The Fog of War

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara is a 2003 American documentary film about the life and times of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, illustrating his observations of the nature of modern warfare. It was directed by Errol Morris and features an original score by Philip Glass. The title derives from the military concept of the "fog of war", which refers to the difficulty of making decisions in the midst of conflict. The film was screened out of competition at the 2003 Cannes Film Festival and won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature and the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature of 2003. In 2019, it was selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the United States National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant". Summary Composed of archival footage, recordings from the 1960s of conversations of the United States Cabinet, and new interviews with former-Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, The Fog of War depicts McNamara's life, as seen from his perspective as an eighty-seven-year-old man. It is divided into eleven sections based upon "lessons" Morris derived from his interviews with McNamara, as well as the eleven lessons presented at the end of McNamara's 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (written with Brian VanDeMark). Born in San Francisco during World War I, McNamara says his earliest memory is of American troops returning from Europe. Coming from humble origins, he graduated from University of California, Berkeley, where he met his first wife, Margaret Craig McNamara, and Harvard Business School, where he went on to teach. During World War II, he served as an officer in the Army Air Forces under General Curtis LeMay, who was later Chief of Staff of the Air Force while McNamara was Secretary of Defense. After the war, McNamara was one of the Whiz Kids at Ford Motor Company, of which he was briefly president before he left to become Secretary of Defense for newly-elected President John F. Kennedy, a role he continued to hold, until 1968, under President Lyndon Johnson. As Secretary of Defense, McNamara was a controversial figure, and in the film he discusses, in particular, his involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis and the escalation of the Vietnam War.