Rationality will not save us: Errol Morris pursues McNamara into the Fog.

As George Bush sets the United States on a course of multiple invasions, Errol Morris's The Fog of War, nominated for an Academy Award, could not have come at a more important time.

The film deals with the bombings of nearly one million Japanese civilians before Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nearer-than-you-think nuclear war the United States almost had with the Soviets during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the machinations behind the invasion of Vietnam seen through the eyes of former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara.

"I would hope the movie would have some kind of influence, that it will call attention to the fact that these things in some similar form had happened in the past. And maybe we should pay attention to that fact," says Morris in a recent interview.

Morris is being modest. People who have paid attention to documentaries over the past twenty years know who Morris is and what kind of impact his films can have.

An investigative reporter-turned-filmmaker, Morris made his first film, Gates of Heaven, a hilarious spoof looking at how Americans relate to death vis-a-vis pet cemeteries. It became an instant success with critics.

His second effort, about the inhabitants of a small town in Florida who lop off their limbs for insurance money ("They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially," Morris says), ran into some problems when his subjects allegedly threatened to kill him. So Morris reworked the documentary and called it Vernon, Florida (1981).

In 1988, Morris left the jokes aside and made The Thin Blue Line, a film that led to the overturned conviction of death row inmate Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Dallas police officer Robert Wood.

In 1992, Morris brought physicist Stephen Hawking to a mass audience with A Brief History of Time.

Then came Morris's quirky 1997 film, Fast, Cheap & Out of Control, which sparked a temporary fascination with the African mole-rat. Legend has it that freaks, geeks, and kids looking for the underground rodents bombarded pet stores with phone calls.

Morris blended his humor with pathos in the brilliant Mr. Death: The Rise and Fall of Fred A. Leuchter, Jr., a 1999 film that chronicles the career of a manufacturer of death penalty machinery who became a Holocaust revisionist. What emerges in Mr. Death is not some bloodthirsty thug but rather a thoroughly pathetic primate on two legs.

There is nothing so pathetic about The Fog of War.

It brings to light the personal attitudes of those who make the biggest decisions for all of us while often remaining in self-denial over their own involvement.

"I think he's forthcoming and he's not forthcoming," says Morris about McNamara. "I think there are things he can't even allow himself to answer or maybe even think about."

Born in San Francisco in 1916, McNamara was always an ambitious fellow who wanted to sit in the number one chair in elementary school. A top student at Berkeley during the 1930s and then Harvard in 1941, McNamara went on to become a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Air Force during World War II.

In 1946, he started work at the Ford Motor Company and became the first nonfamily member to run the company in November 1960.

After barely one month as head of Ford, McNamara joined President John F. Kennedy's Administration as Secretary of Defense, the youngest man ever to hold the position.

McNamara was involved in the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in April 1961, which led to the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962.

After JFK was assassinated, McNamara stayed on with President Lyndon B. Johnson as that Administration plunged America further into Vietnam.

One month after the Tet offensive, in February 1968, McNamara received the Presidential Medal of Freedom from Johnson before becoming the president of the World Bank, where he served until 1981.

The Fog of War, which is broken down into eleven lessons, reveals McNamara's mindset. One of the more startling revelations comes during Lesson #2: "Rationality Will Not Save Us," which discloses that America and the Soviet Union were much closer to nuclear war than the public was eve, told. McNamara alleges that Fidel Castro said he was willing to incinerate Cuba if America had not backed down.

"Rationality ultimately is not enough, he tells us with respect to the Cuban Missile Crisis," says Morris. "We lucked out.... Unlike the story told in Thirteen Days [a 2000 movie with Kevin Costner], this is not a story about how the Kennedys saved the world. This is a story about how we could have very easily gone the other way."

Despite the title of the film, Morris does not buy the idea that complexities, confusions, and uncertainties of war exculpate the individuals who make the decisions.

Leaders use the expression "the fog of war" as an excuse, says Morris.

It's like "the fog of war ate my homework," he says, adding that people claim "war is so complex that no one's responsible. Well, I don't believe that. I don't think he [McNamara] believes that either. Here you have a man who believes that social, political, economic problems were susceptible to rational solutions.... So when he says that 'rationality might not be enough,' there is something incredibly sad about that."

Morris plays McNamara's viewpoint against historical documents, including taped phone calls between him and Johnson. These documents debunk the conventional wisdom of Johnson being anti-war and McNamara as bellicose.

"There's a very different view than Thirteen Days or John Frankenheimer's last film, Path to War, with Alec Baldwin playing Robert McNamara," Morris says. "The familiar story is that McNamara dragged a reluctant President Johnson into war. It's a story that's repeated in Path to War. And in these conversations you hear something very, very different. Johnson is bellicose, McNamara is uncertain."

Reflecting on the Presidency today, McNamara and Morris have harsh words to say.

"It's just wrong what we're doing" in Iraq, McNamara recently told the Toronto Globe and Mail. "It's morally wrong, it's politically wrong, it's economically wrong."

McNamara told the paper that Bush's unilateralism especially troubles him.

"There have been times in the last year when I was just utterly disgusted by our position," he said. "If we can't persuade other nations with comparable values and comparable interests of the merits of our course, we should reconsider the course, and very likely change it. And if we'd followed that rule, we wouldn't have been in Vietnam because there wasn't one single major ally--not France or Britain or Germany or Japan--that agreed with our course or stood beside us there. And we wouldn't be in Iraq."

Morris believes the problem rests with a Presidency that has grown out of proportion.

"I'm puzzled. On the one hand, we're told, 'really great Constitution, balance of powers,' " says Morris. "On the other hand, we have a vastly powerful executive branch, made more powerful by the existence of nuclear weapons--the fact that the chief executive can press a button and destroy the world. I'm not sure the framers had this in mind when the Constitution was written. The belief that the cabinet serves the President and hence no one should speak out against his policy is really something disturbing about the movie because it clearly resonates with what is going on today."

Did Morris forget Lesson 11? "You Can't Change Human Nature."

SUPERPOWER AMERICA

How the Military Industrial Complex Defeated the American People

Two-thirds of our taxes are spent for troops and weapons--not to protect us from our only active enemies, terrorists, but from powerful military enemies that do not exist and to make money or power for "defense" contractors and members of Congress.

Both political parties enforce a taboo to "keep national defense out of polities" to help conceal this theft. The author, Hugh Fincher, is a former GI who at the end of World War II was among those ordered to promote two wars in Asia. Later, he learned about terrorism first hand while living in Saigon as a USAID officer. In the 1968 battle of Saigon, he records how the city was saved not by the military but by the police. More info is on www.superpoweramerica.com. Order from Amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, or bookstores.

John Esther is a Los Angeles-based writer specializing in culture studies.