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Subject: [SIXTIES-L] 'THE FOG OF WAR' Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 17:46:35 -0700 From: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz <rdunbaro at pacbell.net>
October 11, 2003 MOVIE REVIEW | 'THE FOG OF WAR'
Revisiting McNamara and the War He Headed By STEPHEN HOLDEN
If there's one movie that ought to be studied by military and civilian leaders around the world at this treacherous historical moment, it is "The Fog of War," Errol Morris's sober, beautifully edited documentary portrait of the former United States defense secretary, Robert S. McNamara. Mr. McNamara, who was 85 when the interviews that make up the bulk of the film were conducted two years ago, served under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson from 1961 to early 1968. He has been widely vilified as a major architect of the Vietnam War, which cost more than 58,000 American lives and, according to Mr. McNamara, the lives of 3.4 million Vietnamese.
Subtitled "Eleven Lessons of Robert S. McNamara," "The Fog of War," which has the first of two New York Film Festival screenings this evening, organizes his reflections into a list of maxims about war and human error, with the cumulative message suggesting that in wartime nobody in power really knows anything.
The documentary, which has a solemn, anxious score by Philip Glass, incorporates White House tapes of conversations about Vietnam that Mr. McNamara had with both presidents, along with vintage clips from World War II and Vietnam.
Stocky and slick haired, with rimless glasses and a grand corporate manner, Mr. McNamara appears to be an exceptionally articulate, self-confident man who came to this project prepared to deflect embarrassing questions about his personal responsibility for the debacle. While he readily confesses to having made serious mistakes of judgment, he will not admit to any grave moral failures.
Near the end of the film, when pressed about whether he feels guilty about Vietnam, he dances nimbly away from the question.
He also has a streak of grandstanding sentimentality. The only moment in which he betrays emotion is during a moist-eyed reminiscence of Kennedy's assassination and burial. And he goes out of his way to mention his good deeds. Before going into government, he worked for the Ford Motor Company (he was briefly the company's president), where he was instrumental in the establishment of new safety features, including car seat belts. Years later, at an antiwar protest in Washington, he made sure that the rifles of the soldiers guarding the Pentagon weren't loaded.
Mr. McNamara, who left the Defense Department in 1968, remained silent about his feelings about the Vietnam War until his 1995 memoir "In Retrospect" whose reflections, including the 11 lessons, are tersely recycled in the movie.
The gist of his rationalization for escalating the war is twofold. He was serving a president (Johnson) who was strongly opposed to withdrawing American troops from Southeast Asia. Shortly before leaving office in February 1968, he sent a private memo to Johnson urging a scaling down of the war but received no response.
Beyond that, he suggests in a tone sadder and wiser but not apologetic, that the complexity of war, its "fog" if you will, makes it all but impossible for military planners to see the whole picture, except in hindsight.
"Any military commander who is honest will admit that he makes mistakes in the application of military power," he declares. And he worries that because there's "no learning period" for nuclear weapons, which can be deployed in 15 minutes at the whim of a single individual, one mistake could end up destroying nations.
"The Fog of War," goes far beyond Vietnam. During World War II Mr. McNamara served as a commander under the arch-hawk Gen. Curtis Le May, who appears in old photos and film clips as a caricature of a pragmatic, cigar-chomping war-monger. Under Le May, Mr. McNamara was part of the team that made the decision to firebomb 67 Japanese cities, killing large numbers of civilians. In Tokyo alone, more than 100,000 civilians died one night in March 1945.
That was before the atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The lesson that came out of that, Mr. McNamara says, is that "proportionality should be a guideline in war." After the war, he recalls, Le May surmised that had the United States lost World War II, he and Mr. McNamara would have been prosecuted as war criminals.
Mr. McNamara was also at Kennedy's side during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the president had to choose between answering two conflicting messages from the Soviets, one belligerent, the other more conciliatory. At the urging of the former ambassador to the Soviet Union, Tommy Thompson, who knew Nikita S. Khrushchev well and understood that the Soviet leader was looking for a way to avert war while saving face, Kennedy ignored the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to destroy Cuba and responded to the softer message. It was dumb luck, he says, that averted a nuclear war. The lesson that came out of that experience is arguably the most useful of the 11: "Empathize with your enemy."
It was our lack of empathy, Mr. McNamara asserts, that also caused the United States to get so deeply embroiled in Vietnam. What the United States viewed as an extension of the cold war the Vietnamese regarded as a civil war. Parallels can be found between Vietnam and the current war in Iraq. Then, as now, the United States acted without the support of most of its allies. "What makes us omniscient?" Mr. McNamara wonders. "We are the strongest nation in the world today, and I do not believe we should ever apply that economic, political or military power unilaterally. If we'd followed that rule in Vietnam, we wouldn't have been there. None of our allies supported us. If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better re-examine our reasoning."
None of the documentary's lessons can be described as reassuring. "Believing and seeing are both often wrong," one says. "Rationality will not save us," goes another. The final and saddest lesson is delivered by Mr. McNamara with a rueful, you-know-what-I-mean smile:" "You can't change human nature."
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Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 21:25:42 -0500 From: Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu>
Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz quoted: Beyond that, he suggests in a tone sadder and wiser but not apologetic, that the complexity of war, its "fog" if you will, makes it all but impossible for military planners to see the whole picture, except in hindsight.
When I read this paragraph I wanted to scream. I don't know whether I could sit through the movie, given that even reading these notes on it is almost too much. What a fucking asshole. Carrol Cox
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Date: Sat, 11 Oct 2003 21:39:57 -0700 From: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz <rdunbaro at pacbell.net>
Yes, a war criminal. He should be in Leavenworth instead of Leonard Peltier. Roxanne
Carrol Cox wrote: [CLIP]
------ Subject: Re: [SIXTIES-L] Psychedelic painter propels Pentagon posters Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 10:34:47 -0400 From: Ted Morgan <epm2 at LEHIGH.EDU>
After reading this and the piece Roxanne sent around about the McNamara film "Fog of War," I guess my only comment is that the media culture LOVES this stuff: a) reducing a horrendous and criminal war in our collective past to the person of an anguished ex-secretary of Defense after whom the war was named, for a while --we're invited to feel sorry for old Bob, through his 'suffering' we can all start to feel better; and b) a cultural icons like Peter Max, linked in public memory to the subversive sixties, creating the poster for the Pentagon's 9/11 memorial, complete with the quote, "I am also very proud of this thing called democracy and thank God most of the world is moving that way."
I mean it just all goes to show that things are fine these days; we're all one happy family, right? [So, don't worry, be happy; go out & buy! - Ted Morgan
the moderator wrote:
Psychedelic painter propels Pentagon posters by Dennis Ryan Pentagram staff writer
Lady Liberty stands proudly against a backdrop of a somewhat "cosmic" [CLIP] The artist, the architects, Pentagon Memorial Fund President Jim Laychak who lost his brother in the Sept. 11 attack, and Rosemary O'Brien, who represents project sponsor AT&T, attended the unveiling.
Max first came to public prominence by doing album covers and book jackets in a psychedelic style. His style evolved into the famous "Cosmic 60's" school of art which made Max into a household name. Max was on the cover of Life magazine by 1969. [CLIP]
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Subject: Re: [SIXTIES-L] Psychedelic painter propels Pentagon posters Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2003 08:17:27 -0700 From: Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz <rdunbaro at pacbell.net>
I'm sure this is right in general. I haven't seen Fog of War yet--I think it opens in December--but judging by Errol Morris's other documentaries I doubt that McNamara gets off as anything but a war criminal in denial. Roxanne
Ted Morgan wrote: After reading this and the piece Roxanne sent around about the McNamara [CLIP]
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Subject: RE: [SIXTIES-L] 'THE FOG OF WAR' Date: Thu, 16 Oct 2003 23:33:16 -0400 (EDT) From: Sdsrebels at aol.com
It's amazing what those guys (McNamara etc.) get away with. Here's an excerpt from an interview I did with Carl Oglesby (included in a couple videos using more of the interviews I originally did for Rebels with a Cause):
"It's incredible to contemplate the fact that Johnson & McNamara and the rest of them, as we now know from interviews & their books, that they knew everything about the war that we in the streets knew. They knew what they were doing was wrong, in every conceivable dimension. McNamara, in his book Retrospect, basically makes the case against the war now in the '90s that we were trying to make in the '60s."
He continues with some less flattering comments...
And they still walk around free.
Helen Garvy