Robert McNamara's Fog of War

The 2003 film "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara" gives a history of the career of Robert McNamara, including his time as the Secretary of State during the Vietnam War. The film is done in a documentary style that combines an interview with Robert McNamara along with original film from the era.
The film is loosely based on eleven lessons that are laid out by McNamara, as the lessons that were learned from the Vietnam War. Because the film is so heavily built upon the interview with McNamara, he is able to get his personal views across, along with the full knowledge that his positions are from being widely accepted. The other information in the film attempts to paint a more complete picture so the film is still somewhat critical of McNamara at times.
While McNamara is most closely related to the Vietnam War, "The Fog of War" deals with a slightly wider timeframe including McNamara's part in the second world war as well. To begin with it details McNamara's start to applying his detailed analysis to warfare situations. The film talks about how McNamara and his team studied the efficiency of the bombing runs during World War II. When looking at the desertion rate on bombing runs, they determined that most pilots turned around simply because they knew how likely it was that they were going to get shot down, and felt that it would be safer to turn around. Later when looking at the bombing of the Japanese, they decided to use fire bombs to cause the most destruction. The effectiveness of a bombing run was determined as the ratio of the area destroyed against the number of planes lost. These statistics caused McNamara to encourage the lower flight fire bombings because despite the higher loss rate, the amount of the cities that could be destroyed was higher as well.
While McNamara's statistical methods were effective they did not always make him the most popular person. Many of the pilots valued their own lives more than they cared about the effectiveness of their bombing strategy, so they were at odds with the results that McNamara ended up with. Many viewed him as cold and mechanical, and felt that he failed to understand any emotion.
After World War II, Robert McNamara and many of those on his team went to work for Ford. At the time Ford was in serious financial difficulty and had been struggling to make a profit even with the immense war time spending that the government was doing. McNamara and his team were able to use their statistical analysis to help turn the company around. They convinced Ford to capitalize on markets the appealed to safety conscious buyers as well as those looking for affordability. These were ideas that went against the traditional thinking at the time, but turned out to be very successful. As a result McNamara went on to become the President at Ford.
The film quickly looked to move onto the Vietnam War which McNamara is much better known for, and is a controversial figure as a result of. Shortly after McNamara became president at Ford, President Elect John Kennedy asked him to become the Secretary of Defense. At first McNamara was slightly reluctant to take the job, but in the end agreed. After Kennedy was killed he stayed on under President Lyndon Johnson.
H.R. McMaster's Book "Dereliction of Duty" had attacked McNamara rather forcefully . Within the book, McNamara is accused to pushing the war in the wrong direction despite many warning signs not to as a result of his own egotism and by putting Johnson's political agenda first. The film "The Fog of War" is less harsh on McNamara, largely in part because his own views of the era are so much at the forefront of the film.
One criticism that is more magnified by the interviews however is McNamara's egotism. Throughout he dismisses anyone his disagrees with him, and steadfastly believes that he handled things properly. He isn't really bothered by what other people think, and despite being very well aware that he is unliked, refuses to admit being wrong, and would only speak of his regrets in the most vague terms.
The one person the McNamara does blame is President Lyndon Johnson. When asked who was responsible for Vietnam, Johnson is the one that McNamara names. He then points out that he doesn't believe that President Kennedy ever would have gone to war in Vietnam, and was in the process of decreasing the United States presence in the region at the time when he was killed. McNamara talked about how Kennedy was determined not to let Vietnam get out of control. McNamara also notes that he himself tried to talk Johnson out of increasing the war in Vietnam. These messages however are contradictory to most of the actions that McNamara did, which helped bring the Vietnam war about.
In fact McNamara's passing the blame on to Johnson seems almost as if it is nothing more than an attempt to exonerate himself from many policies that in hindsight he can see turned out to be massively unpopular. Yet McNamara was actually one of Johnson's strongest supporters. If McNamara did actually hold any views counter to the president's he did absolutely nothing in order to bring them about. McNamara pushed for Johnson's plans consistently, and gave up better options in Vietnam to best serve Johnson's political interests instead. As such, while Lyndon Johnson was in authority as the President and certainly deserves his share of the blame for the disaster the Vietnam turned into, McNamara can not absolve himself by attempting to put the responsibility for everything at Johnson's feet.
This film was more or less McNamara's chance to tell his side of the story, and to try and explain the rationality of what went wrong in the Vietnam War. But despite being able to even tell things through his own voice his arguments often ring hollow and are less then convincing. To begin with he is unwilling to truly recognize the Vietnam War as a failure. While he concentrates on lessons learned from the war, recognizes that large number of United States soldiers dies, and that in the end almost nothing was accomplished, he is unwilling to admit to himself that everything went wrong. Instead he continues to insist that it was a critical part of the cold war and notes that while it did not turn out as well for the United States as the Cuban Missile Crisis did, he does not see it as being a step back for the country.
In 1995 he was given a chance to travel back to Vietnam to meet with the leaders that he had lead the war against years earlier. He notes that in discussing the war between the two countries, both sides viewed the conflict completely differently, and that contributed significantly to why the two sides had been able to come to an agreement during the war. Yet even in this setting, McNamara notes that the discussion grew so intense that the men almost got in a fight over the issue.
Of the eleven lessons from McNamara's life that are offered the most compelling is the idea that it is important to understand where your opponent is coming from and to feel empathy for them. McNamara pointed out how this worked to great effect in the Cuban Missile Crisis, where the United States realized that the Soviet Union would be willing to accept a slightly unbeneficial deal, as long as it allowed them to save face at home. This is something that did not work out nearly as well in Vietnam, where the United States government was unable to understand and try to accommodate the Vietnamese need for independence into their plans.
The other lessons are not as closely or as precisely backed up, and many of them almost come off as being excuses for why everything went wrong. A number of the lessons are based upon the idea that we can't understand what our advisories are going to do, nor can anyone always make the correct decisions or rely upon rational thought. While these generalities may be more or less true, they do little to describe the situations that McNamara found himself in. While nobody expects everything to always go right, the decision making and the execution of the events leading up to and during the Vietnam War easily could have been handled better than they were.
If the film "The Fog of War" points to any lesson to be learned from Robert McNamara's life it is of the dangers of egotism. McNamara is self righteous throughout the film, and despite this being his one chance to tell his own side of things, he refuses to answer some the questions, either because he feels that they are beneath him, or that any answer that he gives will make him look bad.
When more directly confronted McNamara only answers in the most vague ways possible, not giving a straight answer at any point. At both the begging and the end of the film McNamara states that any military leader has regrets about some of the decisions that they make, and that any others who say otherwise are lying. Yet this is McNamara's only answer as to what his personal regrets are. Instead of mentioning any point at which he feels that he messed up, he just indicates that there probably were some mistakes, but without being willing to point out any specific decisions that he wishes that he made differently. In fact the two of McNamara's decisions that are the most controversial and widely despised, the decision to fire bomb Tokyo and the push ahead with the war in Vietnam, are the two decisions that McNamara defends the most.
McNamara's non-answers and lack of regrets are the real story in this film. Instead of going into what went wrong, it is more of a look at what McNamara doesn't care that everything went wrong, and that furthermore he feels as if everything was really justifiable in the end. Part of McNamara's excuse for the decisions that were made is based upon the concept of the fog of war, from which the documentary got its name. The concept behind the fog of war, is that during a war everything is so disorganized and uncertain that no one truly knows what is going on. Within the fog of war, very important decisions must be made quickly, and with limited information, and that is the overall grand excuse why everything went so wrong in Vietnam.
The fog of war explanation for the war however fails for several reasons. First, as the Secretary of Defense, McNamara was well separated from the action to be able to make calmed rational decisions about the issues. Furthermore it ignores the fact that McNamara and Johnson avoided much of the information at their disposal and instead pushed things towards their own predetermined conclusion. In the end this comes across as just another one of McNamara's many excuses.
While "The Fog of War" could have been McNamara's chance to explain and redeem himself, it instead pointed out and confirmed the worst aspects of his personality. Even after being many years removed from the situation, and the decisions that resulted in the Vietnam War, McNamara came off as nothing but an egotistical, cold, and heartless man. He appeared to be far more concerned with his numbers and the mathematically calculated progress of the war, then on the actual human and emotional toll, which he was seemingly unable to understand or connect with. Still he is unable to admit that he was wrong, but only that not everything worked out right and perhaps analytical methods have their limits and that perhaps rationality should be done away with completely. While this human disconnect may have made him an effective business man during his years at Ford, it also proved him to be a horrible and incompetent Secretary of Defense.