Old hawk rethinks roles in Vietnam and WWII-Robert McNamara

[RamboLiberal]

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/01/21/DDGQD4D3BV1.DTL

If he picks up the New York Times or Washington Post, Robert McNamara sees his image staring back from movie ads for "The Fog of War" -- ads that feature critics' blurbs like "Brilliant!" "Remarkable!" and "Provocative!"

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The attention is a bit strange for the 87-year-old former secretary of defense. He says he doesn't want his life dissected by movie audiences. McNamara insists that "The Fog of War" is not really about him but about his ideas. He was motivated to appear in the film, he says, to stir a national dialogue about nuclear weapons and other "policy" issues -- not a debate about his own life, which reached its most controversial point during the Vietnam War. "McNamara's War," protesters called it.

"I don't give a damn whether people know me or don't know me -- I'm 87, " McNamara says in a phone interview from Washington, D.C. "The purpose of my participation was to examine the foreign policy and defense policy actions of the nation in the last 10, 15, 20 years and to try to draw lessons that are applicable to today and the future. The risk of destruction of nations as a result of nuclear weapons should be debated, and it isn't."

Opening in Bay Area theaters Friday, "The Fog of War" is a dramatic distillation of 23 hours of interviews between Morris and McNamara. Morris -- a maverick documentarian whose works include "The Thin Blue Line" and "Mr. Death" -- divided McNamara's thoughts into 11 "lessons" about military conflicts and human nature, then mixed it with archival footage of war, newsreels of McNamara's years in government, audio recordings done by John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson (which show that McNamara had reservations about the Vietnam War) and Philip Glass' provocative music. McNamara talks directly into the camera with such candor and emotion (several times he gets teary- eyed) that "The Fog of War" almost seems like a confessional, leading some observers to say McNamara is still trying to come to terms with his years of orchestrating the Vietnam War.

[The Backlash Cometh]

1. Is there a bit of revionism going on with this movie?

I distinctly remember MacNamara accepted responsibility for the extension of the war. He was, like Cheney, someone who felt that buckling down was a sign of weakness. So he resisted the Vietnam Peace protestors (Americans who were just exercising their American free speech rights) by sending more boys to Vietnam, until the tragedy of the decision just became to much for us to bear.