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About
Former corporate whiz kid Robert McNamara was the controversial Secretary of Defense in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, during the height of the Vietnam War. Augmented by archival footage and cabinet conversation recordings, Errol Morris gives the conflicted McNamara a platform on which he attempts to confront his and the U.S. government's actions in Southeast Asia in light of the horrors of modern warfare, the end of ideology and the punitive judgment of history.
Theatrical
Dec 9, 2003
Box Office
$5.0M
DVD / Blu-ray
Nov 14, 2023
Director
Producers
Music
Studio
SenArt Films, RadicalMedia, Sony Pictures Classics
Keywords
vietnam
biography
politics
historical figure
historical society
secretary of defense
anti war protest
cuban missile crisis
cabinet position
armed forces
spin doctor
self immolation
auto industry
historical drama
semi-biographical
historical reinterpretation
historical revisionism
historical documentary
historical events
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Cast
Full credits →R
Robert McNamara
Self
E
Errol Morris
Self (uncredited)
F
Fidel Castro
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
B
Barry Goldwater
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
J
John F. Kennedy
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
N
Nikita Khrushchev
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
C
Curtis LeMay
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
R
Richard Nixon
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
H
Harry Reasoner
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
F
Franklin D. Roosevelt
Self (voice) (archive footage) (uncredited)
W
Woodrow Wilson
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
Quotes
See all →Responsibility for the Vietnam War Explored
Morris
When you talk about the responsibility for something like the Vietnam War, whose responsibility is it?
Quotes sourced from Wikiquote (© Wikiquote contributors), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Modified for formatting/length.
Perception and Misjudgment in Decision-Making
McNamara
It was just confusion, and events afterwards showed that our judgment that we'd been attacked that day was wrong. It didn't happen. And the judgment that we'd been attacked on August 2nd was right. We had been, although that was disputed at the time. So we were right once and wrong once. Ultimately, President Johnson authorized bombing in response to what he thought had been the second attack; it hadn't occurred but that's irrelevant to the point I'm making here. He authorized the attack on the assumption it had occurred, and his belief that it was a conscious decision on the part of the North Vietnamese political and military leaders to escalate the conflict and an indication they would not stop short of winning. We were wrong, but we had in our minds a mindset that led to that action. And it carried such heavy costs. We see incorrectly or we see only half of the story at times.
Morris
We see what we want to believe.
McNamara
You're absolutely right. Belief and seeing, they're both often wrong.
Quotes sourced from Wikiquote (© Wikiquote contributors), licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Modified for formatting/length.
