McNamara, Morris and 'The Fog of War'
A Chat with the Filmmaker Who Kept the Defense Chief Talking
Filmmaker Errol Morris
More from Errol Morris
Former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara
Robert S. McNamara became famous as the Secretary of Defense who directed much of the Vietnam War. He was a former auto executive and one of the great minds of his generation -- a man who sought to bring order and reason to the chaos of war.
Three decades later, McNamara wrote a book that was seen as a kind of apology for the disasters of Vietnam. But filmmaker Errol Morris was convinced that McNamara still had something more to say. He persuaded McNamara to sit down for a series of interviews that became a documentary: The Fog of War.
Morris -- whose previous work includes The Thin Blue Line and the TV series First Person -- tells NPR's Steve Inskeep he sought to capture history through the eyes of one man. In this case, a man whose imprint on the 20th century includes the World War II firebombing of Tokyo, the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Vietnam War.
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