This highly praised American documentary about how the big guys can foul things up in war casts a gloomy spell. The sole interviewee is 88-year-old Robert S McNamara, Secretary of Defense to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson.
He studied philosophy at University, served as a military adviser during the Second World War, worked at Ford as a chief executive, and then - the White House, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the murder of Kennedy, Vietnam.
He was deft and articulate, but never a loved figure: too formal and unyielding. In photographs, people around him look apprehensive, hanging on to his words (Simon and Garfunkel, incidentally, subtitled one of their songs How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission).
Although Errol Morris's film takes us through the nasty dramas behind various wars, few of McNamara's clarifications come as a surprise. Of course Vietnam should not have happened as it did, of course military chiefs often behave like war criminals. More interesting are the brief, taped telephone conversations between Kennedy, McNamara and Johnson. Kennedy listens, Johnson gabbles. Kennedy has an internal focal point, a flicker in the depths, while Johnson admits to being "scared" and "terrified". And on the other end of the telephone is McNamara, polite and quiet, as
though sitting in some dark nook with his head down.
As an octogenarian, he appears quite relaxed and loose, but with his eyebrows up and his lower lip this busy, it is occasionally like watching someone feigning frankness at a dinner party. Brutus reassuring Rome. You know that sooner or later director/ interrogator Morris is going to ask him outright how it feels to have sent so many men off to be robbed of their humanity.
And when he does ask, in the closing moments, McNamara is driving home in the rain. For the first time in the film he cannot complete a thought. "Now that would be opening up a ... now that I ... really don't want ..." Suddenly he loses all his poise and leans up against the window, just a distracted old man in a car groping for the right kind of paradox. And all he can offer is embarrassed sadness.
