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Soul on ice: the Robert McNamara of Errol Morris'' new documentary is clearly a tortured soul. But is he tortured enough?

Article Excerpt
IN THE FOG OF WAR, A REVELATORY new documentary about his life and times, a disquieted Robert McNamara implores us to understand why he did the things he did as an Air Force lieutenant colonel who helped plan the fire bombing of Japanese cities in World War II, and, later, as a secretary of defense and pivotal decision-maker during Vietnam, which some Americans came to call "McNamara's War."

In his 1995 memoir, In Retrospect, McNamara said of himself and the other architects of the Vietnam conflict, "[W]e were wrong, terribly wrong. We owe it to future generations to explain why." But he prefaced this nostra culpa by explaining that their intentions had always been honorable. "We of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations who participated in the decisions on Vietnam acted according to what we thought were the principles and traditions of this nation," he wrote.

He offers the same kind of ambidextrous explanations throughout The Fog of War documentary, which in a way functions as a sequel to the book. There are distinct differences, however. The book was McNamara's; the nearly two-hour film is the work of Errol Morris, a gifted documentarian who demonstrated against the war in his student days. While Morris seeks to show McNamara as a complicated man rather than the simplistic "monster" conjured by the anti-war movement, his movie is anything but a puff piece. He had approached McNamara after reading In Retrospect in 1995, and says he found depths in the book that were missing from the reviews. (McNamara was ambivalent at first about the film idea, but eventually agreed to a series of interviews.) A key to the depth in Morris' film is his camera: This is one of those interview-based films (interlaced with previously unaired historical footage) in which the camera stares hard into...