85 year old McNamara is advising the world on how to go about war using a recap of his professional life. He does this because he recognizes that war among humans is inevitable, despite how ugly it is and how wrong it may seem. The former secretary of defense talks about his experiences in WWII through the Vietnam War as well as other sprinkled glimpses into his life. His “lessons” don’t seem to serve any purpose other than to give the documentary some sense of structure. Some just seem to be supported much better than others. There is however, a slight shift in the tone of the lessons after “Get the Data”.
His lessons parallel with the direction of his career. Lessons 1 through 5 deal mainly with wartime strategy and observations. “Empathize with the enemy” says we should look at the war through the eyes of the Vietnamese. We were fighting the cold war while they were simply fighting a civil war. “Maximize Efficiency” was mainly about his calculations and observations of the new bombers and their lack of accuracy. His observations led to another officer’s order to firebomb cities at a much lower altitude, leading to massive Vietnamese casualties. This leads into “Proportionality should be a guideline to war”, where McNamara compares bombed cities to their equals in the USA. It really brings his message home with the visuals in the film.
The documentary seems to take a more philosophical approach with the remaining lessons. “Belief and seeing are both often wrong” talks about the struggle of grasping how the US was failing in Vietnam. “In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil” tells us that war is inevitable. With hostility being in man’s nature, resolve sometimes has to come with a price. The film flashes back to his days studying philosophy in college as he talks about this particular subject.
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