Evening with one of Dr. Strangelove

[nibot]

Robert S. McNamara came to campus last week. I went to the reception at the Chancellor's House, but I was shooed away before I could grab my first martini. (I suppose I should have answered "Yes, of course" when asked, "Do you belong here?") I felt out of place anyway, with all these sophisticated smoozing types who looked like they belonged in New York City.

It was, they said, his first public appearance here since he graduated — in 1937. The evening began with a small Intellectual Property SNAFU — apparently Sony Pictures Classics denied permission to show the film The Fog of War in its entirety, and, instead, about half of the film was shown, an editing job that could easily be described as vastly more 'effective' — or 'prejudicial' — than the released cut. They cut out the context and put in the war scenes. The firebombing of Toyko comes across as utterly mesmerizing. A team of Chinese peasants harnessed to a giant roller, crushing rocks to make a B-29 runway somewhere (is it Mongolia?) — the surreality continues. And you're thinking, "Did this really happen?" at the same time you suddenly feel disgust at being American.

So in this context it's a rather strange happening. The film clip ends and we realize that the Chancellor, the Producer, the Professor, the Millionaire, and the self-described War Criminal are all sitting together in the wing. And then McNamara shrugs off the pointed questions of the Professor, instead addressing the audience with all his might, shaking his fist in the air: "YOU'VE GOT TO DO SOMETHING!"

It's up to us, he says, to make sure history doesn't repeat itself. But he takes no blame for making that history happen the last time around. ("I've not going to appl y these lessons to the Bush Administration. That's for YOU to do!")

The question now is, who is responsible for the talking-head waving-arms McNamara-doll at http://www.sonyclassics.com/fogofwar? That person should be prosecuted immediately.

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BERKELEY, California If the life of Robert McNamara is a series of unfinished circles, one of the biggest ones was closed here this week. McNamara, the defense secretary in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, fielded questions from center stage in a sold-out auditorium at his alma mater, the University of California at Berkeley, for the first time since graduating in 1937.

Under the glare of bright lights, McNamara, 87, faced an audience of graying hippies, men with Vietnam draft lottery numbers still imprinted in their minds and an assortment of 1960's radicals who had devoted the better part of their youth to opposing him.

McNamara's son, Craig, a walnut farmer who had joined protests here against his father's war, came to listen Wednesday, as did Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon official who in 1971 leaked a top-secret report commissioned by McNamara on American involvement in Southeast Asia.

But instead of angry exchanges, there was applause and nods of sympathy from Ellsberg and many of the others, as McNamara, his voice pitched and his ballpoint pen jabbing in the air, spoke pointedly about the lessons of war.

"We human beings killed 160 million other human beings in the 20th century," he said. "Is that what we want in this century? I don't think so."

Though he appeared on stage with Errol Morris, whose Academy Award-nominated documentary film, "Fog of War," is based on interviews with McNamara, this was a solo act by an old man with something urgent to say.

"Ninety-five percent of the audience came in not liking him but ended up thinking he said something we should hear," said Saul Zaentz, an independent film producer. "We should have heard it a long time ago."

There was plenty of the old McNamara still there, the pontificating, lecturing and self-assured executive who refused to answer questions about the Bush administration's policies in Iraq, even while hinting that he found them unpalatable and suggesting that news organizations had done a poor job in examining them. The man who was known to run the Vietnam War on his terms began shuffling his papers and packing his briefcase when he decided that he had had enough, even as others on the stage continued to speak.

"McNamara thinks he can remain above politics and that one vain assumption has led him to pass up genuine chances to change history," said Jeremy Larner, a speechwriter for Eugene McCarthy, the presidential candidate who ran on an antiwar platform in 1968.

Nonetheless, the evening had a palpable sense of history to it.

Since "Fog of War" was released last year, McNamara has appeared before several audiences, including the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the Kennedy Library in Boston and last month in Washington. But the scene on Wednesday night, in the words of Morris, "was surreal." The man who helped make Berkeley synonymous with the anti-Vietnam War movement appeared willingly - even eagerly - before his accusers on their home turf.

"He is a different man now than the man I thought I knew in the 1960's," said Morris, who attended Berkeley as a graduate student.

It was the kind of evening when someone like Ellsberg, 72, who sat in an aisle seat in the auditorium's first tier, could go nearly unnoticed even though it was one of the few times the two men had been in the same room in more than three decades. As was repeatedly demonstrated in the course of McNamara's talk, with Ellsberg sometimes leading the interruptions of applause, some old enemies are no longer so far apart.

"This kind of reflection was a closing of the circle, as it were," said Robert Berdahl, the university's chancellor. "He has in a fundamental way aligned himself with those who protested his policies here at Berkeley 40 years ago."

Craig McNamara, who brought his wife and two children from their farm near Davis, California, to see his father speak, said there was some worrying within the family about "how Dad would be received" at a place so viscerally associated with his opponents.

But McNamara, who cooperated in the making of "Fog of War," described his father as a man with a mission of confronting his ghosts.

"I think he is haunted by the war," he said.

Mark Dowie, a journalist who teaches at the university, said that many members of what he called "the old guard" on campus had criticized the university for inviting McNamara.

"A lot of them wished it hadn't happened," said Dowie, a convicted draft resister during the Vietnam era. "I was more than impressed. I think he's in some ways an evangelist for peace."

In an interview after his appearance, McNamara said he was not surprised how things turned out.

Some years ago, he had been a visiting professor at the university and found then that people - even those who cursed his name - were able to look beyond their conflicted pasts and appreciate his attempt to draw constructive lessons from Vietnam. Then, as now, one of his main themes was the danger of unconventional weapons and how close the world had come to nuclear war.

"I think," he said, "any human being who for any long period of time has been in leadership positions, policy-making positions, owes it to his successors and constituents an examination of what he did and what lessons if any can be drawn."

McNamara got some of his biggest applause for comments that were stridently antiwar. He spoke against pre-emptive war and regime change as ways to deal with nuclear proliferation. He spoke of a United States divided between multilateralists and unilateralists. He spoke of a nuclear policy that has not been fully debated in public.

But McNamara drew the line at directly criticizing his counterparts still serving in the government, insisting it would be reckless for a former defense secretary to second-guess decisions when American troops are at risk overseas.

"My thoughts are not targeted on Bush or the Republicans," he said, "my thoughts are targeted on the actions."

For many in the audience, that was a big disappointment, one that rivaled McNamara's silence about his misgivings during and immediately after the Vietnam War.

The New York Times