Blog#12:FoW-RGV

Through the interviews portrayed in Fog of War, Robert McNamara tells of some of the most significant parts of his life, and he describes how these moments lead into his participation in the Vietnam War as Secretary of Defense. McNamara discusses his education, his marriage, his military experience, and his job experience after college before introducing his role in the government and the topic of the war. The descriptions he offers of his earlier life give the audience background on the unfamiliar areas of his personal life as well as the setting in which he grew up and lived the majority of his life.

The reason for Robert McNamara's presence in the film is the fulfillment of his desire to defend his actions as Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. More than thirty years after the end of the war, most people recognize that a considerable amount of corruption was present within the US government at the time. It has become evident as time has progressed that much was kept from the American people in regard to the status of the war and the accomplishment of American troops. When dealing with this subject, two events that immediately come to mind are the My Lai massacre and the Gulf of Tonkin incident. Now that the public has been made aware of much of what truly took place in Vietnam, many people see numerous negative outcomes of the United States' participation in the war. This perspective has caused many people to wonder why American involved itself in this war and what positive purpose did it serve.

In attempt to justify his actions as Secretary of Defense, McNamara attempts to present his own perspective through his interviews in Fog of War. He explains that not all the knowledge that is available to the public now was available to him during the war. McNamara also attempts to portray his course of action as the right, ethical way of going about things given the circumstances he was in and the stress he was under. His interviews in this documentary are essentially composed of his personal rationalizations about his actions that aim to downplay the stark reality of the war and remove personal guilt that he still carries.

McNamara composes a list of eleven lessons that can be learned from his life experiences. There is a shift in the tone of these lessons after the first three lessons. The first three lessons, "empathize with your enemy, "rationality will not save us," and "there's something beyond one's self," deal with conceptual, ethical issues that one can encounter during life. He advises the audience to view problems from other perspectives in order to make good, moral decisions because of responsibilities people have to themselves and society. On the other hand, the next three lessons, "maximize efficiency," proportionality should be a guideline in war," and "get the data," are more concerned with quantitative, factual topics. In the documentary, numerous images of statistics are shown within these three lessons as to demonstrate the numbers used by government officials in wartime. These lessons also seem to deal with effective ways of waging war successfully. For example, McNamara discusses the necessity of firebombing 100,000 civilians despite its unethical nature. This lesson is an obvious representation of the self-contradiction present in McNamara's fourth, fifth, and sixth lessons because an argument cannot be made that the United States empathized with its enemy through its merciless killing of 100,000 noncombatants.