THERE IS A meeting of minds in The Fog Of War. Behind the camera is Errol Morris, America's most respected documentary filmmaker whose previous successes include The Thin Blue Line and A Brief History Of Time. In front of the camera is no less a figure than Robert S. McNamara, the secretary of defence for both John F. Kennedy and his successor, Lyndon Johnson, and the man generally regarded as the architect of the Vietnam war.
Over the course of 106 minutes, Morris interviews McNamara about his life and the history of the 20th century - two subjects which are, somewhat terrifyingly, inextricably intertwined. The interviews cover the napalm attacks on Japan by the US airforce in 1945, the Cuban missile crisis and the war in Vietnam. The issues raised by these discussions in 2001 and 2002 take on a new relevance in the light of the 'war on terror' and the war in Iraq.
For those too young to remember, a brief introduction to McNamara is necessary. He's best known - and often reviled - as the man who planned the Vietnam war. A high-flyer who could process reams of data and act on the results at great speed, he had his first taste of conflict in the US airforce during the second world war. After the war, he joined the Ford Motor Company, and his intellectual prowess helped him become the president in late 1960. A month later, John F. Kennedy asked him to join the government as secretary of defence.
He worked with Kennedy to solve the Cuban missile crisis and was focusing on the situation in Vietnam when Kennedy was assassinated. Johnson, when he took over as president, decided that US troops should be deployed in Vietnam. McNamara assumed political control of the invasion and sent the US down that disastrous path of destruction and defeat.
McNamara, as he likes to points out himself, is a complex person. Morris says he did not want to pass judgment on the man or put his remarks into any kind of context in the documentary. He was content to watch his subject struggling to come to terms with his own deeds on camera. McNamara is known to be troubled by his Vietnam policy, but refuses to pass any judgment on it in the documentary, claiming the subject is too complex to be discussed in such circumstances.
'One of the things about McNamara that fascinates me is his struggle with himself,' says Morris, speaking at the New York Film Festival. 'He's struggling with that very deep and important question: Who am I? It's a struggle that we watch. I like to think that this movie is a different way of doing history. People talk about the need for balance, the need for presenting different sides of an argument. But this movie is deliberately unbalanced.
'There's only one point of view in the film - that of Robert McNamara, struggling with his own history and the history of the 20th century, which for an amazing amount of time overlapped,' says Morris. 'It's history from the inside out. I'm not there to pass judgment on him, but to draw out his own story, his own monologue, his arrogance, his notion of who he is, who he was, and what he's done.'
