Written by Linda
March 01, 2009
If today's leaders, specifically George Dubya and his administration, would take the time to watch Errol Morris' documentary The Fog of War, by god, they might learn something. In fact, they should be required to watch this film, as should all Americans.
If you think this administration is pussy-footing around the just cause of the Iraq war—a conflict that seems to be spiraling out of control day by day—The Fog of War will give you chills. Acclaimed documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Gates of Heaven, Fast, Cheap, & Out of Control) points his lens at Robert McNamara, the infamous Secretary of Defense under John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson. Under McNamara's watch, the United States entered the Vietnam conflict, and by the time he resigned (or was fired?) in 1969, the body count of U.S. soldiers was already 25,000.
McNamara, still sharp-as-a-tack at 85, recounts not only his tenure as Secretary of Defense in the 1960s, but reminisces about his role in World War II, as a military advisor, partially responsible for the firebombings in Japan. Though the firebombing of Tokyo is most famous—a relentless air-raid that killed 100,000 by burning the wooden city to the ground—he also talks about the less-mentioned bombings of over 60 cities across Japan that killed thousands and thousands more civilians. And this was before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To drive home the impact, the destroyed Japanese city names are flashed across the screen, super-imposed with equivalent-sized U.S. cities like Chattanooga, Chicago, Spokane, and Sacramento. Effective, to say the least.
A segment about his tenure at the Ford Motor Company, where he helped develop seats belts and padded dashboards to reduce fatalities, slows down the film. But the pace picks up again, and the film hits its peak, with his reminiscing about his role in the Vietnam conflict. It is eerie how the order of events seem to parallel a certain modern conflict, and at one point, the screening audience actually applauded one of McNamara's comments for its current relevance. McNamara offers no excuses, but just tells of events from his point of view. Despite his powerful role in the government, he still had to appease his President. Regarding his touch and potentially catastrophic decisions, he had to constantly ask himself, "How much evil must we do in order to do good?"
In an epilogue, Morris ask McNamara if he has had any sense of guilt nagging him about the Vietnam War. Stubbornly refusing to grovel for forgiveness, he mentions the "damned if you do, damned if you don't" conundrum when it comes to acknowledging his role in the deaths of thousands of American soldiers. "I'd rather be damned if I don't," he states without looking at the camera. That just about says it all, as nothing is black and white in this Fog of War.
