McNamara still in the fog
I had such high hopes of a Dalton Camp type conversion, but Robert McNamara sticks to the official line on Vietnam and Cuba, despite lots of skilled cajoling from filmmaker Errol Morris in The Fog of War.
Imagine my excitement. The trailer, which I’d seen while waiting for The Corporation to start, had such promise. I was expecting Robert McNamara, like Wesley Clark, Dalton Camp, or Robert Oppenheimer to make some sort of late-life conversion out guilt and regret.
And the Corporation itself had planted a seed, with its featuring of Ray Anderson, the carpet corporation billionaire who’d became an environmentalist. I thought: “wow, these reprehensible bastards really can find some redemption some how.”
Not McNamara. He stuck to the official line on Vietnam. “It was a mistake, we shouldn’t have been there if we couldn’t win.”
See, most sane people would have ended that last sentence after “there.”
McNamara admits several times he tactical errors in Vietnam. And then he goes on to offer up the usual excuses “but it was the time. It was the cold war. We didn’t know.” Etc etc.
And with every hard question comes a deft attempt to sidestep responsibility. He may have authorized agent orange. He may have ordered the US to attack the north despite the bogus attack on the Maddox, but “at the time it seemed right.” He was there to serve the president etc etc.
And yet even after LBJ fired him for not being hawkish enough, he stayed silent. And gets all misty eyed when he talks about LBJ giving him the liberty medal.
So he said what he thought and followed orders. A poor set of excuses.
If you want to find out about that chapter of American history, read the Pentagon Papers and the Political Economy of Human Rights. Then see the movie and tell me if you think Robert McNamara has redeemed himself.
