Review of The Fog of War (2003) by Shawne ~ — 18 Apr 2004

Call me a plebian. Yes, go ahead. I just didn't 'get' [b]Fog of War[/b]. Yes, Robert Strange McNamara is an interesting man, full of amazing insights, and a quite unparalleled life experience. He's been through fire-bombing in World War II, freely admitting he would be tried a 'war criminal' if the US had lost, and sank into the quagmire of Vietnam together with JFK and Lyndon Johnson. All well and good. McNamara's recollections are amusing (his banter with his wife over his middle name), and sometimes genuinely horrifying (the moment when it sinks in just how much of Japan's geography during World War II by the fire-bombing was completely decimated, in US terms).

And McNamara is at his most intriguing when he hovers on the edge of admitting that he was wrong, or when he points out a simple home truth: war is [i]bad[/i], dude. One does wonder how he never came to that conclusion earlier, or never acted on it, beyond trying in a number of unearthed taped conversations to sound vaguely clever and mildly protesting in the face of Johnson's surprisingly hawkish onslaught. That's when the documentary really has the best chance to break out of its slightly-more-than-mediocre history-lesson box and present a real, no-holds-barred picture of the man. But Errol Morris is flummoxed, as much by his own unintrusive style, as by McNamara's caginess. You don't get to be Secretary of Defense without having some kind of crazy-assed self-defense mechanism! Every time McNamara comes close to a more revelatory statement, he pulls back. And yes, he admits it: he'd rather be damned if he doesn't.

So pardon me if I came away from the documentary feeling a little cheated somehow. Rehashing history with an old man who'd been there when giants were at war with each other, or when a superpower just about lost its footing on subversive, unexpected enemy territory... it should have been more scintillating than this.