Rule #2: “Rationality will not save us” is perhaps the creepiest of all the lessons, with a title that cheerfully overthrows the Age of Enlightenment and everything else that claims human beings are reasonable creatures. When the McNamara of the 1990s meets with Fidel Castro and a foreign minister from the war-era in Vietnam, we learn that Castro was willing to let Cuba be wiped out in 1962 and the Vietnamese were willing to keep fighting no matter what the cost. I’ll leave it to the movie to explain the long and winding road to these conclusions.
“The Fog of War” is virtually impregnable to criticisms about having an agendum or slant. Morris takes what McNamara has said and heightened it with images. Curtis LeMay looks ominous and creepy, but that’s how McNamara talks about him. Yes, some of McNamara’s twenty hours of interviews were left on the cutting room floor, some of them to find their way onto DVD no doubt. But I’ve heard no complaints from McNamara himself about the film. Yes, the Philip Glass score Morris uses is downright spooky in places, but McNamara—and anyone else with that much power and so close to so many different Caesars—must have led a scary life. It is not so much the man who is scary, Morris seems to suggest, but the immensity of his undertakings. I sure wouldn’t want to have so much responsibility.
Of course, McNamara could be lying about everything, but Morris does not portray what McNamara says as being one way or the other. The movie is about the man and the lessons we could learn from him, not the facts.
In the end we are left with three impressions about the Cold War. However faulty, weak, erring, badly handled, or sloppy the men like McNamara, Krushchev, JFK, and LBJ did things, we must ultimately put them, if only by a millimeter, on the happy side of that line that divides a “job well done” from a “job badly done.” Another thing I’ve heard my dad say a few times is that “the biggest surprise of my life is that the US never went to war with Russia.” If we’re alive today, then those haggled, stressed, and mostly dead men must have done more right than wrong. They may have sent tens and hundreds of thousands to die and kill hundreds of thousands more, but the nukes were not dropped, nations were not destroyed, and civilization as we know it was not wiped out. In McNamara’s moral algebra, this comes out to be a good thing, although he seems to constantly imply it wasn’t the best thing.
The second impression is that McNamara does not like war, but sees it as a necessary evil. It is telling that his earliest memory, that memory of himself as a two-year-old, is of peace being declared in 1918. He has no illusions that a lasting peace is possible, but the best a man can do is minimize the number of deaths on his side and maximize the efficiency of fighting, which includes its infrequency. Yet, as life and many other movies, from “Chinatown” to “Citizen Kane,” prove, when you dance with the devil, the devil doesn’t change, the devil changes you.
The last impression—after watching so much footage of human beings so industriously intent on slaughtering each other in figures which the average mind can only grasp on paper, of cities leveled and incinerated and burned and countrysides razed until you wonder if you’re seeing pictures of the Moon landing—is that I hope God will be merciful.
Finished February 6, 2004
Copyright © 2004 Friday & Saturday Night
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