Just back from seeing The Fog of War. Picture a US government official, talking fifty years later about the decisions that sent kids off to war. As my friend Sidney said, “It’s not hard to see Iraq here.” Yes, thanks to Robert McNamara–who helped spin Vietnam for JFK and LBJ–the prequel of GWB is showing now.
Amazingly, fifty years later, McNamara –soft-spoken and still brilliant in his mid-eighties–doesn’t feel he did much wrong.
Razor-sharp on any technical or historical subject, McNamara gets a fond and goofy smile on his face when he talks about Kennedy and Johnson. He loved those guys. He wanted to help them out. He advised them to pull US troops out of Vietnam, but when they said no–hey, he was just there to give them a helping hand. (Quite a few newsreel clips feature McNamara telling the camera that Vietnam was going incredibly well.)
There’s a long telling clip of McNamara getting an award from LBJ. MacNamara is beaming, happy, teary-eyed–unable to choke out his words of gratitude. LBJ tries not to look too bored and annoyed. “Yes, you prostituted yourself for me, and it was just what I needed. Now let this event be over so I can stop looking at you.”
Errol Morris, who won an Oscar with this film, also directed those wonderful Apple “Switch” ads. And the sad thing is that McNamara (whose IQ must be 999) saw himself as a kind of lovable Janie Porche–“I saved Christmas!”
Janie Porche saved Christmas for her family and friends, and I’m sure they were grateful and happy and loved her for it. Her brilliant success was their delight. But Robert McNamara made a career out of trying to generate that kind of delight in two throat-slittingly ambitious career politicians. He still doesn’t get it that he was cynically used.
And he still feels that sending young soldiers off to die–or ordering bombs that would burn civilians alive–well, it was worth it, really, because he loved Kennedy, and he loved Johnson, and they loved him in return. Didn’t they?
* Does it sound like a spinach cinema? (One that you ought to go see, but don’t really want to.) Reach for your inner Popeye and go anyway–you’ll be fascinated.
3 responses so far ↓
1 Anonymous // Apr 7, 2004 at 1:22 pm
Wow, Betsy, that was a good crowbar you used there to get the groaning off the couch, put on their shoes and go see something that is “good” for them. Eat your spinach! Ha-ha.
I don’t personally remember much from that era, but was fascinated by David Foster Wallace’s account of LBJ in a short story he wrote in 1989, entitled: “Lyndon.” He is even younger so he did not remember either, but somehow found enough material to be able to seemingly climb right inside the Oval Office and give a startingly real account of the goings-on during LBJ’s reign. I came away satisfied, as if I had been transported through time and made it back again, alive.
I’m afraid I would not have made it back out again unscathed, had I actually met the man, if you get my drift.
Thank you for the heads up. I will look for this film when it comes out on DVD, as we will probably not see it shown locally.
2 Lisa Williams // Apr 7, 2004 at 3:29 pm
I *love* spinach! I saw it a few weeks ago (impressions here). I really like documentaries, and it’s a treat to be able to see one in a theater. Morris is great, too; his First Person series for Bravo, and his previous documentary Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control were like carwashes for your neurons, you come out with all your brain cells shiny and buffed.
3 Betsy Devine: Now with even more funny ha-ha and peculiar » Eighth deadly sin? It also makes us stupid. // Oct 8, 2007 at 2:10 pm
[…] no one-word name for the deadly sin that sucked all brain cells from the brains-big-as-Buicks of Robert McNamara and Arthur M. […]