Robert McNamara's Mea Culpa

"Are you ready? All set?" In response to Errol Morris' offscreen query, Robert Strange McNamara sets his face and gazes into the Interrotron. He looks vaguely uncomfortable and also ready, but for what?

In The Fog of War, the 86-year-old McNamara talks about his life and career, a series of conversations with Morris edited into a seeming whole, such that the firebombing of Japan during WWII, the development of seatbelts, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the "quagmire" of the Vietnam War are related -- as historical and political events. This connectedness evolves as the film lays out the "11 lessons" of McNamara, each a section titled with an aphorism uttered by the former U.S. Secretary of Defense. For instance: "Empathize with your enemy," "Believing and seeing are both often wrong," "Proportionality should be a guideline in war," and "There's something beyond oneself."

The filmmaker says that he started thinking about this movie when he read McNamara's 1995 memoir, In Retrospect. As Morris puts it, the ostensible "mea culpa" so often attributed to the book seemed more complicated, less clear: "It's not so much an apology," Morris offers, "as an attempt to understand how he and many others blundered into a disastrous war." As comparisons between the war in Vietnam and the occupation of Iraq proliferate, the need for such understanding seems ever more urgent.

Though Morris initially wanted to find personal dimensions in the book's efforts to understand, to discover where McNamara saw himself in history, whether he might actually "feel" responsible or sorry. But the film is not quite that. Rather, it is a compelling meditation on human fallibility, tracing the many steps of a life and shifting set of beliefs in order to reach no fixed conclusions. To showcase such uncertainty might seem counterintuitive for a documentary. Consider that the film that made Errol Morris famous, 1988's The Thin Blue Line, reached a clear conclusion -- that the Dallas County, Texas justice system was wrong -- with the help of a confession to murder by interviewee David Harris.

Attention to that film's ending (and the real life effects it had, for the mistakenly convicted Randall Adams) obscured its focus on how perspective, judgment, and inevitable error influence fact, the ways that stories become truth. Morris' subsequent films -- A Brief History of Time (1991), Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997), and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr. (1999) -- have elaborated on this problem, revealing the layers of deception and desire that form their subjects' self-images. In other words, his movies display "something beyond oneself," multiple perspectives that arise from passing time, shifting situations, expanding contexts.

Just so The Fog of War, one of this year's most provocative, potent, and important films. Taking as its premise one of McNamara's assertions (listed here as number 11), that "You can't change human nature," the film also proposes that such "nature" is also, ironically, ever changing, at least in individual cases. (The broader drama has to do with the will to self-destruction demonstrated over centuries: are we fated to repeat mistakes eternally?) McNamara's roles in so many world-altering events of the 20th century grant him a singular viewpoint, that the documentary proceeds to fragment and rearrange. Composed of McNamara's exchanges with Morris (punctuated by the filmmaker's offscreen questions), archival footage, documents (to underline the man's interest in numbers and "data"), still photos, and taped conversations with Presidents John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (including examples of LBJ's notoriously "salty" language).

In his many positions -- Harvard assistant professor (1941), founding member of the U.S. Air Corps Statistical Control School in 1942, president of Ford Motor Company (for five weeks, during which time he attended to what he calls the U.S. desire for "conspicuous consumption"), Secretary of Defense (1961-1968, during which time he was accused of being an "IBM machine with legs"), and president of the World Bank (1968 to 1981) -- McNamara has participated in more than his share of "historic" events and negotiated with many famous figures, from Fidel Castro and General Curtis LeMay (under whom McNamara strategized to firebomb 67 Japanese cities, killing thousands of civilians), to Special Vietnam Advisor to Kennedy and Johnson Maxwell Taylor and North Vietnamese General Vo Nguyen Giap (who revealed to McNamara in 1995 that the Gulf of Tonkin attack that motivated Johnson to enter into the Vietnam War in 1964, did not happen).