On 2003: The Fog of War
Upon doing some research on Ol’ Reliable Wikipedia, it seems like 2003 was kind of a good year for documentaries. Capturing the Friedmans, Touching the Void, My Architect, The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, and The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, all released the same year. My cinematic taste generally runs action-comedic oriented, and I was worried that in doing this series I would inadvertently spotlight only action and adventure films. So for this next entry, I chose to steer away from narrative films and head toward documentaries.
This was a decision that solidified itself with the passing of Henry Kissinger, a man who sounds so horrible that I’m shocked this guy was able to sleep at night with all the genocides he helped to enable. What’s even more shocking to me is how much political establishment seemed to embrace him with open arms and rely on him for advice until the very end. I know very little about Kissinger’s time as Secretary of State. With all of the killing that occurred in Vietnam and in other places on the planet as a result of American intervention during his tenure, would you even call him successful? At the very least, it doesn’t seem like he’s ever been held accountable for all the terrible atrocities he’s committed. America holds everyone else accountable for atrocities, but our leaders get off with a slap to the wrist. As an American and global citizen, I feel like it’s important to point these things out. What is a free existence if you can’t voice your opinion about the way leaders run and influence things?
Anyway, wanting to pick a different sort of movie for this series and Henry Kissinger’s death steered me toward choosing The Fog of War for my next cinematic look back at 2003. What’s interesting is that Henry Kissinger isn’t in this movie at all, even though it covers America’s involvement in Vietnam. This movie is about American business executive and secretary of defense Robert McNamara, who served in World War II as a member of the Air Force, and oversaw the increase of American troops in Vietnam during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. The film is structured around the insights he’s learned throughout his career, but the title of this movie isn’t Robert McNamara’s Secrets for Successful Diplomacy*. The title of this movie is The Fog of War, which McNamara himself describes as “war is so complex, it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables…our judgment, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people, unnecessarily.”
Robert McNamara above (no, he’s not just a random guy). Spoilers for The Fog of War to follow…
Watching McNamara recount his glory days in the Air Force while facilitating the firebombing of Japanese cities — and this is before the film does a deep dive into McNamara’s involvement in Vietnam — is something else. What this movie will potentially drill into your head is that empathy with populations of the world is desperately needed from the heads of state, not for the purpose of outsmarting the enemy (as McNamara states in the film), but so war can be avoided altogether. I’m going off an assumption from what I watched, but I was astounded by how little remorse McNamara seemed to openly show when describing some of the worst loss of life in the 20th century. He cries when he remembers the day he found out Kennedy was shot, but not when he describes burning “a hundred thousand civilians in a single night in Tokyo” or when he recalls how close we came to nuclear war with Cuba.
Director Errol Morris, an extremely accomplished documentarian who first made a name for himself with The Thin Blue Line, intersperses McNamara’s anecdotes and explanations with footage that does an excellent job of immersing you in the decades and periods of war that are covered. There’s a terrific pace to the editing that keeps the film exciting and engaging. And structuring the movie around McNamara’s lessons gives the film an exciting trajectory. You don’t get a chronological portrayal of McNamara’s life, but somehow this cinematic approach works. The lessons he learned from his work in World War II, and the loss of life he witnessed and admits to facilitating, really sets the tone when the topic of Vietnam gets introduced. It’s hard to imagine being riveted by a movie where the main attraction is an eighty-plus-year old man recounting his glory days in the halls of power, but something about McNamara talking about his direct involvement in so many dramatic, world-shaping events with the nonchalance of describing something unusual his dog saw on a daily walk has the effect of being very gripping, and slightly off-putting.
Man, that “Fortunate Son” song really is not helping things…
Robert McNamara in the 1960s
The ending of this film is marked by failure: the failure of McNamara and others in Johnson’s administration to realize they were in over their head with Vietnam, along with the failure of McNamara and Johnson to get on the same page about how exactly America would achieve its goals in the country. And it struck me as crazy that for all the accomplishments the secretary had achieved by this point, he couldn’t do anything in terms of getting troops removed, or convince the President to stem the loss of life that was increasing overseas. I mean, you attended Berkeley and Harvard, were one of the heads of the Ford Motor Company, directly reported to Kennedy and guided the nation through the Cuban Missile Crisis — you’re unquestionably a brilliant guy; yet you can’t figure out how to stop the bleeding in a war we shouldn’t have been fighting, and that’s incredibly unpopular?
What’s even more remarkable is when Morris asks the former secretary whether he saw himself as “the author [of Vietnam] or an instrument of events outside of his control”. And McNamara basically deflects all responsibility for the war to Johnson. Even for the most casual followers of politics and students of history, you know that statesmanship is a team effort. And McNamara was a part of that team that got the United States into a war that it couldn’t get out of, and in which up to two million people on both sides died.
“Mr. President, how about taking those troops out of Vietnam today?”
”No.”
”Alright, sorry I asked.”
What I do appreciate is how candid Robert McNamara is about his experiences. “I’m at an age where I can look back and derive some conclusions about my actions,” he says at the beginning of the film. And this is a very smart guy, sharing what he’s learned from his time being involved in two wars, and spearheading the field of policy analysis as part of the Ford Motor Company. “My rule is to try to learn, try to understand what happened, develop the lessons, and pass them on,” he says, over Morris’ chosen footage of guns firing and planes crash-landing in the ocean. And it’s almost like the director is saying, “what can you actually learn from war and all its cruelty anyway?”
The Fog of War is the kind of movie that would have put me to sleep if I would have seen it in high school. I wouldn’t have understood its implications, being as young and sheltered as I was. What does some old guy talking about his time in politics and his memories of a war forty years ago have to do with seventeen-year-old me anyway? That would have been my thought process. But watching The Fog of War at my riper age, with devastating wars in Ukraine and Gaza and in other places that aren’t as prominently reported, provided me with a glimpse into the mentality and destruction and violence that seem to be some of the ingredients for global conflicts, past and future. I loved this film and hated what it taught me, which is that so much loss of life can come down to misunderstandings, bad luck, and bullheadedness, and none of this has to do with who’s right or who’s wrong, or who’s “good” and who’s “evil”.