> i dunno about the old heads on here but i found it tedious.
As an "old head" who also saw the preview, I didn't think it was tedious, but I agree with the reviews I've seen that pointed out that McNamara never quite comes clean. He does quote his old commander Gen. Le May making the point that, if the U.S. had lost WW II both of them would have been tried by the Japanese as war criminals for such acts as fire-bombing Tokyo, and asks the question, "What makes an act a war crime if you lose, and not a war crime if you win?" But he doesn't answer the question.
He agonizes a certain extent about the question of doing evil in war to achieve good ends, but he doesn't have any penetrating philosophical points to make about it. At the end of the film, he concludes that you can't change human nature, and war is part of human nature. The interviewer invites him to apologize for his role in Vietnam, or at least say where he might have committed errors (I don't remember exactly the wording); McNamara abruptly says, "I won't say anything more than what I have," and shuts down. I got the impression that he probably feels a great deal of remorse, but at the end of his life he won't express it publicly.
Whether the director intended it or not, he seems to have set up the whole film to portray McNamara as a moderate -- Le May is referred to several times as a personification of the extreme hawk faction McNamara was constantly (according to him) battling against. He says, of his role as Vietnam War DefSec, that he was resisting pressures that would have led to another world war or even a nuclear war.
In sum, I didn't learn anything particularly about old Bob that I didn't know already, but for young people interested in the Vietnam War era, it might have some educational value.
Jon Johanning // jjohanning at igc.org __________________________________ A gentleman haranguing on the perfection of our law, and that it was equally open to the poor and the rich, was answered by another, 'So is the London Tavern.' -- "Tom Paine's Jests..." (1794); also attr. to John Horne Tooke (1736-1812) by Hazlitt