Opens Fri Feb 6.
After the war, Harry Summers recalled an encounter with a North Vietnamese general in which Summers said that the Americans won every battle in Vietnam. The general replied, "That may be so, but it is also irrelevant."
--from Argument Without End by Robert S. McNamaran, et al.
The most startling moment in Errol Morris' The Fog of War occurs early in the picture when the film's subject, Robert S. McNamara, former secretary of defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and one of the chief architects of the Vietnam War, announces that, given the evidence of history, he could have been tried as a war criminal. His admission has nothing to do with Vietnam and the estimated three million who died there, however, but with America's "Last Good War," World War II, and the 67 Japanese cities McNamara helped orchestrate the firebombings of. Firebombing, as the name certainly implies, is rather nasty work, and as McNamara rattles off the cities set aflame by U.S. pilots, he offers American cities of comparable size and population to help drive the brutality home. The decimation of Japan before "Fat Man" and "Little Boy" descended on their targets in 1945 is an often ignored blemish in our country's history, and McNamara's admission that, in hindsight, he could have--or possibly should have--been brought before the courts for his involvement helps describe the moral chaos he has lived in for the past 60 years. What place does morality have in warfare, McNamara ponders, and his inability to provide an answer speaks to much of what The Fog of War is about. This is a film intent on finding answers, but in the end it comes up empty for a single reason: The man who should provide those answers is lost in a fog himself.
At the time the film was shot, McNamara was 85 years old. His hair having long ago traveled south, his face weary and wrinkled, he seems beaten down by his past as he first sits down before Morris' "Interrotron." For those unfamiliar with Morris' invention, the Interrotron is a device that allows direct eye contact between Morris and his subjects while they are being filmed, and the intimacy the equipment allows lends power to McNamara's testimony; speaking directly to us, even making eye contact with us, the former secretary of defense appears decidedly small as he takes us through his embattled life. Morris occasionally asks questions of McNamara, which sound as if he's shouting them at his subject from the back of an auditorium, and the result bounces back and forth between easy conversation and heated interrogation. McNamara has no fear of looking back at the past--indeed, he is a true believer in the lessons of history--but he is obviously not ready to fully cop to his guilt in the Vietnam debacle, despite his efforts in recent years to reexamine his actions during the war. Perhaps McNamara will never be able to admit what so many want him to say, but his appearance says much, expressing that he is a man who is well aware that there may be a seat waiting for him in hell. (If only the same could be said for the smug appearance of our current leaders.)
Still, no matter how much self-infliction McNamara may one day muster, the disaster of the Vietnam War--and it surely was a disaster--can never fully rest upon his slumped shoulders; there were a number of blunders made by both sides leading up to and during "McNamara's War," and The Fog of War takes us through many of them. They are blunders that date back to just after WWII, including an outstretched hand from Ho Chi Minh to then president Harry S. Truman that was ignored, which eventually laid the groundwork for a severe lack of communication on both sides. Then there is the "domino theory," coined by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, which served as the major justification for the conflict under the premise that if South Vietnam fell to communism, then all of Southeast Asia would have been lost to the hordes, tipping the Cold War scale heavily in favor of the Reds. Both of these cases, along with a number of others, are examined and explained by McNamara in the film, and though there are surely enough blunders to go around, McNamara doesn't hide himself behind them. This fact places The Fog of War in a precarious position; without shifting the blame, yet not fully admitting his own blame, McNamara engulfs the years 1961 to 1970, and his culpability, within a fog of his own creation.
It is, in the end, this obscuring fog that both surrounds McNamara and originates from him that gives the film its heft. There are no easy answers, and no blatant villains, to be found within The Fog of War, and this is perhaps as it should be. War is never a clean affair, and looking back on Vietnam--even with a firsthand guide such as McNamara--it appears no cleaner. Some have complained about McNamara's refusal to fully admit his guilt--they seem to want him to apologize for the whole affair. No such words appear to be coming from the former secretary of defense, but what he offers instead is in some ways more interesting. McNamara is quite obviously riddled with guilt about Vietnam, which was a pitiful tragedy. As The Fog of War artfully shows us, McNamara is now a pitiful, tragic figure himself.
