MOVIE CRITIQUE:
This is the quintessential documentary. This movie is so powerful that it is almost mesmerizing. I cannot recommend this movie highly enough.

Errol Morris has taken his subject, Robert S. McNamara, the brilliant Harvard professor, World War II quant under General Curtis Lemay, the savior of the Ford Motor Company, and the much maligned Secretary of Defense under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson and run with his subject into the annals of one of the best documentaries that I have ever seen.

This documentary is fascinating for a number of reasons. First of all, McNamara is a commanding figure with a towering intellect. Secondly, McNamara was a leader on the world stage for much of the Twentieth Century. Thirdly, Morris has allowed him to voice his views of the events of his life without obtrusive editorializing from the filmmaker.

Finally, Morris has brilliantly interjected archival scenes, pictures, and documentary film from the areas being discussed and spliced them into this film in such a way as to make the entire process one seamless cloth of history on the national and international stage from the end of World War One all the way up until about 1995.

McNamara gives his take on world history during his life by organizing everything around the eleven lessons that he has learned throughout his life. This documentary is his story about how he utilized those eleven lessons in the pursuit of his career, both on the military and the industrial side.

Morris is a brilliant filmmaker who has masterfully edited every frame of this interview with archival clips of the world events commented on by McNamara. And, finally, he has had composer Philip Glass score this movie. Glass rose to the occasion with a musical background score that makes this film just riveting.

This is the kind of documentary that agitprop filmmaker Michael Moore couldn't have made even if he wanted to. To have this film follow Moore's intellectually weak "Bowling for Columbine" as the past nominee (and winner) for an Oscar for Best Documentary Film shows in stark contrast just how good Morris is and Moore isn't.
----------------------------------------

MOVIE SYNOPSIS:
This movie starts out with Errol Morris interviewing Robert S. McNamara at the age of 85 years. Don't let his age worry you, for this guy is still as sharp as a tack.

He is so sharp that he remembers the troops coming home after World War One, a time when he was only two years old. He can still recall people standing on the top of buses to get a better view of the victory parades.

From there he went to a school where the teacher arranged the desks in rows with the seats for the star students to be placed in the front. McNamara made sure that he studied hard enough to be placed in the first seat. His scholastic career included Harvard, where he graduated number one in his class. They were so impressed by his abilities that they appointed him to the post of an assistant professorship, the youngest in the history of the university up until that time.

This professorship included a salary of $4,000 per year, so skimpy that the hospital bills resulting from the birth of his first child had to be paid off on an installment plan of $100 per month.

During World War Two the Pentagon came to Harvard to hire scholars for war research, and this opportunity initiated McNamara's long association with the military. At that time, it is interesting to note, Harvard invited the military to come up from Washington as research money for all other projects had dried up during this period. McNamara soon established his credentials as a brilliant analyst, so much so that he was sent down to Washington, D.C., to work in the Pentagon on the staff of Curtis LeMay.

Curtis LeMay was in charge of the bombing of Japan, and McNamara analyzed how low or high the new B-52's should fly on their bombing runs to achieve the maximum kill. In this rather horrifying segment, McNamara discusses how the civilian population was just considered to be an adjunct of the military, and, therefore, fair game for bombing.

My knowledge of these times carry memories of the public outcry over our firebombing of Dresden, Germany, with the resultant kill of thousands of civilians and the massive destruction of the many historical architectural treasures of that city.

In this documentary, McNamara (and Morris) discuss not just one city but some 20 or 30 Japanese cities that were firebombed to the ground with a loss of life in excess of 50% of the population in each instance. Lemay and McNamara even discussed the possibility that they would be charged as war criminals a la the Nuremberg trials if the United States should lose this war.

After the War a fellow analyst casually advised McNamara that he could not afford to go back to Harvard to return to his old career as a professor. This friend instead suggested a new career in industry, and he had discovered just the right company.

"Which one?" McNamara asked.
"Ford Motor Company" came the surprising answer.
"Where did you read this? he asked.
"Life Magazine" came the even more surprising answer.
"What did the article say?" McNamara asked.
"The article stated that out of all of the thousands of Ford employees, there were only ten college graduates."

McNamara tells how the two of them arrived at Ford and discovered that the company under Henry Ford, II, had not made any money for years and no one knew why. McNamara as the quant supreme was perfect for this challenge and he rose to meet it.

Ford was soon making record profits and by 1960 Henry Ford, II appointed McNamara as President of the company, the first non-Ford family member to be appointed to this job.

However, as luck would have it, McNamara would only remain on the job as President of Ford for five months. Kennedy had just been elected resident, and Bobby Kennedy made a secret trip to Detroit to offer McNamara the post of the Secretary of Defense. McNamara was soon off to Washington, D.C. as the new Secretary and a member of Kennedy's highly vaunted "Best and Brightest" core group of advisors. This was at a salary of $25,000 per year, a huge pay cut from what he had been receiving as president of Ford.

Kennedy's fiasco at Cuba's Bay of Pigs would not occur for a while. That nasty little problem in South Viet Nam was not on any one's radar screen at the time. Neither was it then known that Kruschev had made plans to test Kennedy's mettle by shipping hundreds of nuclear warheads to Cuba.