Theology in the Vineyard

Recently TVO showed the riveting Errol Morris documentary The Fog of War, the anguished mea culpa of the former U.S. Secretary of War, Robert McNamara.At the end of the film he speaks T.S. Eliot’s famous lines:

We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

This is a fitting epilogue for the tortuous, cinematic self-examination we are privy to in this revealing film. Culled from twenty-five hours of interviews, the end product is a fascinating Q and A with the still-controversial former secretary of defence in the administrations of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson.

Subtitled “Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara,” the work haunts the viewer by its stunning parallels with the ideas of the architects of the current U.S. debacle in Iraq. It is an eerie experience to hear McNamara’s voice, but see in one’s mind’s eye the faces of Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld — blind men, whose hubris has crafted the stunningly arrogant “Project for the New American Century.”

McNamara, sprightly and energetic at 86, exhibits the same sharp intelligence that catapulted him through Berkeley, Harvard, and IBM to the presidency of the Ford Motor company. Then, at 42, he became the Secretary of Defence under JFK and later under LBJ. In many ways, he is a haunted man, who in his ninth decade, still feels he must submit himself, if not to some high court of international justice, to the cinematic bar of history.

This makes the viewer a bit uncomfortable. We watch this formerly self-assured man squirm and come close to tears as he exposes himself to past wounds. In the end, one is grateful for his doing so. The final product yields a rich harvest.

Eleven lessons

Interspersed with clips of the period, including the memorable ones of the professor with his pointer explaining to a television audience and the press, the “mysterious” country of Vietnam, the film is constructed on the 11 lessons McNamara says he has learned.

They are valuable ones, even if you are among “those who still think I am a sonofabitch.” One forgets today, 40 years later, just what a lightning rod Bob McNamara was for the liberal press, repulsed by his absolute certitude and often condescending air.

The present-day McNamara, if not exactly lovable, is no longer “the soulless technocrat” he appeared to be when all those bombs and cancer-producing defoliants were dropped in a far-off place smaller than Nova Scotia. His newfound humility and anguished ambiguity elicit at least some respect for an older and wiser McNamara. He makes it clear at the start, that even though humans can learn from their mistakes, today there is little turn-around time given the terrible finality of nuclear weapons.

His first lesson is to empathize with the enemy. He credits the former ambassador to the USSR, Tommy Thompson in this regard. The latter sat next to JFK during the October Missile Crisis of 1962, one who knew Khrushchev personally. Thompson convinced JFK that Khrushchev had seen such devastation in two World Wars he would not want to risk a nuclear conflagration. He did, however, want to save face.

In this sense, both men were rational, but McNamara now insists that rationality will not save us. In 1992, Fidel Castro staggered him with his statement that he would have advised Khrushchev to launch a first strike despite the potential incineration of Cuba.

Having studied philosophy and ethics at Berkeley and Harvard, McNamara is a rationalist, one committed to critical thought and ethical thinking. Hence, his third point that there is something beyond oneself. Yet, McNamara never seems to make the leap beyond ruthless intelligence to deep compassion. In 1944, working as the statistical guru of war efficiency, he acknowledged the fighting brilliance and leadership capacities of a man much of the world considered insane in the Vietnam era — General Curtis Lemay, he of the “bomb them back to the stone age” comment. It was Lemay who showed McNamara how “efficency” worked when the latter was trying to understand why 20 per cent of B-19 sorties were aborted. Men would take off and get “sick” until Lemay took the lead plane. Anybody who did not follow would be court-martialled.

The fire bombing of Tokyo

It was McNamara who helped Lemay organize the horrific fire bombing of Japan which killed 100,000 people on one night in Tokyo, and thousands in other Japanese cities. “A man totally intolerant of criticism,” Lemay was the ultimate realist. These mass murders saved American lives. If “we had lost the war,” Lemay admitted, “we would both be tried as war criminals.”

From efficiency to proportionality is McNamara’s fifth lesson. The mass murders in Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama were too much. Nuclear weapons today make moot the questions of proportionality.

Fast forward to 1964. LBJ asks McNamara to fix Vietnam, and “whip the hell out of them.” Even though McNamara was sacked by the American adminstration in 1968, 25,000 Americans and one million Vietnamese had died. Proportionality?
The sixth lesson was natural to McNamara the technocrat: get the data. Here, he refers to his work at Ford, in digging out the reasons behind car deaths (lack of seat belts) and just who were buying fuel-efficient cars in the era of huge tail fins. Bravo for McNamara: the new Ford Falcon became a hit.

He says that “belief and seeing are often wrong.” He often saw what he wanted to see. He fell prey to seeing geopolitics through the simplistic lens of the Cold War, hence the “domino theory:” if the U.S. did not stop Vietnam from going “communist,” the whole of Asia would go. Years later, when visiting Vietnam he understood what any “Asia hand” could have told him: the Vietnamese would never cede their independence. They saw the Americans as the new imperialists, unworthy successors of the French and the Chinese. American myopia had devastating consequences for the world.

One worries that if a bright guy like McNamara knew little of Vietnamese history, what a stunningly incurious man like George Bush knows about Iraqis and their history. How can one trust a man who had never travelled outside the U.S. before he became president, or a Congress where fewer than 40 per cent of members had passports before they were elected.

Commitment to nonviolence

“Be prepared to examine your reasoning” is his eighth lesson. He now admits “We have no record of omniscience.”

Lesson number nine is that “in order to do good you have to engage in evil,” McNamara cites two leaders in American war culture, General Sherman and the aforementioned Curtis Lemay. The former refused the entreaties of the mayor of Atlanta who begged him not to torch the city during the Civil War. “War is hell,” Sherman reminded him, as he lit the match. Curtis Lemay, a man who seemingly had no qualms at all about his death-dealing, by the mid 1960s, had become a savage caricature. In this context, McNamara raises a long forgotten incident during the Vietnam years: the horrifying self immolation of American Quaker Norman Morrison, who at the last moment spared his own child from the flames he had lit. No mention here of the countless Buddhist monks who torched themselves to make the same statement. “War is difficult for sensitive people,” McNamara concludes. In this segment, we see the real heroes of that era — the protestors, the 50,000 people, who marched on the Pentagon in a bid to halt the war. In a touching moment, McNamara, refuses to discuss his family and probably the terrible personal price they paid.

“Rationality will not save us” was for me the dominant lesson McNamara teaches. Philosophy will not save us either. It utterly failed Robert McNamara.We may have a chance if people of faith can grasp the fact that their commitment to nonviolence must absolutely trump their allegiance to imperial adventures like the “Project for the New American Century” and any other imperial crusade. 

Availale in video stores, the Fog of War is a valuable primer on imperial arrogance, stunning hubris and the wisdom of Santayana’s prescient dictum that those who do not read history will be condemned to repeat the mistakes of the past.Fog bound incurious George is the classic example.