5/5 You can almost see his pain.
  by Bob Hoskins (Elkhorn, WI USA)
I stumbled onto this DVD while searching for more Vietnam material. I'm glad I did. Robert McNamara is one of the most engaging people I've ever seen on any screen. He is about 85 yrs old in this documentary yet he is as sharp as a tack. His 11 lessons are born of a life that has seen so much change and he has held many top positions in various industries. John Kennedy invited him to become Secretary of Defense shortly after his election to President. McNamara gave up a life of lavish wealth to accept.
The majority of the documentary involves his own story telling of his life including his term as SoD and his interactions with the presidents he served under. Kennedy tended to listen Johnson tended not too. It's fascinating. He recalls serving under General Curtis LeMay in WW II with respect for LeMay but a clear disagreement with his thinking.
During the documentary you can almost see pain on McNamara's face as he recalls the descent into the Vietnam war once Johnson took over after Kennedy was assassinated. From the outset of his term in office, McNamara and Kennedy wanted an exit strategy from Vietnam. Johnson wanted escalation. This almost seems to haunt him as he tells his story.
Watch the documentary, watch McNamara's face, look into his eyes and see a very VERY intelligent human being with so much soul yet there's also pain. He recalls his whole life with such clarity and articulation and his stance and beliefs have never changed as proven by the taped conversations in the White House that play sporadically throughout the documentary.
An amazing man with SUCH a story to tell. I recommend this highly, it's honest, sometimes brutal and McNamara has the guts to expose his human side to us.


5/5 Macnamara
  by Paulo Ferreira Silverio (São José dos Campos, SP Brazil)
The Fog of War is a obligatory documentary. Enlights what happens behind the scenes, well made. I strongly recommend.

3/5 McNamara is now gone, but a good time to revisit the film
  by Bradford Morgan (North America)
After Robert McNamara died on July 6, 2009, I revisited "The Fog of War" documentary to see if the lapse of time would uncover new insights.

This time, I found that Errol Morris creates a greater impression than is warranted that McNamara and Lyndon Johnson are making life-and-death decisions in a bungling, indecisive, and backroom manner, almost like two guys making policy in a bar. As if an anti-hero in the panoply of military commanders, Johnson comes across as a hayseed, fretful about possible criticism from the emerging counter-culture power base within his party, yet unable to commit to a whatever-it-takes military strategy to defeat the enemy. Shouldn't Morris have protectively edited out Johnson's hot-button ignorance of the good/well distinction?

Unlike Morris, Jonah Goldberg seems to find the seeds of America's military wishy-washiness in our refusal to help the French volunteers at Dien Bien Phu in 1954: "Had Eisenhower supported the French requests to use our bombers based in the Philippines to bomb around Dien Bien Phu, Ho Chi Minh may have not been able to form a government. To his shame, Eisenhower refused to do it unless he had support from all the Congressional leaders, and Lyndon Johnson (to his greater shame) did not support it." Will no one tally the lives lost in the years following such weakness? Couldn't we just as easily argue that front-end ruthlessness costs a few high-profile lives (the more dramatic, the greater the deterrence) but actually saves countless lives in the long run?

For example, Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, the last Shah of Iran, heading a monarchy begun in 1501, was brought down in 1979, with the tacit support of President Jimmy Carter, who has never acknowledged the cost in blood and suffering and a weaker West that followed in the wake of his decision not to back the Shah.

Robert McNamara seems to follow in the footsteps of George C. Marshall, both of whom seem to be models of the preferred military decision-maker today: logistical, operational planners who read data sheets to move armies logically and methodically. Though this type of thinking has always been necessary to fight a war successfully, it seems very contemporary that we elevate its strategic role in the leadership hierarchy. But should the computer-girded quartermaster be turned into a policy implementer?

Film director Errol Morris is at his best when he makes Robert McNamara the foil of Curtis LeMay. McNamara's Harvard think-tank stint as AAF analytical advisor in the early 40s, followed by his service in AAF's Office of Statistical Control, gave him a life-long (though grudging) respect for LeMay. As McNamara describes,

"The U.S. was just beginning to bomb. We were bombing by daylight. The loss rate was very, very high, so they commissioned a study. And what did we find? We found the abort rate was 20%. 20% of the planes that took off to bomb targets in Germany turned around before they got to their target. Well that was a hell of a mess? we lost 20% of our capability right there.
"The form, I think it was form 1--A or something like that was a mission report. And if you aborted a mission you had to write down `why.' So we get all these things and we analyze them, and we finally concluded it was baloney. They were aborting out of fear.
"Because the loss rate was 4% per sortie, the combat tour was 25 sorties--it didn't mean that 100% of them were going to be killed but a hell of a lot of them were going to be killed. They knew that and they found reasons to not go over the target. So we reported this.
"One of the commanders was Curtis LeMay--Colonel in command of a B--24 group. He was the finest combat commander of any service I came across in war. But he was extraordinarily belligerent, many thought brutal. He got the report. He issued an order. He said, 'I will be in the lead plane on every mission. Any plane that takes off will go over the target, or the crew will be court--marshaled.' The abort rate dropped over night."

LeMay seems to come across as having the now-lost profile of leadership that might actually win a war. Even McNamara sensed that the firebombing of Tokyo, with the unfortunate death of 100,000 not-so-innocent civilians, was a necessary "overkill" tactic to get Japan to give up the war, thus saving a million or more combatants (on both sides) in later battles and a planned invasion of the Japanese homeland. It's strange that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is often seen differently.




5/5 Insightful and interesting
  by One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:

One has to wonder if sometimes Mr. McNamara is deliberately telling things from a perspective that will make his own involvement in the events discussed more palatable, but that quibble aside it cannot be denied that The Fog of War is a fascinating film recommended to anyone interested in 20th Century U.S. History; it's not likely to disappoint you.

3.5/4

3/5 Overrated
  by Bob Fake Name (Divided States)
"11 lessons" is a list documentary filmmaker Errol Morris came up with. These include:
1. Empathize with your enemy
2. Rationality will not save us
3. There's something beyond one's self
4. Maximize efficiency
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war
6. Get the data
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong
8. Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil
10. Never say never
11. You can't change human nature

So one of "the best and brightest" didn't know this before waging war?! Oh my god. McNamara added 10 more "lessons" which are included in the DVD extras.

The production quality is excellent. Errol Morris is a fine filmmaker. And I find watching a true war criminal sit there while answering questions, at times looking into the camera, an interesting experience. But I didn't learn anything from this portrait of an American Eichmann who is partly responsible for the deaths of countless millions. McNamara is way too easily let off the hook here folks. And what is more troubling is that viewers of "The Fog of War" are given the strong illusion they are seeing a clearer picture of history than they are. But how much do you know? Some reading in addition to the film would be useful. As an experiment, and I think for a clearer picture of McNamara, read journalist Alexander Cockburn's article on the CounterPunch website as supplemental material to the film. Please feel free to leave comments explaining to me why or how Cockburn is wrong and what is so useful about "The Fog of War". As for the title, Cockburn has an interesting explanation of the origins of this tired cliche. A truly educational doc on McNamara would have informed the viewer of much information included in Cockburn's "McNamara: From the Tokyo Firestorm to the World Bank". See for yourself. The snapshots of everything from McNamara's participation in WW2 under the psychotic LeMay and the firebombing of Tokyo, to his career at Ford and supposed effort to promote automobile safety, to his position as Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and LBJ Administrations and ghastly role in slaughter of millions of Vietnamese and Americans is "foggy" at best. The film is supposedly about learning from war but his long tenor as head of the World Bank and the failed policies which he implemented are not covered. He smoothly transitioned from role as War manager to head of World Bank where he did much to aid Third World dictators and destroy the lives of peasants. McNamara lived to the ripe old age of 93 and never paid for his crimes.