Death. Justice. And very smart people in very strange times. Those are the favored topics of documentarian Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line, Mr. Death). In his new film, The Fog of War, he finds all three in Robert McNamara, the Kennedy- and Johnson-era defense secretary whose career spanned the WWII-era U.S. firebombings of Japan, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam. Fog looks back at the octogenarian’s time at the White House and draws eleven “lessons,” as Fog’s subtitle calls them, about war, nuclear brinksmanship, and presidential power. It’s a fascinating film that’s all too relevant to today’s geopolitics.
THE RAKE: Was it hard to get McNamara to sit down with you?
ERROL MORRIS: Originally he wasn’t going to come at all, and then for an hour. There was this incremental agreement to go on….When he agreed to come up, I don’t think he understood what it meant. I’m interested in very long interviews. Usually, people think it’s going to be half an hour or an hour. Not twenty hours. I would have interviewed him more if I could have.
You invented a device called the Interrotron, which allows you and your interviewees to look at each other rather than the camera lens. How important is this to your movies?
The whole deal is that you’re making eye contact. There’s a transaction going back and forth. It’s a first-person deal rather than the third-person deal….The McNamara movie is a sort of exercise in subjectivity. It’s an unchallenged first-person account. You’re almost inside his head. And littered through that intensely subjective account—if you like, almost an interior monologue—are all of these pieces of evidence. Brute facts, phone calls, the memoranda from the Tokyo firebombing. So it’s both intensely objective on the one end and very subjective on the other.
Before making documentaries, you literally were a private detective. Those job skills obviously still come in handy.
Tons of movies chronicle investigations, you follow detectives and get a keen sense of what they’re doing, but it’s really pretend investigation. What The Thin Blue Line did, and what this movie does, is, you see a kind of residue of really intense investigation. McNamara was amazed; we came up with these 1945 memos that he wrote, suggesting that they lower the bombing altitudes of the B-29s in order to make the bombing more efficient. I don’t think anyone has seen that stuff since World War Two. But there it is on the screen.
And you also dug up recordings of John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and McNamara discussing how to pull out of Vietnam—in 1963.
It’s telling you something at variance with the received view of McNamara, that he was responsible for escalating the war. That simple equation of bellicose McNamara plus vacillatory Johnson equals Vietnam. Versus the other equation of bellicose Johnson plus vacillatory McNamara equals Vietnam.
Because after Kennedy dies, Johnson and the Joint Chiefs want to escalate the fighting.
And it’s a very different story: What do you do as a presidential advisor when the president gives you a very clear indication that he wants to go to war? And it’s interesting because it’s more complex and in a way more disturbing. It’s not letting McNamara off the hook.
One of the eleven lessons is “rationality will not save us.” And of course, the question then is—
What will? I don’t know.
Are you optimistic about humanity’s future?
It’s an interesting question to ask me, of all people. Probably not. I like to think of myself as one of those naysayers. But I think that McNamara is right: There’s some kind of internationalism needed. To weaken the United Nations at this time is sheer idiocy. We need to find other ways to address issues than going to war. And we need to control nuclear arms, or we will indeed eventually just blow ourselves to smithereens. Because one of the McNamara lessons—and I think it’s actually the frightening lesson—is that it’s not a world of conspiracies, it’s a world where errors are made repeatedly. There’s confusion, self-deception. Lying. Mistakes. And on and on and on and on.
The Fog of War opens February 6 at the Uptown Theatre. 2906 Hennepin Ave. S., Minneapolis, (612) 925-6006, www.landmarktheatres.com
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