Robert S. McNamara And 'The Fog Of War'.

Review By Eric 'Renderking' Fisk -  July 11th, 2009

Before we get started, here are two things you need to know about this rant. First, the media is still going crazy over the death of Michael Jackson, a news story that was given new life with his memorial service at The Staples Arena in the city of Lost Angels. This story is still dominating the front page of most of the news outlets, especially CNN. There are more than 7 features about Michael Jackson's death and memorial service at this moment (July 7th, 10:03PM) and there are zero stories (that's 0, with a "Z") about Robert McNamara's death on the same front page of the same site.

Second, I just finished a rant called "Why Palin Quit" where I lambast a few bloggers in particular and other writers in general who spout off about subjects they don't know anything about. There are all these people who ramble on and on about subjects while actual facts elude them. Many of us, myself included, are so snide with our comments and so confident in our belief that we "KNOW" what's really going on that we make accusations and judgments. We write articles and rants based upon what we believe is the truth, conclusions based on what's been reported. Everyone one of us who "blogs" about the news, current events and history does so based on information that's at best second-hand information. In actuality, we're probably dealing with the news that's been diluted each time it's been processed. What we think is "the news" is actually artificial news-byproduct condensed down so it's easy for simple minds to digest. Simply known as "McNews."

I'm not an expert on anything besides my own opinion. By no means am I an expert on the facts nor do I claim to be in possession of all of them. I'm an observer and commentator, writing about subjects as I see them. I don't pretend to know everything and I'm frustrated by people who think they do. While I'm at it, let me also target some news outlets like "MSNBC," too, who are just as guilty or duplicitous.

But, here's the news of Robert Strange McNamara death, (yes, that really is his name) someone who not only knows more about some of the pivotal events of the 20th Century but was actually there. He knew everything there is to know about The Bay Of Pigs, The Cuban Missile Crisis, The Vietnam War, and his decision literally affected everyone in some way shape or form in The United States. Including me.

At the age of 4 and 5 I remember "The Big Boys" who were in their late teens and early 20's coming back from Vietnam heartbroken and distraught. I remember one in particular who committed suicide in the apartment across the common way from my own home. I didn't know where "Vietnam" was, it could have been on another part of the world or a name of another planet, but I knew it was a place where horrible things happened to boys much older then I was and where some boys didn't come back from. Even for a little boy like myself, it was something to be feared.

Everyone knew someone who participated in that conflict, or who were protesting it. Everyone who was old enough to listen or read the news had an opinion about it. Vietnam was something that affected everyone, and Robert McNamara played a huge part in how it was executed.

On the other end of the spectrum, Michael Jackson did not ever affect the lives of people to the same extent. He was a marginal performer, a personality who's phenomenal body of work was marginalized by his own behavior and eccentricities. He entertained people. He sang songs, danced and starred in a handful of music videos. He enticed people into stadiums and raked in large sums of money that he spent on altering his appearance and lavish purchases such as amusement parks and owned the catalog of Beatle songs.

No decision that Michael Jackson ever made affected the lives of so many people directly in any way that could come close to McNamara's. None of Jackson's decisions directly affected the lives of other people beyond his own family or those who worked with him in the business. Michael Jackson performed for billions of people and when the song ended, the video or concert was over - that's pretty much the extent of it.

[A quick aside, Rex Biggers points out: ""While I agree about your basic premise about the ridiculous media focus on entertainment, it's like throwing us sticks of bubble gum and hoping we don't pay attention to Rome burning, I must point out that it was said Jackson had the Guinness record for most charities supported simultaneously by an entertainer." - You're right, Rex! Thank you!]

What McNamara did as Secretary Of Defense changed whole countries for decades. While people might claim that what Jackson did on the entertainment scene was "explosive," McNamara was in the room with the Kennedy brothers trying to decide if a land or air invasion would be an appropriate response to the Soviet Union putting atomic weapon installations in Cuba.

While people wonder if Michael Jackson really molested the young boys who slept over at his house or how many plastic surgeries he had performed on his face, McNamara probably knows more about the answers surrounding the mysteries surrounding the assassination of Jack Kennedy then any other government official who was in Washington DC at the time. McNamara most likely knows what was left out of the Warren Commission and what Kennedy really would have done if the President lived...

"John F. Kennedy," From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

It remains a point of some controversy among historians whether or not Vietnam would have escalated to the point it did had Kennedy served out his full term and been re-elected in 1964.[31] Fueling the debate are statements made by Kennedy's and Johnson's Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara that Kennedy was strongly considering pulling out of Vietnam after the 1964 election. In the film "The Fog of War", not only does McNamara say this, but a tape recording of Lyndon Johnson confirms that Kennedy was planning to withdraw from Vietnam, a position Johnson states he strongly disapproved of.[32] Additional evidence is Kennedy's National Security Action Memorandum (NSAM) #263 on October 11, 1963, that gave the order for the withdrawal of 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963. Nevertheless, given the stated reason for the overthrow of the Diem government, such action would have been a policy reversal, but Kennedy was generally moving in a less hawkish direction in the Cold War since his acclaimed speech about World Peace at American University the previous June 10, 1963.

After Kennedy's assassination, new President Lyndon B. Johnson immediately reversed his predecessor's order to withdraw 1,000 military personnel by the end of 1963 with his own NSAM #273 on November 26, 1963.

I'll go on the record and say this, I think it's very suspicious that Jack Kennedy was ready to abandon Vietnam, was assassinated, then Johnson escalated the conflict and troop level a mere three days after Kennedy's death. But that's something for you folks to rant about on our forum.

But I can point at this disparity in the news coverage between Jackson and McNamara and say: "Is this not a sign of decline in our society? Is this not an indicator that this is a civilization in deep trouble when the death of a performer gets more coverage (now in its second week?) than the most controversial political figure in the 1960's who made decisions that cost the lives of hundreds of thousands servicemen overseas and affected every person in this country?

Is this not a sign that we're in trouble? If news organizations can't prioritize in moments like these, then who's to say they do an adequate job in covering primaries and the candidates, bills that are submitted to become law in Congress, the environment and climate change...

Or maybe it's CNN. Maybe The Cable News Network really isn't a news organization at all. Maybe I'm the one that's been duped into taking it seriously.

Which brings me to the documentary, "The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara"

The Documentary: The Fog Of War

There's so much to this motion picture, just talking about The Cold War and The Cuban Missile Crisis is enough for a review by itself. There are times that I watched this motion picture here at home and had to stop and think about what I just heard in regards to how close we (the human race) came to total annihilation over the conflict that started with the Soviet's installing atomic weapons in Cuba...

Robert McNamara: [about Castro] I said, "I must have got the translation wrong." So I asked him 3 questions. One- did you know there were nuclear warheads in Cuba? Two- would you have recommended to Khrushchev to use nuclear missiles in the event of an American invasion of Cuba? And three- what would have happened to Cuba?

He said, "One- I knew the missiles were there. Two- I would not *have* recommended it, I *did* recommend it! And three- we would have been totally obliterated".

... And the mistakes that they made in backing a coup to oust South Viet Nam President Ngo Dinh Diem which lead to instability in the region and the eventual chaos that led to the loss of the war.

"I was present with the President when together we received information of that coup. I've never seen him more upset. He totally blanched. President Kennedy and I had tremendous problems with Diem, but my God, he was the authority, he was the head of state. And he was overthrown by a military coup. And Kennedy knew and I knew, that to some degree, the U.S. government was responsible for that."

The entirety of "Fog Of War" is an examination of McNamara's life, from his earliest memory of seeing the celebrations on the city streets of San Francisco on the day World War I was declared over, to his years in college and Harvard University, to working with Curtis LeMay in making the allied air bombings in World War II more efficient, his brief stint as the president of Ford Motor Company.

But the most interesting and historically relevant was his role in the Kennedy/Johnson administrations as Secretary of Defense. It's a captivating train wreck to watch a tormented elderly man haunted by the demons of his past and the memories of his own actions that resulted in the images seared into our brains like a branding iron.

There are more than a handful of moments when Mr. McNamara is looking into the camera and choked up, tears welling up in his eyes as he tells us - you and me in the audience - how horrible he feels about the choices he made and the hand he had in causing so much harm to people around the world, especially to United States servicemen and the people of Vietnam.

"...We saw Vietnam as an element of the Cold War. Not what they saw it was: a civil war."

"We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of our country. But we were wrong. We were terribly wrong"

But he's also giving the current administration of which this film was made (George W Bush in 2003) and those to come in the future (such as the current one headed by Barack Obama, and beyond) the lessons of history, the history he created. He's asking all of us to learn from his mistakes and to avoid the biggest one that none of us could recover from.

Okay. Any military commander who is honest with himself, or with those he's speaking to, will admit that he has made mistakes in the application of military power. He's killed people unnecessarily — his own troops or other troops — through mistakes, through errors of judgment. A hundred, or thousands, or tens of thousands, maybe even a hundred thousand. But, he hasn't destroyed nations.

And the conventional wisdom is don't make the same mistake twice, learn from your mistakes. And we all do. Maybe we make the same mistake three times, but hopefully not four or five. They'll be no learning period with nuclear weapons. You make one mistake and you're going to destroy nations...

My concern is that we're creating a society that's so entertainment and amusement oriented that too many of us are oblivious to what's really important, what's really going on. With McNamara's passing, we're watching a chapter of American and Western history close, an event that many media outlets chose to underplay or ignore altogether.

The man who knew where all the "bodies" were buried during the Kennedy/Johnson administrations is now rendered speechless. He knew about the Pentagon's preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union, he knew about all the other back-room deals that involved the United States and our allies in all the other conflicts beyond Cuba and Vietnam that almost lead to an atomic holocaust. What secrets did he take to the grave and what hope do we have that he left something behind for us to read. Or is the documentary "The Fog Of War..." and his books "In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam" and "Argument Without End In Search Of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy" (written with James Blight, Robert K. Brigham, and Thomas J Biersteker) all we have left?

The people who cry hysterically about the death of Michael Jackson as if he was a close relative while simultaneously having no idea who McNamara was or the legacy he left behind (for good and ill) scare me. The people who vote based on the McNews they consume from only one news outlet like CNN, FoxNews, The Huffington Post or USAToday also concern me. Their votes count just as much as yours and mine.

"Those who forget to learn from history are doomed to repeat it." That's the conventional wisdom. But with growing conflicts in Iran, Afghanistan, Venezuela, and a new Cold War brewing with China and Russia, we are quickly coming to the point that we are doomed to make the same mistakes history is trying to teach us. With the proliferation of nuclear weapons that exist today, those mistakes will lead to a calamity so enormous there will be no one left to learn from it.

Does Barack Obama have a copy of this motion picture? If not, how do I go about getting a copy to him?

From Amazon...

"The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara"

In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam | by Robert S. McNamara

"Argument Without End: In Search Of Answers To The Vietnam Tragedy" | April 22, 1999