Robert McNamara: strange mists

In every decade of his long public life Robert Strange MacNamara was at the centre of whatever the world’s most intractable problems were at the time. In the forties, he dealt forensically with fascism. In the fifties he used market research to put some sense into the newly booming car culture. In the sixties he was on the front line of the Cold War and in the seventies he ran global finance at the World Bank. Towards the end of his always busy life he campaigned against nuclear arms and worked on solutions to reduce poverty.

His death at 93 earlier this month robbed the world of one of its great technocrats and fiercest thinkers. But almost every obit focussed almost exclusively on the 1960s and the flawed nature of his leadership of the war in Vietnam. His seven year role as a Kennedy-appointed Defence Secretary was also central to the documentary SBS showed in his honour tonight. The Fog of War is Errol Morris’s Oscar-winning 2003 documentary about "11 lessons from McNamara’s life".

The “fog of war” was coined by the nineteenth century Prussian military thinker Carl Von Clausewitz. In his magnum opus On War, Clausewitz warned about the uncertainty of all data. It was a peculiar difficulty, he said, because all action is “planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not unfrequently—like the effect of a fog or moonshine—gives to things exaggerated dimensions and an unnatural appearance.” McNamara could certainly identify with the chaos of war as seen by those immersed in some component of it.

Much of McNamara’s time as Defence Secretary (1961-1967) were spent immersed in a war fog of one kind or another. His recollections to Morris were an attempt to view the fog through the clarity of hindsight. But while McNamara was happy enough about the title he was not happy about the 11 lessons subtitle. Morris put these in very late in the editing process. McNamara complained bitterly to him, “these are not my lessons; these are your lessons”. But Morris would not take them out, he was making a movie and was determined to paint the story as he saw fit. “It's a Horatio Alger story, Morris told Tom Ryan, “the story of a man who comes from relatively humble origins – his parents didn't finish high school – who becomes this incredible achiever”. Morris called it a very powerful story about a man who believes in rational solutions to economic, social and political problems.

McNamara saw a lot of action in the Pentagon hot seat. He had to deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassionations of Ngo Dinh Diem and Kennedy within a month of each other, the difficulty of doing business with Johnson, the Gulf of Tonkin incident which escalated the war in Vietnam, and the authorisation of the deadly herbicide Agent Orange in that war. He attempted to rationalise his way through all of these difficult decisions. But in one of the lessons of Morris’ film he is forced to admit that “rationality will not save us”.

Yet there was little evidence from the rest of McNamara’s life that he had abandoned his belief in rationality. His 13 year reign as President of the World Bank transformed the stuffy cautious institution he inherited. The Bank began to address problems of income disparity and poverty. It diversified into sectors of activity where progress was inevitably slow and unspectacular. It was also taking more of an interest in the economic and social conditions of its borrowers. McNamara called the bank "an innovative, problem-solving mechanism…to help fashion a better life for mankind in the decades ahead."

Though McNamara still had two decades of his own life to shape after 1981, Vietnam continued to haunt him and dominated the public discourse about his legacy. 25,000 Americans and a million or more Vietnamese died during his reign as Secretary of Defence. He claimed his role was to soften President Johnson’s hawkishness. But he told his biographer Deborah Shipley he was never sure enough of his doubts about Vietnam to act on them.

McNamara knew his was a tough reputation to defend. But defend it he did using Shipley, Morris and many other proxies to tell his story. He also wrote his own memoir, In Retrospect published in 1995. Morris probably got his “lessons” idea from this book which was subtitled “The tragedy and lessons of Vietnam”. McNamara claimed it was a book he planned never to put on the public record. He did not want to “appear self-serving, defensive, or vindictive” and found it hard to face his mistakes. “But something changed my attitude and willingness to speak,” he wrote. “I am responding not to a desire to get out my personal story but rather to a wish to put before the American people why their government and its leaders behaved as they did and what we may learn from that experience.”

Writing about the book, Noam Chomsky witheringly noted that McNamara did not have much of an idea of what was going on around him, neither then nor now. And to some degree this is true, McNamara has always been embroiled in the fog of war. But what Chomsky does not deny is that McNamara was at the centre of major decision making constantly confronted by the uncertainty of the data he was using. He may not always have been right, but he could always plausibly justify his course of action. This alone makes him worth learning from.

Liberal Rules OK?

For the last few days SBS has been heavily promoting Liberal Rule: The Politics that Changed Australia, a weighty three-hour retrospective on the Howard era of Government. This was always threatening to be compulsory viewing not only because of the sociological claim in the subtitle but also because many of the biggest Liberal politicians and staffers contributed: John Howard was in it as was Fraser, Costello, Downer, Reith, Staley and Sinodinos. Here would be some good insights into the business of government.

This morning, anticipation was lifted up another notch when Gerard Henderson in the Sydney Morning Herald called the documentary “a shocker and a disgrace”. Henderson is a Howard supporter and plainly didn’t like the authors’ “layers of subtext” which he saw as code for left wing. He sportingly said the left got “free kick after free kick” and then played the man not the ball when he said Norm Abjorensen's book John Howard and the Conservative Tradition has sold fewer than 100 copies in a year.

But I’m thinking Henderson should be on the SBS marketing payroll if he isn’t already. By publicly bagging the program, he was drawing splendid attention to it. And it was a program he was in. In his SMH attack he leaves out any discussion of the layers of sub-text of his segment. This suggests the filmmakers treated him fairly. Henderson did show he was more accurate than SBS in one key respect - he got the time of the show right. SBS were sending out online ads in Crikey and elsewhere all day saying it was on “SBS One Wednesday 8.30pm”. But Henderson got the facts right in his article – It was aired at 8.30pm tonight (Tuesday).

Apart from unnecessarily losing out on audiences, the SBS mistake also undermines the fact that Liberal Rules is likely to become good history - assuming the quality does not dip in the next two episodes. As Henderson rightly criticised, it did not interview any Labor or National politicians and overcompensated with leftwing critics such as the unfortunate Abjorensen, Judith Brett and Mark Davis (whose praise appeared on the blurb of the ad with the wrong day). But so what. In three hours of television, there will be a wealth of great historical material to choose from the political interviews.

This is a necessity the filmmakers turned into a brilliant virtue. Joint filmmaker Garry Sturgess had brought his skills as a senior researcher on ABC’s Labor in Power to do a similar job on the Howard era. But Sturgess found it difficult to open old doors. He and partner Nick Torrens struggled with sibling rivalry on the public purse when they tried to gain access to ABC’s treasure chest of news archives. It was the job of ex-SBS employee Alan Sunderland to deny the request on the grounds that their “primary responsibility is to make programs for the Australian public.”

So Sturgess and Torrens stacked the program with talking heads. This is difficult to make exciting and they wasted no time showing the questions or questioners inanely nodding. Audiences had to work out what was going on from the guiding of the anonymous narrator, the taut editing of the film, and the surprisingly candid answers themselves.

Howard and the other Liberals agreed to take part because they knew this would be a film about legacy and they were keen to shape it. As the film itself says, the Liberals are all about leadership. From Menzies to Turnbull the ethos of the party is that leadership is central to its identity. Liberal philosophy changes with the winds unburdened as it is by any -ism. What was most of interest in this film was how Howard and the rest approached their decision making.

For example Costello was brutally honest about the spoils of power. He would go to meetings where there might be 15 or 16 or people. The difficulty of getting them to do something for him was that all of them there were appointed by Howard. All that is, except him. “I was the only one elected”, he said. Ever since he backed Downer for the leadership in 1993, it was clear Costello always preferred to be the message rather than the messenger.

What mattered was not who did things the best, but who announced them best. And John Howard was always better at that than Costello. Howard was more ruthlesss for starters and served a tougher apprenticeship learning for the top job. In the 1970s, he was a young and generally hopeless Treasurer. In the 1980s, he wrestled with Peacock for the right to lose to Bob Hawke. And in the early 1990s, he watched as the newer leaders Hewson and Downer were gobbled up and spat out by the “street brawler” Paul Keating. Downer resigned in 1995 as the party stared at a sixth election loss. Costello was kept as deputy but it was Howard – battle-hardened but just 56 year old – who was chosen. He came out by Costello’s side to tell the media he had been appointed “unanimous leader”. His body language suggested supreme confidence he was going to be the next Prime Minister and he crushed Keating at the election a year later.

Howard was the master of the small agenda but his inability to look up almost made him a one-term premier. In trouble in the polls, he turned to his tax agenda and decided to run hard on getting a mandate for a Goods and Services Tax. While this overturned an election promise, he got away with it because Labor though an election could not be won selling a tax. Despite the fact his victory over Beazley was narrow, it was was a turning point. Although Howard would have to reach into his bag of tricks again to find another issue to win in 2001 (Tampa), it was the GST election that cemented his place in the party’s pantheon.

After that second win, he had carte blanche to do what he wanted. Howard used the twin drivers of the mining boom and a trillion dollars worth of personal debt to get the government back in the black. He then increased public spending on favoured projects and dished out largesse in the budget much to the chagrin of the more economic rationalist Treasurer. Neither of them did much on climate change. It is this sense that Liberal frittered away their years in power that bothered Henderson about Liberal Rules.

He says the left have won the victory of ideas because unlike the Liberals, they take history seriously. Henderson took the example of Opposition frontbencher George Brandis who complained in The Spectator that that Liberals are not celebrating the 100th anniversary of the formation of the inaugural Liberal Party. “But Brandis could have arranged such a celebration himself,” Henderson said. As Malcolm Turnbull and all the others before him showed, the Liberals are not about ideas, they are about actions.

Killing Cars

Yesterday, General Motors announced the launch of a new H3 Hummer truck in 2009. The vehicle, which began life as a high-mobility vehicle (Humvee) for the US military, is key to GM’s strategy as it tries to recover from a $US10.6 billion 2005 loss. Global Hummer sales rose 54 per cent in the first nine months of 2006 despite high oil prices, while overall GM sales fell 2.5 per cent. Hummers have been roundly criticised for their low fuel economy, massive bulk and environment destructiveness when used as off-road vehicles.

The popularity of the Hummer is mainly due to favourable US tax breaks and lax emission standards. A $50,000 H2 attracts a federal tax deduction of $38,000. Owners take advantage of a loophole which allows tax breaks on vehicles with a gross weight of 6,000 pounds (2720 kg) or more which was meant to help farmers afford tractors, large trucks and other heavy equipment. But many SUVs, including the 2,900 kg H2, fall into that heavyweight category. Typical SUV owners include executives, doctors, real estate agents and lawyers are now all qualifying for the deduction. Truck-type vehicles are also held to weaker emissions standards than passenger cars.

The growth in the use of the H2 is in direct comparison to how General Motors treated the EV1 – the electric car. Filmmaker and ex EV1 driver Chris Paine made the feature length documentary “Who Killed the Electric Car?” The film documents the history of the electric car in the US focussing on GM’s EV1. GM built the EV1 in response to California’s Zero Emissions Vehicle (ZEV) Mandate of 1990. California specified that by 1998, 2% of all new cars sold were to have no emissions. GM spent over $1 billion developing and marketing the EV1 much of which was defrayed by the Clinton Administration's 1996 Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV) project.

The EV1 was first displayed as a concept at the 1990 Los Angeles Auto Show under the name of “Impact”. It took six years to get it onto the road. The first purpose built two-seater electric vehicles were made available in 1996 on three year leases to about a thousand drivers in California and Arizona. It could be plugged in for recharging at home and at a number of so-called battery parks. The first generation EV1 used a lead-acid battery which required re-charge after approximately 100kms. In 1999, a new car with a nickel metal hydride battery could run for approximately 200kms without charge. The EV1 had the lowest wind resistance of any production vehicle in history and the only audible noise was the whirr of the tyres, with nothing from wind or motors. The EV1 could accelerate from 0-100kph in under ten second and had a top speed of about 130kph.

In 2001, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) modified the ZEV Mandate to allow manufacturers to claim partial ZEV credit for hybrid vehicles. General Motors and Daimler Chrysler then sued the state of California and CARB, alleging the new rules violated a federal law barring states from regulating fuel economy. The oil companies Exxon and Mobil joined the suit as did the federal government under the new Bush administration. Vice President Cheney and Secretary of State Rice had major links to the oil industry. And ex-Chief of Staff Andrew Card came to the White House from GM where he was appointed Vice President of Government Relations in 1999.

But even before the Bush team was elected, GM was already scaling down their operation. Barely a month after releasing the second generation EV1 in 2000, the car manufacturer announced it was closing down the production line due to insufficient demand. They recalled all EV1 due to thermal problems and although they returned them to the original lessees, they told everyone on the waiting list they would no longer be able to lease a vehicle. Under the considerable external pressure of the law suit, CARB finally backed away from their ZEV mandate in 2003. GM’s response was swift. The entire program was cancelled. They claimed they halted production because there were only 800 paying customers. Activists contended GM ignored a waiting list of 5,000 because the EV1 threatened the future of the rest of GM’s fleet based on the internal combustion engine.

The last private lease expired in August 2004. The cars were stored at a facility in Burbank, California before being transferred to the GM Desert Proving Grounds in Mesa, Arizona. There they were crushed and recycled. GM refused all requests from lessees to purchase the vehicles. The reason GM gave for refusing was to avoid legal liabilities. GM claimed the EV1 was not a failure but that battery technology was not advanced enough to support it. Nearly all models have now been destroyed apart from a small amount of cars (minus working battery) GM donated to colleges and universities for engineering students. Several museums also have EV1s in their possession.

One of those museums is Washington’s esteemed Smithsonian Institution. However in June this year, the Institution pulled its model from display in advance of the release of “Who Killed the Electric Car?” GM is a donor to the museum but a spokesman claimed there was no conspiracy and it simply needed the space for another vehicle. Filmmaker Chris Paine said he was disappointed the EV1 was in the museum at all. "It's an example of what the 21st century can be in this country, if we had the willpower to do it," he said. "The Smithsonian should take the car out of the museum and put it back on the road."

In the Shadow of the Palms

“In the Shadow of the Palms” is an Australian documentary film made in 2005. It is the only foreign documentary filmed in Iraq prior to, during, and after the 2003 Invasion of Iraq.

The Iraqi war was one of the most media saturated events in history. But it was also strictly controlled by the US military. We had tightly scripted conferences from Washington and the military. We saw the view from Kuwait and Qatar. We heard from journalists holed up in the Palestine Hotel in Baghdad and others ‘embedded’ with the armed forces. What we didn't have was the voices of ordinary Iraqis. The makers of “In the Shadow of the Palms” are one notable independent exception to this rule.

The film is a co-production of Ipso Facto productions and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC.) The filmmaker spent ten weeks in Baghdad making the film and it commences four weeks out from the start of the invasion. The film then takes us through excruciating countdown to zero hour as we go from 4 weeks, to 3, to 2, to 1, to 1 day and then beyond in the daily lives of these people.

Bookended by images taken from a U.S. helicopter gunship as it surgically eliminates a target, the film gives an insight into a cross-section of ordinary Iraqi citizens, a window into their everyday realities before, during and after the war. The film shows first hand the effects of the bombing campaign on the lives of civilians. Many locals are interviewed but the four main characters are a professor of Arabic poetry, a wrestling coach (who represented Iraq in the Olympics in the 1980s) an imam and a cobbler.

Their interviews are interspersed with government propaganda on TV. Saddam is almost a peripheral figure in their lives. People may not like their government but they totally resent the coming invasion and its motivations. Even schoolchildren can see it is all about oil.

The filmmaker is Wayne Coles-Janess, a Melbourne based documentary maker in his late 30s. He mortgaged his Melbourne home to help fund the Iraq film. His 1992 drama, On the Border of Hopetown, was nominated for an AFI award. His documentary Life at the End of the Rainbow has also been shown on ABC.

Coles-Janess had his tricky moments in Iraq and was arrested eleven times in all. "One time I was in the neighbourhood at night before the war and these guys grabbed me and thought that I was a pilot that had been shot down or a spy or whatever," he says. "There was a bit of toing-and-froing but luckily some people that knew me in that area heard all the commotion and rescued me."

Another time, he was bundled into a car and taken to military headquarters. There he underwent an ordeal at the hands of two senior army officers as they discussed his fate.

The film shows first hand the effects of the bombing campaign on the lives of civilians. In one very powerful scene, Coles-Janess brings his camera into a bomb site and watches the frenetic attempts to rescue a family of five from the rubble. Two of the children are killed.

Coles-Janess escapes across the border before the Americans take Baghdad. On return to Australia, his tapes are destroyed by suspicious Customs officers. Luckily for him and his viewers, he has made copies which are safe elsewhere. He returned to Iraq after the Americans had handed over provisional control to the Iraqi interim government.

When he returned to Baghdad, he found caution towards him as a Westerner had intensified and some attitudes had hardened. "I think some characters were happy to see me but they were uncomfortable spending time with me. I was definitely seen as the enemy and therefore people would start asking questions. Is he a contractor? Is he with the CIA? What's that family doing with him?"

He tries to track down the people he spoke to before the war. A Palestinian refugee is now homeless and stateless and living in a refugee camp. US soldiers are suspicious of his filming. The Olympic wrestling coach has disappeared without trace. He was arrested when soldiers suspected his car remote control could be used as a bomb triggering device. Everyone he meets is convinced that matters are worse now than before the war. There is a continual atmosphere of resentment and fear.

The film is not without its faults and is marred by some poor production values. The title cards are frustratingly amateurish and the subtitles rife with spelling mistakes. The misspelling of “sacrifice” to read “scarifice” (several times) is almost frightening apt!

However, the documentary is compelling and builds an articulate picture of the rage and powerlessness of the ordinary people. It demands to be seen by those who buy the official US and Australian government line that the Iraqi invasion was just and necessary.

Fog of War

Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara was a 2003 film which won the Oscar for best documentary in that year.

The narrative of The Fog of War covers some of defining moments of American and world history in the middle of the 20th century and Robert Strange McNamara was at the fulcrum of many of these events.

US Secretary of Defense from 1961 to 1967, McNamara says in the film “I lived the Cold War”.

The Fog of War is organised both by the kernel events in McNamara’s life and also by the eleven lessons of the film’s subtitle. Much of the content is an interview between Errol Morris and Robert McNamara but McNamara’s voice dominates. He tells his story direct to camera interspersed with archival material such as TV interviews, telephone recordings, stock footage and news broadcasts.

It is also self-reflexive. The voice of the filmmaker is in the dialogue but is without the self-validating, authoritative tone of traditional documentaries. Errol Morris has made little attempt to hide the technical aspects of his editing. There are obvious jump cuts and some editing suggestions from McNamara have made the final text. This manipulation shows that the film’s voice is not to be found in the technical assemblage. Instead, it is an example of what Kuhn called “a text whose ’truth’ may be judged only by means of extra-textual evidence”. It is the insights into McNamara’s decision-making under great pressure which give it its power. It avoids the trap that Bill Nichols calls “conceptual inadequacy” due to the implied addresser’s ability to place context around his statements.

The sound track is often not in synch with the image track. The text continually returns to visual metaphorical motifs (particularly bombs, guns and military preparations) to undermine the political points (eg when President Johnson is shown saying “we seek no wider war” or when McNamara says “we are rational but reason has its limits”). Philip Glass’s urgent pounding score hammers home the brutality of war.

The first event, and the only one out of chronological sequence is the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962. This kernel event offers a dramatic start to show how leaders operate under pressure and to show how close the world and its “rational leaders” came to mutually assured destruction. This narrative has satellite events in both senses of the word (the missile site pictures from space drive the narrative forward by accentuating the tension). Due to the embedded events of the two contradictory messages from Khrushchev, there is agonised discussion on how to respond. In a series of enchained events, Tommy Thompson convinces Kennedy to respond to the first “soft” message and the missiles are removed without bloodshed. The danger has passed due to the application of lesson #1 “empathise with your enemy”. In a flashforward to 1992, McNamara meets Castro and realises just how close to the edge they came. The narrative concludes back in 1962 by contrasting Kennedy’s simple statement “we won” with an oppositional reading from General LeMay “won, hell, we should have destroyed them!”

The rest of the narrative is mostly chronological and the pace slows down for the longest segment of the film dealing with Vietnam. This war scarred the American conscience like no other and McNamara was the ultimate insider. Unlike the previous military rulers, the French, for whom Indochina posed no real threat to the political system in the metropole, the US was deeply politically divided by its foray into Vietnam.

The paradigmatic structure of The Fog of War also merits some attention. Firstly there is an example of paradigmatic relation of selection based on location. The empathy (lesson #1) with which the Kennedy administration dealt with the Cuban Missile Crisis is contrasted with the way the Tonkin Gulf incident was handled (lesson #7 “belief and seeing are often wrong”).

There is also a paradigmic role for the American general Curtis LeMay. He appears in both the World War II and the Cuban segments of the text. In World War II, his directness, courage and bombast work successfully in a brutal war. He reduces the bomb abort rate over Germany by placing himself in the lead aeroplane and threatening to court-martial any crew that fails to reach the target site. He also devastates Japan by using incendiary bombs to bomb its wooden cities.

By contrast, he is marginalised in the Cuban episode. He is the embodiment of the myth of American gung-ho attitude and his injunction “let’s destroy Cuba” carries less weight in the uncertainties of the post nuclear world.

Barthes has said that “the Text can be approached, experienced, in reaction to the sign”. Some of The Fog of War’s signification is self-evident, some is requires interpretation. The sheer scope of the narrative and the controversial personalities, actions and ideas it covers allows for plural meanings.

The text assumes certain pre-knowledge of Japan, Cuba, Vietnam and the American political structure. The Fog of War is an example of what Williamson calls a “bearer of different social purposes”. The implied audience are politicians, political scientists, historians and those with an interest in and knowledge of American political, cultural and social hegemony in the middle decades of the twentieth century. As in Brechtian epic theatre, the purpose is to turn the spectator into an observer but also to arouse his or her capacity for action.

The phrase “fog of war” was coined by the nineteenth century Prussian military thinker Carl Von Clausewitz in a reference to the chaos of war while immersed in it. Much of McNamara’s life is spent inside that fog. His recollections are an attempt to view the referent (the events that cause the fog) with the clear daylight clarity of hindsight.

The text also uses iconic, indexical and conventional signs to display meaning. The recurring motif of dominoes falling on a map of South East Asia works in three ways. Firstly it is iconic (the final domino falls on the location of Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam), secondly it is indexical (the dominoes are a motivated signifier for the link between Russia, China and Vietnam) and finally it works conventionally (the dominos stand for the theory by which Communism was expected to take root in the surrounding countries if not stopped).

McNamara’s role in the statistical analysis group of the Air Force is also shown by a deft mix of signs. The image track displays maps of Japan, stock footage of aircraft manufacture and statistics of target destruction. His personal responsibility is conveyed by a torrent of numbers and mathematical symbols raining down like bombs on photos of Japanese cities.

The myth and ideology of this film is based around America’s wars of the 20th century. The myth of American infallibility which grew out of their successes in two world wars haunted them in Vietnam. Johnson’s speech “America wins the wars she undertakes” makes a commitment to uphold the myth. McNamara is a sometimes unwilling partner dragged along to make this myth a reality despite the ‘disturbing signs’ coming from the cable. Occasionally, the real author, Morris attempts to puncture the prevailing ethos with his interjections such as “we had attempted to invade you (Cuba)” or by questioning the use of incendiary bombing in World War II and the use of Agent Orange in Vietnam. But the preferred reading of the addresser is the pride of serving one’s country, right or wrong.

McNamara himself is singularly lacking in ideology. Though he is a Democratic presidential appointee, he makes very few ideologically based statements throughout the text. He is guided more by practicalities and politics (for example, knowing the best time of day to release bad news) than by any ideological codes.

The story is McNamara’s life but the plot is mostly confined to his relationship to warfare. The text is mainly concerned with the application of warfare and its devastating consequences. The recurring images of bombs, aeroplanes, war boats and destruction provide anchorage for this preferred reading of the text.

Apart from his decision to work for Ford, the kernel events that are shown are all directly related to war. McNamara’s decision to work for the Air Force, his acceptance of the Secretary of Defense role, the Kennedy assassination and the Tonkin Gulf incident all serve to increase the disequilibrium of the narrative which is not resolved until McNamara quits his position. The ceremony of the Order of Freedom medal is the signifier that his role is finished and the narrative can conclude.

The frame of the narrative as a whole mirrors the format of the Cuban Missile Crisis story. Each kernel event deals with a problem of warfare or commerce, and each ends with homily and a lesson.

There is substantial ellipsis for the period after 1968. Almost all of this period is omitted except where it directly relates to events beforehand (ie his subsequent meetings with Castro and the Vietnamese foreign minister). His thirteen year tenure as head of the World Bank is briefly mentioned in the opening segment and appears once again in the closing titles.

Apart from a few questions and interjections from Morris and some other voices on the archival footage, most of the narration is done by McNamara himself. However as Tom Ryan discovered in his interview with Morris, McNamara never liked the lessons of the film’s subtitle. McNamara is quoted by Morris as saying “These are not my lessons; these are your lessons”. The lessons were a function of control of the real author.

Nonetheless McNamara, the diegetic narrator, is the addresser of these lessons. He wants “to develop the lessons and pass them on”. The technical code fudges the gap between narratee, implied and real audience. Morris uses a technical device called the Interrotron that Ebert says “allows Morris and his subjects to look into each other's eyes while also looking directly into the camera lens”. The effect is that McNamara can cut through the constraints of the narratee and the implied audience to look directly into the eyes of his real audience, Kozloff's “flesh-and-blood viewers in their living rooms”.

McNamara is a complex psychologised character. He is a sensitive soul who cries tears for Kennedy and Norman Morrison and yet has no compunction in issuing orders which results in the deaths of hundreds of thousand Japanese and Vietnamese citizens. He knows that Vietnam is a dubious, unwinnable enterprise. Yet he offers no argument to Johnson’s simplistic urgings instead serving the president’s desire to escalate the war in Vietnam.

Most of McNamara’s character traits are drawn by indirect presentation. According to Rimmon-Kenan, indirect presentation “does not mention the trait but displays it and exemplifies it in various ways”. For instance, his attention to detail and ability to draw conclusions by use of metrics is established in many scenes.

There is also a contradiction between McNamara’s ego and his modesty. The school scene where he talks about the Chinese and Japanese students trying to beat “that damn Irishman” is immediately contrasted by a 1960s TV interview in which he is described as “Mr I have all the answers”. McNamara comfortably bats away the questions with a stylish modesty that cloaks his true opinion of himself. He says “I don’t know what I don’t know…” and follows this up immediately with a phatic but telling counter-comment “…and there is much indeed”. He is on much safer ground when he goes on to bury the question with a statistic of how many hours of preparation he puts in for each hour of congressional testimony.

McNamara is a Proppian hero and many of the events of his life follow the fairytale morphology. He absents himself from home, he is addressed by an interdiction (“there is something beyond one’s self”), there is violation of the interdiction (outbreak of war), there is villainy (Japan), and the hero is tested (rising through the ranks at Ford).

The meeting with the Kennedys is pure Propp function IX: “THE HERO IS APPROACHED WITH A REQUEST OR COMMAND”. The request is to become Secretary of Defense. McNamara accepts and begins his actantial role as the subject of various quests to serve his country and keep it from nuclear annihilation. Eventually the hero is led to the object of search (Propp XV) Vietnam.

There are also binary oppositions at work in the text. At the character level there are obvious differences at work in the Manichean opposites of McNamara (pragmatic) against Johnson (patriot) and McNamara (dove) against LeMay (hawk). There are also ideological opposites present: conspicuous consumption (Cadillac) against prudent economics (Falcon), the US (freedom) against Germany/Japan (fascism), and the US (capitalist) against the USSR (communist). Through use of these oppositions, the text builds an “effective narrative apparatus” so beloved of Eco.

McNamara’s media skills are evident in many of the 1960s interview sequences. His phatic exchanges with the media in the pre-title sequence shows the comfortable ease with which he sets the ground rules and establishes the boundaries between politicians and the media they rely on. His question “let me ask the TV, are you ready?” is also a metaphorical question for the implied viewer about to embark on the narrative of his life story.

McNamara’s disarming honesty when discussing possible war crimes in World War II is contrasted by his refusal to confront his personal responsibility in Vietnam. He avoids questions of responsibility of Vietnam and concludes, when prompted by Morris, that he would rather be “damned if he doesn’t” answer the questions.

In the final sequences, McNamara wears the seatbelt he helped to introduce and drives his car out the film in a form of metonymy. Here is a man at the centre of great power in one of the most controversial periods of modern history and yet the implied audience remains in the dark about how he feels despite the eleven “lessons”.

It is a puzzling and open ending to the narrative of a puzzling character, Robert Strange McNamara.