Canter Bridge

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This brilliant series of interviews with Robert McNamara should be required viewing for anyone before he or she is authorized to venture an opinion regarding what America should or should not do with its power. I do not begin my review because of any clear sense of the virtue or villainy of Bob McNamara’s legacy as president of the Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson, and long-time president of the World Bank.

Far from it, the spendidly drawn impression is how dangerously concentrated power becomes in the hands of fragile, myopic, regular men and women who in many—most?—cases want to do the right thing.

McNamara’s memory ranges from World War I to the extinction of River Blindness in Africa through the World Bank’s efforts. For understandable reasons, the camera and the questions linger most on the Viet Nam era, for this is where McNamara took ‘the world stage’, as he puts it.

Clearly enamored of John Kennedy, McNamara had a more complex relationship with Johnson, whom he admired but with whom he came to disagree in a process that led to McNamara’s firing just shortly before Johnson made his epic decision not to run for reelection.

As The Fog of War touches time and again upon the deliberations that framed the Bay of Pigs crisis and then the Southeast Asian war itself, one hears via the clarity of taped conversations how little we knew and, proverbially, how close we came to ultimate war.

McNamara has passionate remarks to offer on the very timely matter of taking America’s strength into battle when we have failed to convince our allies of that course.

Kudos to McNamara for complicating his legacy even more by achieving astonishing results through some of the World Bank’s better years.

Required viewing.