The Fog of War
Professor Joanna invited Emerson College’s freshmen Honors classes to a screening of The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara on Thursday night. This Errol Morris documentary digs into the mind of Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations. McNamara has always played a key villain role in my U.S. history classes’ study of the Vietnam War. Through telling introspection, McNamara describes his struggle to pursue the diplomatic and military plans and that he and President Kennedy developed before President Kennedy’s assassination.
If President George W. Bush is a war mongerer, he pales in comparison to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson’s escalation and missteps in Vietnam. According to McNamara, President Johnson disagreed with President Kennedy’s strategy for Vietnam and subsequently chose a radically different, and ultimately fateful, approach. McNamara cowardly submitted to and executed President Johnson’s orders against his own judgment. What follows in the documentary are eleven lessons McNamara learned from Vietnam War at the price of 211,529 casualties, $111-billion, and immeasurable damage to the ideals and reputation of the United States.
Most shocking to me was McNamara’s conversation with a high-ranking Vietnamese official many years after the Vietnam War where he realized that even the President of the United States and his Cabinet did not understand that the Communists in Vietnam were fighting for state independence, not for alignment with China and other Communist nations. The killing was in vain. The United States of American should have aligned itself with the Vietnamese Communist revolutionists to have an ally against the larger Communist states in the region. Both sides were really fighting against the same enemy, only we were blinded by paranoia. Fog of War is the most disruptive account of the Vietnam War I have seen.
*Statistical Summary America’s Major Wars
This entry was posted on Friday, February 27th, 2004 at 16:50 and is tagged politics. 