I meant to say how much I loved The Fog of War, the other day. Great flick. Also, people should check out this Fresh Air interview with McNamara and Errol Morris, who did Fog Of War.
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I watched Fog of War completely by chance with my father in law. It just sucked us in. I heard the Fresh Air interview but wasn't as impressed with terri. She injected herself in so much she interrupted the guest inappropriately. But it was mad interesting.
It's weird - while I have a pretty mixed view of McNamara, after seeing Fog of War and reading up on him, it's probably more positive than negative. That is, I see him as a brilliant guy who got stuck in an awful position such that he had to plan out a war he didn't think could be won, but he could never convince Johnson of that. Maybe (probably) he should have resigned earlier as a way of saying "this is wrong," but when Johnson trusted him so much as to have offered him the vice presidency, maybe McNamara wasn't (morally) wrong in thinking he could eventually convince Johnson if he stuck around.
My mother on the other hand... She has only negative views of him and doesn't really forgive anything. Maybe it's having lived through it that makes it impossible to forgive. So I was trying to think about whether I could forgive Rumsfeld or Cheney or whomever. For the most part I don't think I could, but that's because I don't think there was ever really any doubt, any sense that we should maybe do things differently, etc. But, I could probably forgive Powell for his role, knowing now that he wasn't really psyched about the war, etc. And Democrats like Hillary Clinton - so long as they actually acknowledged their roles in the quagmire.
I actually had a similar experience. I was talking to a professor of mine a couple years ago, and suggested we watch the Fog of War for class. He basically thought McNamara was "total asshole" for saying all of this after the fact. I didn't live through it, but I don't see things that way at all. Like you, I see him as carrying out a plan for Johnson while Johnson slowly realized he was in way over his head.
It's funny you mention the Bush administration, because I think the more apt comparison would be Powell. He refused to speak up or step down in the face of pressure.
Yeah, I think Powell really is the apt comparison. I was really angry at him a few years ago for not resigning, but I can see myself forgiving him if he (credibly) explained that he thought the whole thing was f'ed up, but that he was convinced he could do more good as Secretary of State than he could outside of the administration. I'm not sure I would believe that - if Powell had quit and said the war was a bad idea, I don't think it would have been authorized by Congress - but I could at least understand what he was trying to do.
Interesting that you bring up Colin Powell.
Colin Powell had not been a member of The Project for the New American Century (with Wolfowitz, et al) and it was curious as to why he became a neo-conservative. Early in the Bush Administration, people speculated that he perhaps considered himself to be the moderating voice of reason.
Yet, he goes before the National Security Council and gives the fateful speech, sacrificing his own legacy, and for what? Being a team player? Being a good soldier? Believing it would all turn out better than it did?
None of this is hindsight. Even the speechwriter was raising red flags.
Powell is, quite simply, a man who was handed a moment in history, and blew it all to hell. Imagine Powell now if he had resigned.
A more meaningful comparison of Powell would be to Martin Luther King, Jr. rather than Robert McNamara.
King was a visionary, a man who understood his moment in history, which by the way, wasn't nearly as obvious as Powell's moment.
Powell is not a visionary, just an ordinary person in a powerful position who made a really bad decision for himself, Iraq, and his own country. He will be remembered for it.
Part of it is the genius of Morris, but I don't think anyone in any movie has really captured my attention like McNamara did. It's so damn sad watching that movie the wake of the Iraq War, you just see them breaking his rules. The "empathize with the enemy" rule is the most important; I don't see how we keep ignoring that.
The moment in the movie that really got me was when he talked about the state dinner with the Vietnamese ambassador (I think - might have been another delegate from Vietnam) who told him that they would never have given up no matter what the US had done. And how McNamara suddenly realized that it was true and that the US could never have won the war. So damn powerful.
that was a brilliant film on a variety of fronts, and a decent interview by Terry. two things struck me in light of recent conversations here, one is that they were convinced that technocratic know-how could manage very complex social/political situations, a very Obama like position. The other was the just following orders defense he offered. This kind of just doing my job so don't blame me aspect of our culture is widespread, from corporate life down to the don't hate the player hate the game street level, and really corrosive to our quality of life/democracy. Comes a time to man/woman up and take responsibility.
I wish it were that simple/limited. the misleading part of the title was that these decision makers weren't in the actual fog of war. they were miles away working on computer programs and crunching numbers. this is the same kind of abstraction, at a distance, that fed into the recent economic meltdown. for an interesting read on the limits of know-how prediction/control see the book the Black Swan. it raise the larger point, of some more general interest here, that the future will in its most important, history making, ways be unlike what has come before.
You could watch him sort of slowly getting close to expressing remorse, before stepping away. When there was an admission of culpability, it was in the first-person plural: "We were wrong."
I saw "The Fog of War" some time ago, and I will admit that it was very interesting. However, Vietnam was the war of my generation.
So now they think that at least two million Vietnamese civilians died during the war and there were over a million Vietnamese military deaths. There is also the matter of dioxin poisoning, the millions of people affected by that, birth defects, what the poisoning did to their farmland, and so forth.
I suppose that old men who planned and executed wars like to sit around in their old age and figure out what it was all about, write books, share what they learned from the whole thing, and so on. No wonder the books and interviews are fascinating because not many of us get to cause the deaths of millions of people, and reflect on it later in life.
Hmmm, my recollection from that time is that large numbers of citizens opposed the war because it became apparent that it was a cynical exercise, created out of a falsehood (Gulf of Tonkin? anyone? falsified attack? anyone at ALL? no? let's move on) for what we came to recognize as imperialist motives on the part of our government. There was no "fog of war" because that implies that we (he) was pursuing a legitimate goal and it went astray due to some misconstruance of fact, circumstance, reportage, etc. The war in Viet Nam was contrived out of motives which quite simply meet every criteria for being classified as war crimes. For my money this was like hearing Goebbels explain how the attempted extermination of the Jews was somehow inadvertent. Let's hope they are sharing a bunk somewhere...
I've seen this movie. Coincidentally, before the run-up to the Iraq War, I had started taking a keen interest in the Vietnam War(or as the Vietnamese call it, 'The American War'). At that point, I knew little except for what I had seen in the dramatic films that had piqued my interest(Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, etc). Sadly, I am not very well educated, even though I am curious and love to travel. Reading about the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a real eye-opener for me; I remember first reading about it on the airplane on my way to Vietnam. In an instant, I knew that the same thing was about to happen with Iraq. It was a horrible, guilty, feeling: visiting the Vietnam war museum w/ graphic pictures, seeing a old lady with missing limbs, seeing old suffocating tunnels and torture devices, and wondering...did we really play a part in all this? Are we going to do this again? The only thing that helped is the fact that the younger generation don't remember the war so much, and the older Vietnamese are incredibly forgiving.
When I visited Cambodia, I also met a young man who makes his living as a guide at a landmine museum. Can you imagine such a thing? Even after all these years, there are still landmines popping off and destroying peoples' limbs. And guess what country made some of them? And guess what country fought against banning them?
But have we evolved, even after someone like McNamara comes clean? After all the movies about the stupidity and ugliness of war? What I really want to know is, is Obama or anyone else bothered by the drone-dropped bombs that are killing innocent people? We liberals fancy ourselves different, better, but are we?
I went thru the whole Viet Nam thing when I was living in California and participated in most of the protests and the hate I developed for McNamara and the whole gang will never go away. I don't understand why some people still have human considerations for that bastard.
Here's a piece no one cared about. Meh, whatever, probably the most enjoyable article I did during my stint at TIME. Premiered a month before I got laid-off. The nail in the coffin? Ya think?
Here's me going after Al. I didn't so much have a problem with him, as I had a problem with media acting like this dude was the go-to guy for everything black.
This was my first real story at time. I was writing for the Business section, a real change of direction for me. At any rate, it's about Wal-Mart's attempts to colonize the inner-city. As much as I enjoyed this piece, I mostly enjoyed going out to Chicago, which is a beautiful, beautiful city.
This a piece I did about the cops just outside our nation capitol, in Prince George's County, a few years back. I wanted to offer a counter to the dumb, conventional wisdom that if you paint your police force black, you could eradicate police brutality. In fact, Prince George's--one of the richest, blackest counties in the country--also had one of the most brutal police force's in the country.
The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood 
I watched Fog of War completely by chance with my father in law. It just sucked us in. I heard the Fresh Air interview but wasn't as impressed with terri. She injected herself in so much she interrupted the guest inappropriately. But it was mad interesting.
It's weird - while I have a pretty mixed view of McNamara, after seeing Fog of War and reading up on him, it's probably more positive than negative. That is, I see him as a brilliant guy who got stuck in an awful position such that he had to plan out a war he didn't think could be won, but he could never convince Johnson of that. Maybe (probably) he should have resigned earlier as a way of saying "this is wrong," but when Johnson trusted him so much as to have offered him the vice presidency, maybe McNamara wasn't (morally) wrong in thinking he could eventually convince Johnson if he stuck around.
My mother on the other hand... She has only negative views of him and doesn't really forgive anything. Maybe it's having lived through it that makes it impossible to forgive. So I was trying to think about whether I could forgive Rumsfeld or Cheney or whomever. For the most part I don't think I could, but that's because I don't think there was ever really any doubt, any sense that we should maybe do things differently, etc. But, I could probably forgive Powell for his role, knowing now that he wasn't really psyched about the war, etc. And Democrats like Hillary Clinton - so long as they actually acknowledged their roles in the quagmire.
I actually had a similar experience. I was talking to a professor of mine a couple years ago, and suggested we watch the Fog of War for class. He basically thought McNamara was "total asshole" for saying all of this after the fact. I didn't live through it, but I don't see things that way at all. Like you, I see him as carrying out a plan for Johnson while Johnson slowly realized he was in way over his head.
It's funny you mention the Bush administration, because I think the more apt comparison would be Powell. He refused to speak up or step down in the face of pressure.
Yeah, I think Powell really is the apt comparison. I was really angry at him a few years ago for not resigning, but I can see myself forgiving him if he (credibly) explained that he thought the whole thing was f'ed up, but that he was convinced he could do more good as Secretary of State than he could outside of the administration. I'm not sure I would believe that - if Powell had quit and said the war was a bad idea, I don't think it would have been authorized by Congress - but I could at least understand what he was trying to do.
Interesting that you bring up Colin Powell.
Colin Powell had not been a member of The Project for the New American Century (with Wolfowitz, et al) and it was curious as to why he became a neo-conservative. Early in the Bush Administration, people speculated that he perhaps considered himself to be the moderating voice of reason.
Yet, he goes before the National Security Council and gives the fateful speech, sacrificing his own legacy, and for what? Being a team player? Being a good soldier? Believing it would all turn out better than it did?
None of this is hindsight. Even the speechwriter was raising red flags.
Powell is, quite simply, a man who was handed a moment in history, and blew it all to hell. Imagine Powell now if he had resigned.
A more meaningful comparison of Powell would be to Martin Luther King, Jr. rather than Robert McNamara.
King was a visionary, a man who understood his moment in history, which by the way, wasn't nearly as obvious as Powell's moment.
Powell is not a visionary, just an ordinary person in a powerful position who made a really bad decision for himself, Iraq, and his own country. He will be remembered for it.
Powell knew how to juke the stats to make the Department look good. And when it came time to do so, he was a team player.
He's no Lester Freeman, and he's not Bunny Colvin, either.
Part of it is the genius of Morris, but I don't think anyone in any movie has really captured my attention like McNamara did. It's so damn sad watching that movie the wake of the Iraq War, you just see them breaking his rules. The "empathize with the enemy" rule is the most important; I don't see how we keep ignoring that.
The moment in the movie that really got me was when he talked about the state dinner with the Vietnamese ambassador (I think - might have been another delegate from Vietnam) who told him that they would never have given up no matter what the US had done. And how McNamara suddenly realized that it was true and that the US could never have won the war. So damn powerful.
that was a brilliant film on a variety of fronts, and a decent interview by Terry. two things struck me in light of recent conversations here, one is that they were convinced that technocratic know-how could manage very complex social/political situations, a very Obama like position. The other was the just following orders defense he offered. This kind of just doing my job so don't blame me aspect of our culture is widespread, from corporate life down to the don't hate the player hate the game street level, and really corrosive to our quality of life/democracy. Comes a time to man/woman up and take responsibility.
I see your point, but I'd say this is part of the problem with the Fog of War; that it makes even honorable, intelligent people act irrationally.
I wish it were that simple/limited. the misleading part of the title was that these decision makers weren't in the actual fog of war. they were miles away working on computer programs and crunching numbers. this is the same kind of abstraction, at a distance, that fed into the recent economic meltdown. for an interesting read on the limits of know-how prediction/control see the book the Black Swan. it raise the larger point, of some more general interest here, that the future will in its most important, history making, ways be unlike what has come before.
Quoted For Truth!
Just a fantastic film. Completely riveting.
You could watch him sort of slowly getting close to expressing remorse, before stepping away. When there was an admission of culpability, it was in the first-person plural: "We were wrong."
I saw "The Fog of War" some time ago, and I will admit that it was very interesting. However, Vietnam was the war of my generation.
So now they think that at least two million Vietnamese civilians died during the war and there were over a million Vietnamese military deaths. There is also the matter of dioxin poisoning, the millions of people affected by that, birth defects, what the poisoning did to their farmland, and so forth.
I suppose that old men who planned and executed wars like to sit around in their old age and figure out what it was all about, write books, share what they learned from the whole thing, and so on. No wonder the books and interviews are fascinating because not many of us get to cause the deaths of millions of people, and reflect on it later in life.
Hmmm, my recollection from that time is that large numbers of citizens opposed the war because it became apparent that it was a cynical exercise, created out of a falsehood (Gulf of Tonkin? anyone? falsified attack? anyone at ALL? no? let's move on) for what we came to recognize as imperialist motives on the part of our government. There was no "fog of war" because that implies that we (he) was pursuing a legitimate goal and it went astray due to some misconstruance of fact, circumstance, reportage, etc. The war in Viet Nam was contrived out of motives which quite simply meet every criteria for being classified as war crimes. For my money this was like hearing Goebbels explain how the attempted extermination of the Jews was somehow inadvertent. Let's hope they are sharing a bunk somewhere...
I've seen this movie. Coincidentally, before the run-up to the Iraq War, I had started taking a keen interest in the Vietnam War(or as the Vietnamese call it, 'The American War'). At that point, I knew little except for what I had seen in the dramatic films that had piqued my interest(Deer Hunter, Full Metal Jacket, etc). Sadly, I am not very well educated, even though I am curious and love to travel. Reading about the Gulf of Tonkin incident was a real eye-opener for me; I remember first reading about it on the airplane on my way to Vietnam. In an instant, I knew that the same thing was about to happen with Iraq. It was a horrible, guilty, feeling: visiting the Vietnam war museum w/ graphic pictures, seeing a old lady with missing limbs, seeing old suffocating tunnels and torture devices, and wondering...did we really play a part in all this? Are we going to do this again? The only thing that helped is the fact that the younger generation don't remember the war so much, and the older Vietnamese are incredibly forgiving.
When I visited Cambodia, I also met a young man who makes his living as a guide at a landmine museum. Can you imagine such a thing? Even after all these years, there are still landmines popping off and destroying peoples' limbs. And guess what country made some of them? And guess what country fought against banning them?
But have we evolved, even after someone like McNamara comes clean? After all the movies about the stupidity and ugliness of war? What I really want to know is, is Obama or anyone else bothered by the drone-dropped bombs that are killing innocent people? We liberals fancy ourselves different, better, but are we?
I went thru the whole Viet Nam thing when I was living in California and participated in most of the protests and the hate I developed for McNamara and the whole gang will never go away. I don't understand why some people still have human considerations for that bastard.