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By Kerry Tremain Robert McNamara, whose brilliance and drive took him to the heights of power after his graduation from Berkeley in 1937, has spent the last two decades combing over his life’s mistakes. In his books Wilson’s Ghost and In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam, and now in an Academy Award-winning film bt Errol Morris, The Fog of War, McNamara argues that lessons learned from past mistakes in American foreign policy can reduce the risks of war in the future. He is uniquely placed to comment. As Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, McNamara organized the escalation of American military involvement in Vietnam between 1963 and 1968. Although he left the Johnson administration because he opposed the further escalation of the war, he didn’t speak out publicly until well after the conflict ended in 1975. As McNamara hoped, Morris’ film has brought far wider attention to the lessons he drew from his experiences in wartime and to a reassessment of his own record. Yet, according to Morris, “No matter what he says, people will see him as making excuses for himself.” In February, McNamara returned to Berkeley to promote the film and his message at Zellerbach Auditorium, sharing the stage with former Cal student Morris and moderator Mark Danner, a professor at the Graduate School of Journalism. No one knew exactly how McNamara, a bête noire of the antiwar movement in the 1960s, would be greeted here. The audience was admonished to respect McNamara’s right to speak; but, as it turned out, there were no protests, booing, or rude questions. The mostly middle-aged audience was joined by younger students and graduates who were curious about Vietnam but couldn’t understand why the issues remain so emotional for many in their parents’ generation. Several antiwar veterans there shared the view of a New York Times editorial written when In Retrospect was released: “McNamara must not escape the lasting moral condemnation of his countrymen,” it read, noting that he and Johnson were “men who in the full hubristic glow of their power would not listen to logical warning or ethical appeal…and when young people in the streets shouted it, they were hounded from the country.” His Berkeley critics said they could never forgive him for his prosecution of the war, but nonetheless wished that he would apologize and admit he was wrong (and, by implication, that they were right) about the war. They said the film added nothing new or illuminating to the historical record. Others, including the filmmaker, were more sympathetic to McNamara and curious about his reflections on his role in history. “I’m
amazed by people who tell me this is a man who doesn’t feel any remorse for what he’s done,” Morris told California Monthly. “I believe I’ve made a movie about regret. It shows in almost everything he says.” Introducing McNamara at Zellerbach, Chancellor Robert Berdahl recalled a dinner he once attended with him. “In listening to him, I was struck by the awesome responsibility of power, the frailty of human judgment, and the awful consequences of error,” the chancellor said. “I was also struck by how few who have held power have acknowledged the realities of errors they may have committed. Whatever else one may think about Robert McNamara, he is one of the most reflective people to have exercised power.” More than any other, that quality attracted Morris. “McNamara is unique as a public figure,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of people who have gone back over errors that they committed. Compare In Retrospect to the writings of Henry Kissinger, whose strategy is to create books so boring and intentionally obtuse that no one will be able to read them. People say McNamara hasn’t gone far enough—he’s not really forthcoming, he’s rewriting history, he’s creating excuses for himself, and he’s lying. And I say, they’re right; those elements are all there. But there is something additional there, too--a real attempt to reckon with the past.” In Berkeley, such a full reckoning would include coming to terms with the feud that rent what was once the same political family. Like much of the Zellerbach audience, McNamara is a liberal; a profile in California Monthly in 1961 as he joined the Kennedy administration remarked on his efforts to integrate neighborhoods in Ann Arbor, including his own. His liberalism was also on full display at Zellerbach; he called for national health care reform and for increasing taxes to improve California schools (which drew the biggest cheer of the evening). Liberals in the Democratic Party split apart over the Vietnam War, and McNamara was a polarizing figure. George Packer, author of The Blood of Liberals, argues that the fissure remains today, as exemplified by the argument between Howard Dean and other Democratic presidential candidates over the Iraq war vote. He writes that discomfort with American power and division over security policy, a legacy of the Vietnam conflict, have effectively ceded authority on those issues to Republicans, weakening Democratic candidates at election time. McNamara’s books and the film rarely acknowledge the widespread antiwar movement of the 1960s, but his work of the past two decades can be seen as an attempt to square differences with his liberal critics based on such common goals as building multilateral institutions and controlling nuclear proliferation. In some respects, McNamara and Morris symbolize both the old split and the prospects for mending it. The two men make an intriguing pair: the cold-warrior-turned-apostle-of-peace and the director of films like Mr. Death and The Thin Blue Line, which explore the osmotic boundary between truth and belief. McNamara studied philosophy in Berkeley in the 1930s; Morris was a philosophy graduate student here in the 1970s. Like McNamara, who in a 1968 issue of this magazine credited the University with creating “an environment which, more than any other, shaped the pattern of my life,” Morris believes his years in Berkeley were important ones. “I suddenly came into my own. I became a filmmaker in Berkeley,” he said. He worked for the Pacific Film Archive and made his first film here, Gates of Heaven, about a pet cemetery in Napa. But the two men’s experiences of Berkeley were very different: the Great Depression shaped McNamara’s student years, while the Vietnam War shaped Morris’ time here. “I told McNamara very early on that I had demonstrated against the war. I also told him my feelings hadn’t changed. He did not seem terribly bothered by that,” Morris said. “One of the puzzling things about the story is that the man who holds so many values that are important to me is also a man who did something utterly appalling to me. I like him. But I don’t like him for Vietnam.” Morris spoke very little at Zellerbach, but when he did it was often to affectionately prompt McNamara or elaborate on one of his points. Danner took a more confrontational stance, prodding McNamara to speak out against the war in Iraq. Danner noted that McNamara had returned to his alma mater at a time when the country itself was returning to “a political conundrum very much like the one that we faced in the mid-Sixties,” with a distant, controversial war of unsure objectives and duration that is being taken up in a presidential campaign. If lessons can be learned from Vietnam, he insisted, surely now is the time to apply them. In The Fog of War, McNamara’s on-camera soliloquies sound like a condemnation of Bush’s foreign and military policy, but he does not say so directly and does not explicitly apply his lessons to Iraq. “The word ‘Bush’ does not appear in my books,” McNamara told Danner. Turning to the crowd, he said, “Look, you’re smart. I don’t need to apply them. You apply them!” The Fog of War, partially screened at the Zellerbach event, recounts important phases of McNamara’s career: his role in World War II, when he helped General Curtis LeMay plan firebombing attacks that destroyed 67 Japanese cities and killed a million people; his leadership in the 1950s of the Ford Motor Company; his participation in President Kennedy’s response to the Cuban missile crisis in 1962; and his part in directing the military advisor program in Vietnam under Kennedy, and then the rapid escalation of the war under President Johnson. The film contains surprises, like McNamara’s uphill struggle to enhance passenger safety in Ford’s cars, and recordings of meetings and phone calls by Kennedy and Johnson that reveal McNamara as a restraining voice against administration hawks. The Kennedy tapes also make clear how forcefully military leaders pressed for an invasion of Cuba in 1962, which McNamara convincingly argues would have triggered a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. Inspired by In Retrospect, Morris organized The Fog of War around a group of lessons. A remarkably vigorous 85-year-old, McNamara delivers the film’s eleven lessons in a fast-paced, high-pitched voice, frequently jabbing his finger toward the camera. This footage alternates with hypnotic images of objects falling--dominoes toppling on a map of Asia to symbolize the Cold War fear of
At Zellerbach, McNamara claimed that he had only one motive for participating in Morris’s film: “reducing the risk of conflict, killing, and the use of weapons of mass destruction.” He raised his voice to a near shout: “We human beings killed one hundred and sixty million other human beings in the twentieth century—killed by conflict. Is that what we want in this century?” McNamara would not be high on the list of people whose actions significantly contributed to that total, but he would be on it, and he appears to realize it. He admits in the film that, had the U.S. lost World War II, he and LeMay might well have been tried as war criminals for the massive civilian deaths in Japan. He is also critical of U.S. policy failures in Vietnam. He faults our lack of understanding of Vietnamese culture and history, our acting without allies, our leaders’ refusal to recognize their limitations and to engage the public in a full and frank discussion of military involvement, and our over-reliance on military power to achieve political objectives. “We failed to recognize that in international affairs, as in other aspects of life, there may be problems for which there are no immediate solutions,” he says. “We do not have the God-given right to shape every nation in our image or as we choose.” These points cover several of the lessons from In Retrospect. Late in the program, Danner recited the entire list out loud and, returning again to the current situation, characterized them as eerie echoes of the Bush administration’s intervention in Iraq. “To me, that was the most powerful moment of the evening,” Morris said afterwards. A few weeks later, when Morris accepted his Academy Award, he said, “Forty years ago, this country went down a rabbit hole in Vietnam and millions died. I fear we’re going down a rabbit hole once again.” Those who cannot forgive McNamara fault him in three ways. They say he has failed to express sufficient remorse; that he didn’t speak out about Vietnam when it mattered and he won’t comment on Iraq now; and that he misrepresents aspects of his record in self-serving ways. Morris is impatient with those who say that McNamara can’t be sincere unless he apologizes. “Everybody wants to ‘out’ McNamara,” he says. “ ‘Admit you’re a war criminal! Admit you’re evil! Get down on your knees and beg forgiveness.’ But McNamara has done something I find far more interesting. He’s gone back into his memory of the past, his notes and documents, and tried to figure it out.” To Morris, McNamara’s contradictions—that he advocated withdrawal to Kennedy, but led Johnson’s escalation, and that he refused to speak out about Vietnam because of a personal code that deemed doing so improper for a former defense secretary—are part of what motivated him to make the film. “I get it and I don’t get it,” Morris says. “You know, the world is a surreal place. I’ve made a whole number of movies about how surreal that place is. This is probably the most surreal of all.” Others hold a sharper view. Before he left office, McNamara asked an aide to collect significant government documents about the war for the use of future scholars. Daniel Ellsberg, a military planner, released those secret documents, dubbed the “Pentagon Papers,” to the New York Times in 1971. Their publication revealed that four presidents had repeatedly lied to the public and helped turn the tide of opinion against the Vietnam War. Ellsberg sat in the audience at Zellerbach. He told California Monthly that he was the first to applaud that evening when McNamara spoke against American nuclear weapons policy. He also credits McNamara with restraining the Joint Chiefs of Staff from leading us into a nuclear war with China. “This may sound odd, but I actually have a higher regard for his actions while he was Secretary of Defense than in the years between 1968 and the end of the war.” Ellsberg believes McNamara should have spoken out against the war, as he himself did. He flatly rejects McNamara’s rationale for not doing so: “He talked of potential risk to the troops of speaking out, but is oblivious to the dangers of remaining silent. It was wrong then and it’s wrong now. Silence didn’t just risk lives; it cost lives.” McNamara does misremember certain crucial details. On a return visit to Vietnam in 1997, McNamara told the Vietnamese foreign minister that Vietnam could have avoided war with the United States and accomplished their goals of self-determination and independence had they accepted a proposal for a coalition government in 1963–64. But, as Danner pointed out, the United States never offered such a proposal. A more important distortion concerns a turning point in the war, the Gulf of Tonkin incident. North Vietnam had allegedly attacked the USS Maddox with torpedoes at Tonkin on August 2 and August 4, 1964. In The Fog of War, the captain of the Maddox is shown radioing superiors that the second torpedo “attack” could have merely been misreadings by overeager sonar men. Later investigations indicate the second attack never happened. At Zellerbach, McNamara insisted that he had represented the ambiguities of the situation to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on August 6, just after the incident. But the record of those hearings reveals the opposite: McNamara did not share his doubts about what happened. And, based on McNamara’s testimony, Congress gave Johnson broad powers to execute the war--which led to a massive escalation of the American intervention. The first lesson in The Fog of War is “Empathize with your enemy.” McNamara explains: “We must try to put ourselves inside their skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.” This is arguably the most challenging message in the film. At the Berkeley event, Morris recounted an interview with a TV reporter at Fox News, who said that the film’s lessons were all very good, but obviously didn’t apply now. “You could empathize with the North Vietnamese, but there’s no way to empathize with terrorists,” the reporter said. “The situation is completely different.” “The country is divided over unilateralism versus multilateralism, terrorism, Iraq and so on,” McNamara said, and went on to compare the domestic political context now to the one that existed during the Vietnam War. Johnson wasn’t only worried about protests on the Berkeley campus, he said. “He was more afraid of the right than he was of the left.” Goldwater and military leaders had urged nuclear attacks against China, public opinion remained opposed to withdrawal, and when McNamara proposed fewer bombing attacks against North Vietnam, Senator Strom Thurmond accused him of appeasing the communists. In The Fog of War, McNamara is shown discussing the war with Vietnamese officials during the 1997 visit. Representatives from each country’s delegation tried to explain the “mindsets” of their leaders in the 1960s. McNamara addressed Nguyen Co Thach, the former Vietnamese foreign minister, saying that, were he a communist in North Vietnam in 1961, he might well have believed—wrongly—that America’s goal was victory over their country. Thach retorted that the Vietnamese assessment of the U.S. was in fact correct: the America wanted to become the “master of the world,” replacing the British and French. The two men, McNamara says in the film, nearly came to blows. “We were not opposed to an independent, unified Vietnam. We were not!” he told Thach. “What we feared was a Vietnam that was a pawn in the hands of the Soviets and/or the Chinese.” But McNamara acknowledged the American government’s mistake. He lamented the tragedy that American officials had failed to understand the Vietnamese context. They didn’t comprehend that--as the antiwar movement had insisted--the country was fighting a civil and nationalist war, not one on behalf of the Soviet Union or China. They hadn’t empathized with the enemy. For those who fought bitterly over the Vietnam War, McNamara’s Berkeley homecoming served as a reminder that, even after forty years, that can be a difficult thing to do. |
 April 2004
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