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Fog Of War: 11 Lessons From The Life Of Robert Mcnamara

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“The Fog of War: 11 Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara” Summary “The Fog of War” is a documentary revolving around an interview with the former United States defense secretary Robert S. McNamara. McNamara served as the Secretary of Defense for seven years under Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. In this documentary, McNamara reflects on war in the early to mid-20th century along with the errors that were made. McNamara was at the center of World War II, the Cold War, and Vietnam, and came away believing that war is too complex and catastrophic to be left to humans. Throughout the production, McNamara speaks freely on his life and mistakes; his thoughts are organized as "11 Lessons from the Life of Robert McNamara.” …show more content…

McNamara states that although President Kennedy wanted to keep the nation out of war, there was a clear division between the cabinet on whether we should have invaded Cuba or not. McNamara also reveals that he later found out that we had attempted to assassinate Castro under a number of occasions, under the Eisenhower, Kennedy, and Johnson administration. Nations were tense and on the verge of chaos, and McNamara reveals that the only reason we escaped nuclear war was because we were lucky. Also, McNamara later found out that in January 1962, there were 162 nuclear warheads in Cuba at the time of the crisis, and not only was President Kennedy fully aware of it, but he was willing to accept that Cuba would have been obliterated if anything were to have happened to any of those missiles. In the end we got missiles out without war, but McNamara states that the human race needs to think more about killing and conflict and realize the repercussions of it. McNamara closes his discussion of the Cuban Missile Crisis by creating the equation: “human fallibility + nuclear weapons = the end of

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This paper is a case study about Robert Strange McNamara as a person, an advisor during WWII, and the time when he was the US secretary of defense. McNamara is a man whose carrier begun mostly during WWII when he was working in statistics office upgrading USAF efficiency against Nazi Germany and Japan. He was a man devoted to his country, wise and mathematically skilled. His analytic brain across with confidence close to arrogance gave him prime position in advising USAF. He was not a leader at that time but he was strongly influential on commanders’ decisions, especially General Le May commander of Bomber Command.

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In an attempt to overthrow Castro and prevent the spread of communism throughout Latin America, Kennedy was forced to implement “a watered down plan inherited from the Eisenhower administration” , which involved using CIA trained Cuban rebels to encourage an anti-Castro uprising which would then appear as an internal uprising. This resulted in what historian Theodore Draper described as a “perfect failure” On April 17th 1961, 1500 rebels landed on the Bahia de Cochinos however invaders were swiftly captured or killed and as Kennedy refused to send in USA troops and cancelled a planned air strike in order to feign lack of American involvement, the plan ended in “total humiliating defeat” . Kennedy was enraged that he had signed what he had seen as an “unworkable plan” and that he had “allowed himself to be swept along by sheer bureaucratic momentum” . Despite this he took full responsibility for the failed operation stating in a news conference on March 21st 1961, that while “victory has a hundred fathers, defeat is an orphan” .

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