I don’t know enough about Robert McNamara or the Vietnam War to really understand what’s going on in this documentary of McNamara’s life, but it quickly becomes apparent that the filmmakers, director Errol Morris in particular, have a predetermined bias against the Vietnam War.

McNamara, who served as the Secretary of Defense under Kennedy and then Johnson, was viewed as the source of the problems surrounding the Vietnam War, and now Morris has the chance to pin him down and get to the heart of things. We get about an hour of interview out of reportedly 20 hours of tape, so it’s hard to tell how McNamara really feels about things.

From what we get, he appears apologetic for mental mistakes he made while in his position, but appears confident that he did his best. It all boils down to the idea that the whole event was more complex than anyone really understands it to be, and though he places most of the blame on Johnson, he feels like he would have done things differently looking back.

Though it’s apparent we get the whole issue from one perspective, I was actually less intrigued by the politics than by the psychology. McNamara is hard to get a hold of as a character; he becomes continually more interesting as he looks back on his life with seeming sincerity and evaluates his performance – a sort of judgment day.

The film is divided into eleven “lessons” that we learn from McNamara’s experience that apply as much to our individual lives as they do to politics. These lessons constitute Covey-esque statements such as, “Empathize with you enemy” and “Belief and seeing are both often wrong.” I appreciated theses lessons to the extent that they revealed serious mistakes and better solutions – but the film is a far cry from providing solutions to Vietnam. Instead it seems more simply to have allowed a man to come to terms with himself and pass on wisdom that will hopefully aid in generations to come.

Documentary

Year: