ERROL MORRIS: The Hollywood Interview

[Former Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara and filmmaker Errol Morris.]

This article originally appeared in the December 2003 issue of Venice Magazine. Morris is extremely sharp, and although I've interviewed a number of famous folk, I was more nervous about this interview than any other I had done up until that point. That's because I knew Morris went into all of his interviews extremely prepared. Hopefully, I managed to do the same here. A lot has happened in regards to the Iraq War since The Fog of War came out, and although it focuses on a controversial Secretary of Defense from a prior generation, the parallels between the arrogance of Robert S. McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld were apparent even back in '03. While McNamara essentially confesses to a lot of his mistakes in this film, albeit a few decades after the fact, I wonder if Rumsfeld will do the same or something similar when he reaches McNamara's age.

Morris' new film, Standard Operating Procedure, will be released by Sony Pictures Classics in April.

Errol Morris in The Fog of War
by Terry Keefe

There were few figures during the Vietnam Era as controversial as Robert S. McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy Adminstration and part of the Johnson Administration. Famed filmmaker Errol Morris was in college during the Vietnam War and, like many students of his generation, protested against it. The idea that more than 35 years later Morris would be interviewing McNamara for a documentary seems unlikely. Even more unlikely is that McNamara would occasionally emerge as a sympathetic figure, although one whose conduct Morris still clearly has deep moral questions about. Those interviews are what form the basis of Morris' new film, The Fog of War, which might be the most important, not to mention disturbing, film of the year.

Like many of Morris' previous films, which include A Thin Blue Line (1988) and Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr (1999), The Fog of War is a highly stylized combination of interviews, stock footage, created footage, and music, in this case a brilliant score evoking existential dread by Philip Glass. The Robert S. McNamara who emerges in The Fog of War is not the same Robert. S. McNamara who has been painted for us many times over in every form of media. Popular opinion on McNamara, by his critics at least, has often been that he was an arrogant bureaucrat who stumbled into the Vietnam War and, after Kennedy's death, pushed Lyndon Johnson hard to escalate the conflict. Morris presents evidence quite to the contrary, on the last point at least, via tapes of conversations between McNamara and Johnson in which it is the President who is clearly the one pushing for more troops, with McNamara taking on a more reluctant voice. However, although it is a revelation that McNamara clearly believed the Vietnam War to be wrong, Morris presents him with the pivotal question which asks, to paraphrase, "Why then he didn't speak out against the war once he left the cabinet in 1968?" To this, McNamara has no real direct answer, and it is here that his own silence is damning.

The question of what McNamara hoped to accomplish by participating in the film arises upon a first viewing, and repeated viewings start to answer it. He isn't apologizing for anything he did wrong, as much as he is trying to explain how it all happened, with a view, perhaps subconsciously, towards not only his own understanding of the events but the understanding of future generations about war and how it relates to human nature.

A few chilling new revelations about American wartime history emerge from the film. We learn that prior to dropping the two atomic bombs on Japan, controversial World War II General Curtis LeMay firebombed 67 Japanese cities in 1945, even killing 100,000 people in one night in Tokyo on March 10th, 1945. McNamara, who was working closely with LeMay at the time, raises the question of whether this was justified. It's a question which he doesn't answer, but it sets the questioning tone which is to come, a questioning of the behavior of human beings during war in general. Morris' team of researchers then discover re-created footage of the Gulf of Tonkin Incident, put together by the military within days of the actual incidents. To what purposes this footage was used is never stated, but the Gulf of Tonkin Incident was a pivotal moment in getting Congress to authorize more troops in Vietnam. We also learn, from taped conversations, and contrary to popular myth, that the Cuban Missile Crisis was not so much solved by JFK and RFK, but more by a government official who had spent extensive time with Krushchev and advised Kennedy on how to proceed based on his knowledge of the Soviet leader. McNamara also reveals that Castro told him years later that he had advised Krushchev to use the missiles if the United States invaded Cuba. Things quite simply could have gone either way. One can't watch The Fog of War without feeling that so many stories of American history have become over-mythologized, covering over the fact that many of our leaders are just as clueless about what to do in times of crisis as we ourselves may be. To put it more succinctly, in the fog of war anything can and does happen.

How have your opinions on McNamara changed since before you started interviewing him, as opposed to now?

Errol Morris: Well, like many people of my generation….I was going to say I hated him (at first). It’s hard to me to know how I feel now that I’ve spent now two years off and on talking to him. One thing I do know is that my view about the war hasn’t changed. At all. That has stayed the same. I thought it was appalling in 1968, and I still think that 35 years later. And my view of McNamara has changed, in many, many ways. But I would also say that there are many, many mysteries about what he did which are not resolved in my mind.

There’s a sense that he’s not making an apology exactly but he’s definitely trying to make some sort of explanation about what happened during those years and why.

I don’t think it’s an apology per se. I think it’s an attempt to reckon with, to understand “What did I do back then? What was I thinking?” Part of it is an attempt at explanation. Part of it is denial. Part of it is self-deception. There’s a lot of different things. It’s very powerful. It’s very human. And disturbing. And it becomes even more disturbing because McNamara is not unlikable. When we investigated it, we discovered so many new things. I think I should point them out because people might look at the film and think, "Well, everybody knows these things." But they don't. I don't know how many full biographies there are on McNamara, but nobody has ever uncovered this information on McNamara and LeMay and the firebombing of Japan. Which I find unbelievable. Here is McNamara as a young lieutenant colonel in the Army Air Force telling you how memos he wrote played a role in the LeMay's decision to drop down the bombing altitude. We went to the National Archive. McNamara couldn't believe we found them (the paperwork). Quite surprised that they turned up. And I don't think anyone had looked at them since the end of World War II. It was material long forgotten, hidden away in the National Archive. And it's true of so many things in the film. You know, I've said often about The Thin Blue Line, that the movie was good but the investigation was better. I hear people tell me that this was the movie that got the guy out of prison. Well, yes and no. The movie got him out of prison because contained in the movie was an investigation. The movie was very odd in the sense that an actual murder investigation was being conducted with the cameras (on). And it was the investigation that got him out. Things that were uncovered. Lots of people have made films about miscarriages of justice. I think it's more rare to actually see an investigation as part of the making of a film. I would like the movie to get credit for the investigation that underlies the movie. Because we really did do something there. And it turns out that amongst the materials we unearthed, were found were these amazing re-enactments of the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents. They re-enacted the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents, well, there was only one incident, but they re-enacted the two imagined incidents within days of the incidents themselves and then the footage was filed away.

And how did you learn of the existence of the footage?

We just found it by digging. And we're still in the process of trying to uncover why they made it. It's not clear to me what was going on. Re-enacted history has been part of our thinking about history for a very long time. It may go back as far as history itself, I don't know. Often re-enacted history is thought of as an attempt to falsify history. When I first realized there was all this material in the National Archive of these re-enactments of the Gulf of Tonkin Incidents, I first thought, "Wasn't this the government's attempt to somehow prove that certain things happened when they really didn't?" Without knowing for certain, and like I said, we're still in the process of investigating this, I think things are often re-enacted because they're considered to be a great historical moment and people are often confused about what happened. Or want a record of what happened, they want to preserve the moment in some way. Even though they're not preserving the moment itself. It's really, really interesting.

What do you think McNamara was trying to gain from his participation in the film, if anything?

I think there is no one thing he expected to get out of it. And I think it changed over time, his expectations. The whole nature of the project itself changed over time. When I first approached him, I had the idea of it being a longer film. I had no idea what type of health he would be in, about his ability to talk. But I knew very much that I at least wanted to try to interview him. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He equivocated for several days before coming up to Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was in Washington. I think he agreed to do the first interview, only because he mistakenly thought I was part of his book tour. We'd do one hour on one day. And then he'd do three hours. Then he'd come back another day and do four hours on that day.

When you showed McNamara a 40-minute cut of the film, part of the way through the process, was there any concern whether he might not continue?

Yeah, I was worried if he would ever come back, if he would go ahead with the project. You know, people think I have everything in mind at the very beginning. That it somehow unfolds according to some master plan. But that’s not the case. He could have not come back. He could have stopped talking. But as he himself says, he likes talking to me. I read his books and I read a great deal about history and thought a lot about it and he enjoyed discussing it with me. And I enjoyed discussing it with him. I feel very privileged and I’m a little amazed that it actually happened, the whole deal. I mean, the oddity of having someone I demonstrated against having dinner in my house, amongst other things.