I watched the Errol Morris documentary again entitled “The Fog of War.”  The subtitle is “Eleven Lessons in the Life of Robert McNamara.” My wife claims I have watched this dozens of times. It won an Oscar in 2003.

McNamara, at age 85 when the documentary was filmed, has some good lessons. He participated in planning for Curtis LeMay’s 1945 fire bombings of Japan, the Vietnam War, and “three crises that took us to the brink with the Russians”: the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Kosigyn’s threat, which I hadn’t heard before, made during the 1967 Six Day (Middle East) War, “if you want war, you’ll get war,” apparently related to reports that America was involved in Israel’s air victories.  I assume the third crisis was Berlin 1961.

McNamara cited the failure of our Vietnam policy, saying the lesson was that the United States should never act unilaterally.  If we couldn’t persuade the Brits, Europeans, Japanese and other allies at the time who share our values of the worthiness of the cause, we should not have gone it alone.

On the Cuban Missile Crisis, McNamara’s lesson was that you must empathize with your adversary.  Kennedy said we would never get the missiles out (of Cuba) by negotiation. Ambassador Tommy (Llewellyn) Thompson had the guts to disagree with Kennedy in EXCOM meetings, as we heard on tape, saying there was a way out, and that Kennedy could work with Khrushchev, who was not necessarily under the control of his military hard liners.  We could offer a quid, no invasion of Cuba, which would be sufficient for Khrushchev’s own political purposes.  Khrushchev had gotten himself in a bind, but he could get out of it by saying to the Presidium, “Kennedy was going to invade, and I saved Cuba.” In Vietnam, by contrast, McNamara charges that we did not empathize with our enemy.  We saw the war from our own Cold War perspective and never understood North Vietnam’s view of the struggle as one for independence.

Also, in fighting wars, we have to ensure in the future that we apply the principle of proportionality.  No matter what Curtis LeMay felt, it was not right to kill hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians with fire-bombings and two atomic bombs in order to spare the lives of American soldiers who would have to invade Japan.  We were, McNamara claimed, war criminals.

McNamara claims to have been privately arguing with President Johnson to get the U.S. out of Vietnam while publicly supporting the war.  I’m not sure that this stands up, given what other historians have said about McNamara and what I remember.  Perhaps the most compelling message of the film related to Vietnam and the Quaker protester, Morrison, who burnt himself to death at the Pentagon beneath McNamara’s window, throwing his infant daughter to safety just in time.  Morrison’s wife, McNamara recounts, sadly said the lesson was simply that people must stop killing each other.

McNamara says we are bound to make mistakes, but should try to learn from them.  It became clear to me, watching LBJ’s pondering the War in Vietnam, that President George W. Bush made the same mistakes in Iraq, forty years later, getting mixed up in a civil war and posturing it in larger geo-strategic terms, seeing it as a fight for freedom, relying on faulty intelligence, and believing in military might.

McNamara’s lessons are valuable. It should be the primary objective of any President to keep the nation out of war.  We should never get involved unilaterally in military conflict, except for direct danger to the U.S. mainland. Most important, given the danger of nuclear weapons, it is inevitable that nations will be destroyed someday.  We need to rethink our attitudes on killing and war before it is to late. This is a problem with human nature that we need to correct, the need for weapons and aggression. We have to change our mind set, now with nuclear weapons.  Kennedy and Khrushchev and Castro were all rational men, and yet came close to destroying the world in 1962.

McNamara asked Castro thirty years after the crisis, in 1992, if he would have recommended to Moscow that they launch the IRBMs at the United States had we invaded, and Castro said yes, even if Cuba were destroyed.  That was pure madness.

The film itself is magical, with Philip Glass’ music and beautiful slow motion scenes of Japanese walking the streets of modern Tokyo, interspersed with McNamara’s voiceover talking about the devastation of Japan in 1945, with terrible statistics turned into images of numbers falling from the sky like bombs, and with clips of sailors on U.S. ships imposing the quarantine on Cuba in 1962 and on the Turner Joy in the Gulf of Tonkin in 1965, and recordings of LBJ’s talking to McNamara on the phone, demanding escalation in Vietnam, and slow motion sequences of Vietnamese on bicycles in the streets of Saigon while talking about “Rolling Thunder.” All this is done with the haunting, retrospective music in the background, with three rising scale flute notes breaking through at times, suggesting peril and momentous events.