AFSCME 3357-HOF'S BLOG

The Fog of War - DVD mini-review

I just watched a dvd of a documentary released late in 2003 titled The Fog of War. In this movie, director Errol Morris gives a mouthpiece to Robert McNamara. McNamara, a spry and articulate 86 years old at the time of the filming, was Secretary of Defense under presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He is routinely thought of as being the architect of the Vietnam policy during those two administrations.

The movie is set up as a conversation/lecture by McNamara outlining the ten most important lessons that he learned over his career. He acknowledges making many mistakes during his tenure and casts himself now as a repentitent pacifist. Others have quibbled with his accounts of past events. (see this link The Evasions of Robert McNamara - What's true and what's a lie in The Fog of War? By Fred?Kaplan ) I personally found his version of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident highly questionable. Still, the lessons from his experience are hard to ignore, and George Bush as well as all of this country's voters would have been well served to have seen this movie prior to engaging in active war in Iraq.

Morrel cast his movie as a simple lesson from an old man rather than a foreign policy debate. Input from sources other than McNamara is sparse. Morrel spices things up with archive footage and a fantastic original music score by Phillip Glass.

Of interest to my fellow UAW-LSP lawyers: McNamara was a Ford Motor Company executive prior to joining the Kennedy administration, for a very short time, He was the President of Ford Mo. Co. A statistician by trade, he brought statistical quality control procedures to Ford. He recounts one incident when they were looking at safety issues, they were trying to figure out how to prevent head injuries. Because of a lack of sophisticated equipment, they took human skulls and dropped them down a multi-story stairwell. They tried out various types of materials designed to protect the skulls. There is more on the Ford days in the Deleted Scenes section of the disk.

Overall, the disc is well worth watching. I'll give it a solid A.