When The Fog of War came out in theaters, it was presented as Robert McNamara, Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, speaks out against the war. Frankly, that facile, nutshell description does not do the film justice. Here’s how it came about:
McNamara originally agreed to an hour-long interview for the Errol Morris PBS series, “First Person” (2000). The interview lasted eight hours and McNamara stayed for a second day of interviewing. He also returned months later, for two more days of interviews. Morris found himself with more than enough material for a feature-length documentary.
During WWII, McNamara worked in an early think tank within the Army Air Corps:
McNamara: I was on the island of Guam in his [General Curtis LeMay's] command in March 1945. In that single night, we burned to death one hundred thousand Japanese civilians in Tokyo. Men, women and children.
Interviewer: Were you aware this was going to happen?
McNamara: Well, I was part of a mechanism that, in a sense, recommended it.
The biographical details are fascinating. McNamara mentions that he went to an unimpressive elementary school, but he had an excellent teacher who seated the class by how well each student had performed the previous week. The class was primarily WASPs, but his competition for the first desk came from Asians and Jews (who went to their own ethnic schools in addition to the public school).
He couldn’t afford to go to Stanford (during the Depression), so he went to Berkeley (for $52 a year), where he was invited to join Phi Beta Kappa. After graduate school, he became the youngest assistant professor ever at Harvard Business School.
After WWII, he and his wife both became sick with polio. To pay the bills, he took a job at Ford, where modern managerial methods were novel — “Of the top 1000 executives at Ford Motor Company, I don’t believe there were 10 college graduates.” — and became the first nonfamily member at Ford to become president of the company. He only kept the job for five weeks before he was offered the position of Secretary of the Treasury. When he turned that down, he was offered Secretary of Defense.
Here are the 11 lessons:
- Empathize with your enemy.
- Rationality will not save us.
- There’s something beyond oneself.
- Maximize efficiency.
- Proportionality should be a guideline in war.
- Get the data.
- Belief and seeing are both often wrong.
- Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning.
- In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil.
- Never say never.
- You can’t change human nature.