Site Presented By
Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
Director Errol Morris discusses how his Oscar-winning "The Fog of War" resonates with George W. Bush's foreign policy in Iraq, and the complicated morality of his film's star.
Feb 28, 2004 | Toward the end of "The Fog of War," Errol Morris' deeply important and haunting documentary about the hard-won lessons of history, the subject of the film, former Defense Secretary Robert Strange McNamara -- shrunken and liver-spotted, but older and wiser now -- quotes from T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets":
"We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time."
In "The Fog of War," Morris, who throughout his career has raised documentary filmmaking to the level of art, succeeds in showing us well-worn pages from our past -- the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the Vietnam War -- in such a way that we know them for the first time. Though McNamara has not fully come to terms with his past as the numbers-driven architect of the Vietnam War, his impassioned grappling with that war and the rest of his defense record make for a uniquely fascinating history lesson. Morris began his interviews with McNamara before 9/11 and the war in Iraq. But the film, with its insights into how even the most rational officials can blunder and deceive themselves and the public into epic tragedies, has struck a chord that Morris could not have predicted.
Salon spoke to Morris (before "The Fog of War" won the Oscar on Sunday for best documentary) by phone in Cambridge, Mass., where he works and lives with his wife, art historian Julia Sheehan, and their son Hamilton.
You are responsible, in a way, for rehabilitating Robert McNamara. And yet he still remains a troubling figure for many people, who criticize him for not speaking out during the Vietnam War about his growing doubts about the war -- even after he left office in 1968. You must have a pretty good sense of the man by now. What prevented him from speaking out?
It's a question that I certainly would like to answer, but I'm not sure I can answer. If it was a mystery when I started making this movie, it remains a mystery having finished the movie. McNamara was up in my office yesterday for a number of hours, and the issue comes up again and again and again and again: Why didn't you speak out back then against the war in Vietnam? You talk to different people, they have different complaints about McNamara, different reasons why they hate him.
I know when I spoke to [Vietnam War correspondent] Frances Fitzgerald while I was making this movie, she said it was the fact that she would get off these transports from Vietnam at Andrews Air Force Base, where there would be crowds of reporters, and McNamara would say over and over again, "Things are improving. We're winning the war" -- when he knew otherwise. Basically, he lied to the American people, and possibly to himself. For other writers, like my friend Ron Rosenbaum, it's the fact that he didn't speak out after he left office in 1968. The fact that he continued to serve Johnson despite his doubts about the war, that's maybe OK, but it's not beyond the pale. What for him is beyond the pale is that he left in early '68, and we all know that the war went on and on and on and on -- '69, '70, '71, '72, '73. And he still did not speak out. Fifty-eight thousand American dead, millions of Vietnamese, and there he was, safely ensconced as president of the World Bank. For him, that is inexcusable.
What do you feel?
You know, it depends on which day you ask me. Someone asked me this earlier today -- that I should talk more about my father. My father died when I was 2 years old. I have no memories of my father. McNamara is perhaps the ultimate father figure. He was the father figure in some way for a generation. Maybe that's making too much of it. But for me, having this relationship with him -- and it is a relationship, it would be incorrect to claim otherwise -- produces such a range of emotion for me. It's not as if, say, close to 40 years later, I've come to love the Vietnam War, a war which I demonstrated against in the late '60s and early '70s. I found the war appalling then, I find the war appalling now, I've had no reason to change that view. That has been a constant.
It's not only people on the left who are deeply disturbed by McNamara, of course. He's also vilified by the right, who believe that he forced the military to fight with one hand tied behind its back, out of fear of widening the war.
Absolutely. As I point out often, McNamara got the hat trick. He's hated by the left, the right and the center. Congratulations!
"The Fog of War" focuses of course on McNamara's career, but I think it's touched a public chord because the lessons of Vietnam resonate in Bush's America. Was that your intention?
I started my interviews with McNamara well before 9/11, but as we worked on the film, I would show various sections of the movie, and eventually rough cuts of the movie, to different people, and they would constantly point out, "This is incredibly relevant ... The movie should be out today."
I don't believe that history exactly repeats itself. That's not the argument. History's like the weather -- it never exactly repeats itself. And there's a danger in making inappropriate and false analogies, but it's really hard to look at this story without seeing parallels, common themes. I think about why I was attracted to doing this movie with McNamara in the first place. One of the reasons most certainly is that his stories, whether he knows it clearly or not, his stories are about error, confusion, mistakes, self-deception, wishful thinking, false ideology. It's a cornucopia of bad stuff, of human failings. And what's so interesting is that in some form or another, we see them in play today.
You see in the film the story behind the imagined attack by the North Vietnamese on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. Never happened. We imagined it. We imagined something that wasn't there. Sound familiar?
