grandpa had such spunk? Could you ever imagine a  gramma as feisty as she?  What a hoot to see these old codgers ready to do violence to one another for potato chips!” (Such may have been the level of critical response to the ad from these future business leaders of America.)

It escaped them entirely that the ad might have conveyed an image of elderly people that is not only unflattering but full of prejudice. The students are supposed to be whetting their critical intelligence, but instead they accepted as funny a commercial that trades on stereotypes.

Two Harvard undergraduates of my acquaintance, Jackie O’Brien and Stephanie Hurder, also found the ad innocent: “I do not think the ad made fun of the elderly in a harmful way,” says Jackie. Stephanie adds: “Perhaps the reason I found the ad entertaining was that it portrayed old people being feisty, when it’s usually assumed that old people are docile and incapable of physical conflict.”

In stressing humor, they have a point. But I wonder in this instance if they are not missing something. There may be a generational difference at work here. Perhaps you have to be closer to my age to feel offended by ads like this one. And maybe you also need a more seasoned view of American culture and the advertising industry that reflects our values.

I side with longtime ad watcher John Carroll, currently executive producer of “Greater Boston” on WGBH-TV, who labels the ad as the “cheapest, lamest, grasp at a laugh.”

Another friend, Robert Katz, a long-time advertising executive, finds this ad to be in “very poor taste.” My age peer Emerson Stamps regrets “an acting out of the violence of society” while Donna Svrluga says simply: “I was appalled.”

The views of the students at Washington University and at Harvard would be welcomed by the people at Frito-Lay in Dallas. I spoke to the company’s director of public relations, Charles Nicolas, who told me the ad has proved so popular in other countries that Frito-Lay decided to present it on the Super Bowl broadcast. He admits, however, that they have received negative feedback as well as positive.

Nicolas confesses not knowing how to react to the criticism. “It was an attempt at humor,” he says, and adds. “We didn’t mean to offend anyone.” Fortunately, the company has no plans to show it again in this country but it is currently airing it in Mexico and eight other countries.

Maybe they would have profited, as I did, from the work of the “Media Watch,” a committee of the Gray Panthers that used to monitor television programs and commercials for evidence of mistaken views of elders.

Members of this group raised my own consciousness in the 1970s about the often subtle stereotypes of older people that were more common then. Not without a certain militancy, the Panthers would go after the producers of the ads and growl at the networks that showed them.

You may wonder if I am making to big a deal out of this.  After all, it was just an ad. What difference does it make except to sell more potato chips?

But ageism, like racism and sexism, exerts harmful outcomes on society. People lose their jobs because of it. Older Americans get shortchanged in quality health care because of ageist attitudes. And many people are made to feel worthless because growing older is regarded in so many quarters as the road to irrelevance.

The kind of prejudice behind the “Senior Moment” ad (this title itself I find patronizing) is subtle and covered over by an attempt at humor. That does not make it any less objectionable.

Richard Griffin

“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