Another riveting section of your film deals with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when McNamara says we were a hair's breadth away from nuclear holocaust. It's startling for people today to realize how close we were, and how hard-pressed Kennedy and his inner circle, including McNamara, were by the military hard-liners to go to war.

There's an amazing moment if you listen to the recordings when the Joint Chiefs confront Kennedy. And it's really, really, really frightening.

What do they say?

They're basically saying that Kennedy should invade and bomb Cuba. And he should do it sooner rather than later. All he's doing through delay is giving the Soviets more time to get ready to launch an attack on the United States. That delay is unconscionable, and that anything other than a military response is unconscionable. There's a moment -- you listen to the tapes, you can imagine what that scene must've been like -- when Curtis LeMay [the famously zealous Air Force chief] says to Kennedy, "This is worse than Munich."

And of course, he knew what a slap in the face that was to Kennedy, whose father, Joe, was considered a Nazi appeaser before World War II.

Yes, indeed. That is part of that story. Thank you very much.

How does Kennedy respond?

Kennedy does not respond. There's silence. Kennedy says very little to the generals.

One of the things that really fascinates me about that moment, where LeMay says this is worse than Munich, is that it goes right back to a question you asked me at the beginning of our conversation about historical analogies. Iraq, Vietnam, Munich, the Cuban missile crisis, the danger of this sort of thing. But let's look at the reality here.

First of all, the Kennedy administration had been given faulty information by the CIA. They had been told there were no Soviet warheads on Cuba. OK, so what should the president conclude? Perhaps the Joint Chiefs are absolutely right. Act sooner rather than later. Take out the missiles, take out the missile launchers and the missile sites before the warheads arrive. Although in fact several of those Joint Chiefs wanted to go a little further than Cuba, they wanted to go take out the Soviet Union and China as well. They had big appetites. But we now know that if LeMay and the other Joint Chiefs had had their way, and there was bombing and an invasion, the local Soviet commanders who had autonomy would have used those missiles with warheads against the United States. Can I say this with certainty? No. But was there a good likelihood if we invaded and bombed that they would reply? Yep. So that in this instance, "appeasement" averted a catastrophe. The analogy to Munich isn't an analogy at all. People often make these analogies. What is Munich? It's a way of calling a leader like Kennedy a candy-ass. And because of your weakness, because of your policies, everyone will have to suffer. It will lead to an even worse catastrophe than you can imagine. In this instance -- wrong! The diplomatic solution proved to be the correct one.

So during the Cuban missile crisis, "The Fog of War" makes clear that the Kennedys and McNamara acted heroically, and by defying the generals, saved the world.

Yes. You know, I worry for many reasons about being seen as a McNamara apologist. But based on the research that I've done, I do not see McNamara in the same way I saw him years ago. I see him quite differently. I no longer see him as the chief architect of the war in Vietnam. I no longer see it the way that ["The Best and the Brightest" author] David Halberstam sees the Vietnam War, for instance, that it was the product of a bellicose McNamara and a vacillating Johnson. I believe it was the other way around. And I believe that McNamara, throughout the Cuban missile crisis, was a restraining force on the military. And helped keep us out of war.

Now I also believe that McNamara willingly implemented Johnson's Vietnam policies. Why? Why is the question. If he was so opposed in Oct. 2, 1963, while Kennedy was still president, not just to the escalation of the war, but to our continued presence in Vietnam past 1965, how is it that he becomes the enabler in the Johnson administration? How the hell does this come to be? I have my answers. Are they conclusive answers? They aren't. But it does go back to these questions of McNamara's personal code of honor -- if you're rule-bound, when does loyalty to the public, when does loyalty to the republic, when does loyalty to the truth trump responsibility and loyalty to the president. As one Harvard historian, Peter Hall, very kindly said about my movie, it is one of the very few works of history -- and he did consider it a work of history -- that shows clearly the complexity of the decisions that people had to make.

Speaking of McNamara's role as a restraining force on the military, it's ironic -- today, in the Bush administration, the situation is reversed. It's the military commanders who are the voice of reason, and the civilians like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the others who are the crazies.

They're like cheerleaders. They're out there with short skirts and pompoms and letter sweaters, urging the country into war. The one military leader in a civilian post in the Bush administration [Colin Powell] has been marginalized because of his reluctance to go to war. It's ironic. It's even funny in a grim sort of way. And it's goddamn frightening.

But perhaps not as frightening as the Cuban missile crisis, when the entire world was on the brink.

Yes. And you don't know whether it was a ploy, of course, a way to wring concessions from the Soviets. But in the middle of that crisis, Bobby Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, that Moscow had to understand that if there is not some kind of resolution quickly to this, there is a risk of a coup in the U.S. The military will topple JFK. I like to say that we have come to realize that "Dr. Strangelove" is not a drama, it's a documentary.

McNamara speaks most clearly about himself when he's speaking about others. There's a moment in my movie when Johnson gives McNamara the Medal of Freedom at his farewell ceremony and he's unable to speak. And then in the movie he says what he would've said to Johnson if he had been able to speak. He would have said that people should understand that he had reasons for what he did. That there were people who wished for a war with the Soviet Union and Red China, and he was determined to prevent it. And if you like McNamara, if you're sympathetic to him, it's a key moment. If you hate him, if you dislike him, it is seen as one more pathetic excuse among many. But there's a reason why General LeMay is in this movie so prominently, because he represents a dark part of American history that was there, it was real. This was not a figment of McNamara's imagination. He knew all too well what he was dealing with.

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