Robert S. McNamara’s earliest memory? Witnessing the joy and relief that people felt when peace was declared in 1918 at the end of what Woodrow Wilson called the war to end all wars. McNamara was only two years old at the time, but the memory, he tells us, is still a vivid one. And it is with more than a hint of irony that he recalls this event. Between ’43 and ’45 McNamara served as a Lt. Colonel in the US Air Force, and was involved in the 1945 fire-bombings of 67 Japanese cites, including the infamous attack on Tokyo in which 100,000 civilians burned to death in a single night. In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, he joined the Kennedy Administration as Secretary of Defense, serving through the Bay of Pigs invasion, the Cuban Missile Crisis, Kennedy’s assassination and LBJ’s subsequent appointment, and the decision to commit American boys to the jungles of ‘Nam to protect the Free World from the Red Threat. Although he has witnessed much war and killing and been involved with it extensively on a decision making level, McNamara is also a man who has devoted himself to bettering the quality of life of other human beings. An intensely ethical person, he was deeply troubled by the war-time decisions he had to make and the morally ambiguous positions he often found himself in. And in director Errol Morris’ interviews for The Fog of War he comes across as a person who, at almost 90 years of age, is still troubled by those decisions and dilemmas.

This sense of contradiction, of the moral dilemmas that McNamara repeatedly found himself in forms the core of Errol Morris’ documentary. McNamara tells us that "any military commander being honest with himself will admit he has made mistakes that resulted in loss of life." McNamara believes that any leadership decision must eventually face that fact of human fallibility. It is impossible for a person to make the right choice each and every time, especially in war where complex and constantly-evolving situations demanding rapid responses mean that errors in judgment will invariably occur. McNamara’s position as Secretary of Defense meant that his mistakes resulted in loss of life, or in unnecessary killing. McNamara holds a commonsense view that what makes a person good at their work is their ability to learn from mistakes. But he is equally aware that in a modern nuclear world, a single mistake at the highest leadership level, a mistake which in another time might not have be critical, could have catastrophic consequences on a global scale. He cites the Cuban Missile Crisis as the classic 20th century example of this, a moment when America and Russia were poised on the brink of nuclear war, "eyeball to eyeball" as Dean Rusk put it, and he clearly states that the avoidance of global nuclear conflict was not essentially due to an intelligent analysis of the situation but mostly to the fact that they "lucked out".

Errol Morris has used his conversations with McNamara to give structure to The Fog of War. Instead of moving in a linear direction, beginning with McNamara’s role in WWII, following through to the Ford Motor Company, appointment as Secretary of Defense, etc, Morris allows McNamara’s precise articulate answers to dictate the film’s direction, e.g. when McNamara answers a question by stating that he’ll have to begin with WWII, the film cuts back to that period and an examination of McNamara’s role in it. The result of this is that we feel as if we too are sitting down and having a conversation with McNamara. This sense is heightened by Morris’ use of a device called the Interrotron. This machine allows Morris to project an image of himself onto a screen directly over the camera’s lens, so that when McNamara answers the question asked by the person on the screen, his eyesight and attention is focused directly into the eye of the camera, and in turn, directly at the audience. This gives Morris’ film a greater air of casual inter-personal interaction than historical documentaries dealing with weighty issues usually have.

Morris’ style as a documentary filmmaker is to raise questions. Unlike Michael Moore’s recent documentary Bowling for Columbine (2002), which assigned blame, searched for culprits, demanded apologies, and suggested that if only Charlton Heston could say "sorry" the world would be a safer place, Morris doesn’t believe that there are any simple black-and-white answers to complex issues, nor does he attempt to suggest that there exists any easy way to deal with the contradictions they raise. Morris prompts questions about our inherent destructiveness, about our proclivity for war, and about our inability to cease killing and maiming each other. He questions whether we will, or can, ever change. And in raising the issue of nuclear warfare, he wonders how long it will be before humankind obliterates all it has achieved and striven for. It is the same fear that Stanley Kubrick’s black-comedy Dr. Strangelove: or How I Learnt to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) tapped into. But whereas Kubrick’s film ends with nuclear annihilation, (brought about by a half-mad completely-paranoid General who obsesses that America is in danger from a Communist conspiracy to sap its "precious bodily fluids"), in Morris’ documentary we are a couple rungs down reality’s ladder. In focusing on McNamara, a man who as US Secretary of Defense struggled to reduce warfare, Morris shows us the possibility of a different direction. The possibility that leaders making future decisions may not only think of protecting their country, but also of protecting their world. I can close my eyes and see McNamara looking straight at me, and at almost 90 and having survived the turbulent 20th century, he provides an image of hopefulness -- he seems to embody the morally-aware leader -- and then I hear his pragmatic experience-laden voice telling us that even with the best intentions, human fallibility is a fact. Mistakes are unavoidable. Let’s hope we "luck out".