the fog of war

I’m not even done watching it yet (it’s on as I’m typing this), but I’m already ready to give an unequivocable recommendation that you watch the Academy Award-winning documentary “The Fog of War,” the latest documentary to come out of the brilliant mind of the documentarian Errol Morris. And watch it soon.

As a grad student of journalism at Arkansas, I took a documentary film class from the incomparably awesome Larry Foley, who — in addition to teaching — makes outstanding documentaries of his own. Each week, we were to watch a documentary and write an analysis/critique of it. At some point, I picked up one of Errol Morris’s films, and was so impressed by his style and storytelling abilities that I quickly watched every one of his films I could put my hands on.

So when I heard he had tackled the subject of war by looking at the life of Robert S. McNamara, former secretary of defense under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, I knew it would be something that I’d want to watch. I never made it to the theaters to see it, but renting the DVD was high on my list once it was released.

The interviews with McNamara comprise the entire plot of the movie — the narration, the story, they’re all his own words. His commentary on his own actions in World War II (“if we had lost the war, I would have been tried as a war criminal”) and the way things unfolded in Vietnam is bitingly honest. People of our generation generally know very little about the human experience in our country during the major events of the Twentieth Century; McNamara gives an honest, clear picture of the drama and emotion of the time he served. At the moment where his sense of history is at its most palpable is when he describes how close America came to nuclear war with Cuba.

The events chronicled in “Fog of War” have fundamentally shaped our country, and I only wish I had been taught more about them (Vietnam, World War II, etc.) instead of the endlessly repetitive classes on the Revolutionary War while in school. Why don’t we spend more time teaching our kids about the things that have had genuine, dramatic impact on the lives of people they know — their parents and grandparents especially? It’s something I’ve never understood.