BEFORE: Yesterday I hit the halfway point on Documentary Month, with 15 down and 14 to go - so now I'm over the hump, and this is the last film on the subject of politics & war, and in a couple of days (now that I switched the order around) I can look forward to films about comedians and maybe lighten up the mood around here for a while. I've got a good read now on which Presidents have appeared the most so far this year - and it looks like Barack Obama and Bill Clinton are tied for first with 12 appearances each, both easily beating my top actor for the year, James Franco. After those two Presidents come George W. Bush with 11 appearances and both Nixon and Reagan with 10 each. There are still 13 docs to come after tonight, so there may be a couple more Presidents popping up, but that's less likely once I get off politics.
Something for the holiday, today, obviously - it's one of the easiest holidays for me to program for, as long as I find something about U.S. history or war, that seems to fit the bill. Last year at this time I watched "The Birth of a Nation" (followed by "American Made" and "Hostiles") and the year before that, I think it was "Free State of Jones".
Richard Nixon carries over from "Get Me Roger Stone" via archive footage.
THE PLOT: The story of America as seen through the eyes of Robert McNamara, the former Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson.
AFTER: Well, I've already covered Watergate and the moon landing this year, so I suppose the Vietnam War was inevitable. But was it? I mean in real life, that is. Knowing what we know now (or rather in 2009, when this was filmed) what's the take on Vietnam, should it have even happened? Filmmaker Errol Morris arranged a one-hour interview with Robert McNamara, which turned into an eight-hour interview, and then two more days of interviews a few months later. Could it be that this guy had something he wanted to get off his chest? Yesterday's film had the "Rules" of Roger Stone, and today it's the "Life Lessons" or Robert McNamara.
Funny story, it turns out the U.S. getting into Vietnam was just a horrible misunderstanding. So there's a bit of "Whoopsie! My bad..." from McNamara as he admits that mistakes were made. His story about Navy men misreading the sonar is pretty chilling, like they somehow thought that everything on the sonar was a torpedo, and I'm guessing the Viet Cong probably didn't even have torpedoes, or any way to launch them. I've never learned much about the Tonkin Gulf incident before, and now to find out that there were supposedly two attacks on August 2 and 4, only now it seems that the second one was completely imaginary, it never happened. Freak weather effects on radar and sonar operators who were possibly misreading signals from the propeller of their own boat (?) possibly indicate that there was no second attack by torpedo boats - which the Navy claimed they had located and sunk, despite the fact that there was no wreckage or physical evidence of any engagement. So, umm, what was the Navy shooting at, then? Manatees?
This matters because the two Tonkin Gulf incidents led to Congress passing the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, which was the legal justification for President Johnson to send U.S. troops to fight North Vietnam. And only NOW (again, 2009) does McNamara reveal that part of the original attack that justified the war didn't even happen? OK, no big deal, just 60,000 U.S. troops killed or MIA, a few hundred thousand of civilians burned to death, and a generation of Americans losing faith in their country. But it's good that McNamara's able to clear his conscience, right?
McNamara also relates his relationship with General Curtis LeMay, who designed the strategic bombing campaigns used in World War II, which were first used to take out military targets in Japan, but were later turned toward ordinary civilians, burning up half the citizens of cities like Tokyo, Osaka and Yokohama. So here's another morality question that McNamara ends up grappling with - how many civilians is it OK to kill during a war, by both regular bombs and then the atomic one? He worked with Lemay, and while he claims that both he and Lemay would probably be prosecuted for war crimes if their side had lost the war, he's still able to compartmentalize the devastation using one of his lessons as a mantra: "Proportionality should be a guideline in war." Oh, well, sure, by all means, carry on with your life, then.
Lesson #9 states that "In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil." Another big-picture sort of rationalization, but doesn't that contrast with Lesson #1, "Empathize with your enemy"? Because if mistakes were made, if evil things were done in order to bring about a "good" result, how does one then empathize with the thousands of people who died as collateral damage, who died for no other reason that they were born in a country that the Communists were interested in? And then we in the U.S. look down on dictators around the world who wield terrible power and claim to know what's best for their citizens, and thus justify all kinds of terrible actions, even genocide. How is McNamara any different from those dictators, in the end? Because he's fooled himself into thinking that everything was done for the common good? Sorry, I'm not buying it.
Prior to all that, the film re-visits the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962, when McNamara was serving as Kennedy's Secretary of Defense. And at least I've seen this depicted before, how close we were to nuclear war after missiles were discovered in Cuba, aimed at America. What I did not before was that Kennedy received two contradictory messages from Nikita Khrushchev, one "soft message", informally stating that if the U.S. did not invade, then the USSR would remove the missiles from Cuba. The second, more formal, "hard" message threatened military action against the U.S. if they invaded - which message was more genuine, or were the Soviets merely hedging their bets? A former ambassador to Moscow was called in, a man who knew Khrushchev personally, and he advised responding to the first message, believing that the Soviet premier merely wanted to save face, and be able to tell Fidel Castro that he had stopped the U.S. invasion. Knowledge, empathy, and a bit of good luck prevented nuclear war in 1962, according to McNamara at least.
Hindsight is always 20/20, of course, a fact which McNamara mansplains to us - "See, you don't have hindsight at the time..." No, really? Geez, thanks for that. His perfect hindsight tells us how lucky we were at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, but that "mistakes were made" in Vietnam. Then he has the audacity to tell us all that we get to learn from our mistakes and try to do better next time. OK, so the next time you have the chance to firebomb 100,000 civilians, that might give you some pause? Give me a break. And now I have to worry about some drone that got shot down in Iran, and that just makes me think about the Tonkin Gulf all over again, and how easily Trump might start a war just because voters are less likely to unseat a President while we're in a (phony) war. Once again, as with "Get Me Roger Stone", I wish that the American people would think less about what politicians are saying, and more about WHY they're saying what they're saying.
War is a complex issue, to be sure. But this is a day when I'm supposed to be feeling proud to be an American, but when I find out that we never should have been in Vietnam in the first place, AND our Demander in Chief is putting on a giant, dictatorial military parade to pay tribute to himself, I'm not sure how I'm going to get there. Plus, as usual, my neighborhood is going to sound like war-torn Syria tonight with all of the illegal fireworks that nobody ever seems to know how to stop or control. I'll glance at the fireworks show tonight on TV, I suppose, but no way am I leaving the house tonight, it's much too dangerous.
Also starring Robert McNamara, the voice of Errol Morris, and archive footage of John F. Kennedy (also carrying over from "Get Me Roger Stone"), Barry Goldwater (ditto), Lyndon Johnson (last seen in "Won't You Be My Neighbor?"), Fidel Castro, Nikita Khrushchev, Curtis LeMay, Harry Reasoner (last seen in "13th"), Woodrow Wilson and the voice of Franklin Roosevelt (last seen in "Capitalism: A Love Story").
RATING: 4 out of 10 Philip Glass songs
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