War crimes and misdemeanors
On Errol Morris's missed opportunity.

By Tim Redmond

IN THE OLD days, when I used to stay up late at night, one of my favorite things to do was watch Nightline and shout out questions that Ted Koppel really should've been asking. Koppel was, in his day, one of the best live interviewers in the businesses, but every now and then he'd let someone like Henry Kissinger get away with, well, murder. And it would make me scream.

That's how I felt for almost two hours watching The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara. Errol Morris may be an accomplished documentary filmmaker, and there are plenty of valuable moments in his latest work, but as a political interview, the movie is a flop.

Morris had a fabulous opportunity here: Robert McNamara, the secretary of defense for seven years under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and one of the key architects of the Vietnam War, sat for hours and hours of interviews and discussed his life, his recollections, and his historical evaluation of the firebombing of Japan in World War II, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Vietnam at great length. He makes some stunning statements (he says Gen. Curtis LeMay and junior officers like himself were "behaving as war criminals" when they ordered raids that killed 50 to 90 percent of the people in 62 Japanese cities with conflagration bombs, and he admits that much of the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened). He makes a powerful case against the expansion of nuclear weapons and unilateral U.S. military actions.

But McNamara, who is now 87, never is really forced to account for his role in promoting a war that killed 50,000 U.S. soldiers and more than 3 million Vietnamese. Instead, McNamara gets to present himself through this kind of passionless, intellectual historical debate, as if this were all some sort of Harvard classroom discussion of something that never really happened. He gets to say things like "I'm sorry that, in the process of accomplishing things, I've made some errors" – as if, gee, maybe that student over in the third row should've gotten a B+ instead of a B on the midterm.

The whole idea that a sizable part of a generation of American kids died pointlessly in a jungle, that this country was at war with itself for a decade, that a government Kennedy had once exalted as a home for the best and the brightest turned out to be the enemy of much of the young population, leaving scars that are still there today ... none of that seems to be a part of McNamara's consciousness. Or at least he never admits that it is.

Morris had plenty of chances to go after him. There are endless questions he could have asked, endless avenues he never pursued. Why, if McNamara now claims he never really supported the war, did he continue to serve as defense secretary? Why did he repeatedly lie to Congress and the public about the conduct of the war? Why has he never apologized?

It isn't until the last three minutes of the movie that Morris even asks the question that seems so obvious it almost screams from between every clip and frame: Why, if he knew the war was such a disaster, did he never say so in public? Why, even after leaving the Johnson administration, did he fail to tell the truth about what he knew, saw, and believed?

McNamara's response: "I'm not going to say any more than I have."

With all due respect, Mr. Secretary, that's not an acceptable answer.