...into real-life murder that ended up uncovering the real criminal. Critics have pointed out that just about all the film-maker's other films have become enquiries of one kind or another-not surprising, as Morris was once a private detective. The Fog of War is no exception: and repeatedly what is exposed is either a historical revelation, or an inadequate grasp of history leading to tragic consequences.

McNamara, as everyone of my generation knows, was John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson's Secretary of Defense. In the sixties he was the one most blamed--apart from LBJ himself--for the escalation of the Vietnam War. Morris builds his film around an interview with the eighty-five-year-old McNamara, in which through a camera trick he looks straight at the audience so that the viewer seems to become the interviewer. (Usually a subject maintains eye contact with an on- or off-screen questioner--and this is observed by the spectator. Here McNamara, one suspects by choice, addresses us directly.)

Morris then uses archival footage, stills and most telling of all, the tapes from the Oval Office, to place McNamara's narrative into a range of different contexts. At times the old man appears to be controlling the situation. "I don't want to go back ... you can fix it up later--I have the rest of the sentence in my mind," he says imperiously at the outset. But it soon becomes clear that Morris is conducting his own subtle enquiry into McNamara himself. This is no vulgar expose. The Fog of War is obviously a collaboration, and one senses McNamara wants to know the answers as much as Morris does. Supposedly during the making of the film McNamara would be undecided as to whether to continue; then he would decide he really had to give a further interview to justify what he'd said in the last one. As a result, Morris ended up with twenty hours of footage to cut.

Three revelations dominate The Fog of War The first is McNamara's insider's account of the Cuban Missile Crisis, where he directs Morris to an exchange...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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