Oppenheimer (2023), and The Fog of War (2003)— the stories of two men captured by the US War Machine while serving their country and President.
I watched two movies over the weekend, Oppenheimer (2023) and The Fog of War Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003). I believe these are excellent companion films to have watched on consecutive days and I will attempt to draw the parallels of both films in this essay. I recommend watching both of them.
I have previously written essays: an analysis of history, about the most recent JFK biography and his assassination, a book review on American Exceptionism, and on RFK Jr.’s campaign for the Presidency, and the Corporate Capture of Government. There are common themes in all of these essays that relate to the common themes of these two movies. Those themes will be explored here in the context of the two movies.
The movie Oppenheimer is a biopic or historical drama that looks at the life and work of J. Robert Oppenheimer (played by Cillian Murphy). The film was written and produced by Christopher Nolan and was based on Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin’s book American Prometheus, and was deemed mostly historically accurate. The movie is a “mind blower” that looks at the theoretical physicists life and career before he was appointed director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, the centerpiece of the Manhattan Project, the $2 billion, top-secret World War II program to build the atomic bomb, as well as the aftermath of that work. I read about the project 50 years ago. There have been well over fifty books written about it, but the movie’s depiction of the aftermath of the project and Oppenheimer’s rivalry with Lewis Strauss (played by Robert Downey Jr) was new to me.
Historians can and have argued about the significance of the development of nuclear weapons at Los Alamos and the expansion of that industry since, but certainly it is one of the most significant events in human history as we have created the means to destroy ourselves and much of all life on planet earth. When I visited New Mexico in 2012, my wife and I stopped and visited the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, located in Albuquerque, NM, which covers much of the history of this industry.
All of the scientists recognized the power they were unleashing, and the impact they would have not just on the American war effort vs the Nazis, but on the future of warfare and humanity. Upon completion of the successful testing of the Atomic bomb before it was dropped on Japan, Oppenheimer did quote the Bhagavad-Gita, “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed over 200,000 Japanese civilians, resulting in Japan’s unconditional surrender and ending WWII. It also began the nuclear era and nuclear arms race and jump started into high gear the Cold War with the Soviet Union successfully testing their own bomb four years later.
As the movie indicates, scientist Edward Teller was a proponent of developing a much more powerful nuclear weapon — the Hydrogen bomb, which the Cold War enabled and made into a reality. When Oppenheimer met with President Truman, who authorized the weapons use in Japan, he noted he had blood on his hands. After he left, Truman told an aide to never let that crybaby back in his office.
After the war, Oppenheimer “raised doubts about his work, opposed production of the much more powerful hydrogen bomb, called for international controls on all weapons of mass destruction, and as a result, got blackballed by key figures in the nuclear establishment — his security clearance revoked by a tribunal as rigged and vindictive as any of the Cold War’s various other Red-baiting panels.”
“Teller hawks vs. the Oppenheimer doves, a divide that pushed both sets of partisans to harden their positions. It also drove a rift between scientists and the government.” Some of the scientists that worked on the Atom bomb, “led by Leo Szilard and to some extent joined by Oppenheimer, became ardent activists for nuclear arms control.” This Cold War hawks and war mongers vs Cold War “peaceniks” was and is an adversarial fight in America and the world that continues to the present day. President Eisenhower, after enabling the expansion of this hawkishness at the beginning of the Cold War during his administration, gave a farewell speech, January 17, 1961, warning Americans and the world of the threat posed by the Military Industrial Complex that he saw expanded and did not dis-arm during his own administration.
The movie highlighted the strong anti-communist sentiment in the United States that existed before WWII, during WWII, and after, with the launch of the Cold War and American Century, with this sentiment peaking in the 1950s with the Red Scare and Joseph McCarthy hearings and the government witch hunt for communist sympathizers. It is that very strong sentiment — that Communism posed an existential threat, which drove the development of war fighting including the development of the extensive nuclear armament forces now represented in the US as the nuclear triad.
As Frederik Logevall noted in Volume 1 of his 2-volume biography of President John F. Kennedy, JFK came of age during the American Century and his worldviews were formed during the run-up to WWII, his service in WWII, and his broad international travel and views regarding the first world development and exploitation of the third world with its expansion of colonialism, and this formed the basis for his actions as President. As a Senator from Massachusetts, Kennedy began speaking out on these issues and it likely formed the basis for his support of Oppenheimer, reversing his loss of security clearance, his organizing opposition to confirmation of Strauss as Commerce Secretary in 1959, and then awarding Oppenheimer the Enrico Fermi award, which was given to him by LBJ two weeks after JFK was assassinated.
Since the launch of the nuclear age as covered in Oppenheimer, there have been several near misses which nearly brought the world full scale nuclear war, that would have resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people. The most prominent threats occurred during the Kennedy administration during the Cuban missile crisis, which was discussed in the McNamara movie. JFK himself gave his peace speech in June of 1963, which led to the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty later that year before he was assassinated.
There have been many groups that continue to lobby for the reduction of the number of nuclear weapons in the world. Several of them have taken the opportunity with the release of Oppenheimer to revisit their lobbying efforts to reduce nuclear weapons and have the United States sign the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. Sixty-eight nations have signed and ratified the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW), and 24 more have signed it with ratification now in the pipeline, but the US has not signed. These NGOs include Back From the Brink and the Chesapeake Physicians for Social Responsibility and many others.
The Fog of War Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara (2003), is an award winning documentary by Eroll Morris that is an extended interview with former Ford President, Defense Secretary, and World Bank President Robert S. McNamara. It includes historical archival footage and audio recordings of relevant conversations between McNamara, Kennedy, Johnson and USAF General Curtis LeMay during his stint in the USAF in WWII, when he reported to LeMay, and as Secretary of Defense during the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations.
McNamara, like many of his contemporaries, served in the US Military during WWII, and knew the carnage of major wars. This documentary is his reflection on what he learned mostly as a participant in WWII, and war time leader for the US during the Viet Nam war. He discusses LeMay the person and the general soldier that carried out the massive incendiary bombing of Japan before the nuclear bombs and how those bombings were far more indiscriminate and killed more people than the nuclear weapons did. LeMay was the inspiration for several characters represented in two other related movies — 1964’s Dr. Strangelove and Seven Days in May.
The film is divided into eleven sections derived from his interviews with McNamara, as well as the eleven lessons presented at the end of McNamara’s 1995 book, In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam (written with Brian VanDeMark).
The documentary clearly shows that McNamara was strongly affected by his experiences in warfare and his book and the interviews in the documentary convey these strong feelings and his lessons learned. We see where he travels to Cuba in 1992 to meet with Castro to discuss the Cuban missile crisis and to Viet Nam in 1995 to meet with his counterparts from North Vietnam.
The following are the eleven lessons presented in the film:
1-Empathize with your enemy — He discusses the importance of this for JFK to come to understand the Russian position during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when Curtis LeMay and other members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wanted to invade Cuba and use nuclear weapons.
2- Rationality will not save us — He notes how lucky we were during the Cuban missile crisis. In the 1992 conference, he and the world learned that the Russians had tactical nuclear missles and were prepared to use them in the event of an American invasion. The US had an invasion force of 180,000 men mobilized in the southeastern United States for just such an invasion. My older cousin Jimmy Loving was part of that force. He served aboard the USS Oglethorpe AKA 100, which was part of Naval Task force 135, the invading force. Had we invaded, my cousin along with over 100,000 American men and most of Cuba would have been incinerated with nuclear weapons. The invasion was only called off within 48 hours of launch with the resolution of the crisis occurring on October 28, 1962 . This was deemed “worse than Chamberlain’s appeasement of Hitler” by USAF General Curtis LeMay. “We Lost”, LeMay proclaimed.
The credits show that an advisor on this film included– James Blight, an expert on the Cuban Missile Crisis. He served as director of the Avoiding Nuclear War project at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government and developed a pioneering research method called critical oral history. This work produced the Armageddon Letters, “a transmedia project (multiplatform storytelling) launched on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Cuban missile crisis. It takes visitors behind the scenes during the October 1962 Cuban missile crisis, the most dangerous crisis in recorded history.”
3 There’s something beyond one’s self importance of values
4- Maximize efficiency
5- Proportionality should be a guideline in war. McNamara discusses how in his opinion, Japanese deaths were disproportionate to the US War objectives
6- Get the data. During this segment, McNamara discusses how he had recommended to JFK the withdrawal of all US force in Viet Nam, how that had begun with NSAM 263, and how it would have been completed in 1965 after the 1964 election. He also discusses how it was he who picked the spot at Arlington National Cemetery where JFK was buried. The segment also plays audio recordings of his discussions with LBJ on 2/25/64 regarding Viet Nam and how McNamara and JFK statements about withdrawal “were stupid” and we learn of LBJ’s repeated plans to escalate the war in Viet Nam.
7- Belief and Seeing are both often wrong (We see want we want to believe) The 8/2/64 Gulf of Tonkin incident & Tonkin Gulf Resolution are discussed. There was no attack on 8/4 but on 8/2 there was. McNamara also discusses his 1995 visit to Viet Nam and how our actions there were a “Cold War fight.”
8- Be prepared to reexamine your reasoning
9- In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. McNamara discusses Norman Morrison, a Quaker, and his death via self-immolation by fire at the pentagon via in 1965. He discusses the importance of having ethical truths and moral laws. He discusses General Sherman and Atlanta during the Civil War and his decision to burn Atlanta after having been asked not to do so. He discusses how War is cruel and fighters with the mindset of Sherman and LeMay are prepared to do anything to “Save the Country”, doing whatever killing is necessary, and how this is hard for sensitive people. I believe both McNamara and Oppenheimer fall into this category.
10 — Never Say never. — Answer the question you wish had been asked of you. Who was responsible for Viet Nam? Johnson was. McNamara’s 11/1/67 memo to LBJ regarding Viet Nam was never addressed or responded to by LBJ. Rather, LBJ removed McNamara as SECDEF and awarded him the Medal of Freedom. McNamara notes that historians do not like to deal with counterfactuals but he asserts had JFK lived, we would not have lost 500,000 Americans and 3.5M Vietnamese.
11- You can’t change human nature. McNamara thinks of and quotes TS Eliot — “We shall not cease from exploring, and at the end of our exploration, we will return to where we started, and know the place for the first time.”
For the DVD version of this film, McNamara provided Ten Lessons and these are:
1. The human race will not eliminate war in this century, but we can reduce the brutality of war — the level of killing — by adhering to the principles of a “Just War,” in particular to the principle of “proportionality.”
2. The indefinite combinations of human fallibility and nuclear weapons will lead to the destruction of nations.
3. We [the United States] are the most powerful nation in the world — economically, politically, and militarily — and we are likely to remain so for decades ahead. But we are not omniscient. If we cannot persuade other nations with similar interests and similar values of the merits of the proposed use of that power, we should not proceed unilaterally except in the unlikely requirement to defend directly the continental U.S., Alaska and Hawaii.
4. Moral principles are often ambiguous guides to foreign policy and defense policy, but surely we can agree that we should establish as a major goal of U.S. foreign policy and, indeed, of foreign policy across the globe: the avoidance, in this century, of the carnage — 160 million dead — caused by conflict in the 20th century.
5. We, the richest nation in the world, have failed in our responsibility to our own poor and to the disadvantaged across the world to help them advance their welfare in the most fundamental terms of nutrition, literacy, health and employment.
6. Corporate executives must recognize there is no contradiction between a soft heart and a hard head. Of course, they have responsibilities to stockholders, but they also have responsibilities to their employees, their customers and to society as a whole.
7. President Kennedy believed a primary responsibility of a president — indeed “the” primary responsibility of a president — is to keep the nation out of war, if at all possible.
8. War is a blunt instrument by which to settle disputes between or within nations, and economic sanctions are rarely effective. Therefore, we should build a system of jurisprudence based on the International Court — that the U.S. has refused to support — which would hold individuals responsible for crimes against humanity.
9. If we are to deal effectively with terrorists across the globe, we must develop a sense of empathy — I don’t mean “sympathy,” but rather “understanding” — to counter their attacks on us and the Western World.
10. One of the greatest dangers we face today is the risk that terrorists will obtain access to weapons of mass destruction as a result of the breakdown of the Non-Proliferation Regime. We in the U.S. are contributing to that breakdown.
Epilogue of the film
McNamara was asked why he did not speak out against the Viet Nam war after he left office? He indicated he would have no further comment on Viet Nam, that it was too complex, and there would always be a damned if you do, damned if you don’t response to any explanation he might give. My personal opinion is that he took some important observations about that war, the reason for US entry into it as a Cold War proxy fight vs China and the USSR, and how we prosecuted it, to the grave with him.
Summary
The United States stood alone at the end of WWII as the leading country in the world with the most powerful military in history. Since that time, we have continued to develop this military and intelligence operation with great costs to the nation and the world. For an excellent discussion of the extent of this Nuclear-Industrial Complex, and the tremendous costs to maintain it, I recommend William Hartung’s essay in Tom Dispatch.
Robert Oppenheimer and Robert McNamara were two key cogs in several key US war efforts at the beginning and middle of the Cold War during the American Century. Both of these films show key aspects of the American military and intelligence might and the thinking that has propelled it to continue to dominate our government spending and national strategies for how the US operates in the world today. I highly recommend both films.