Former Secretary of Defense, Robert S. McNamara, 85-year-old, sat down in front of documentarian Errol Morris's Interrotron for over 23 hours of interviews, which have been condensed into over 100 minutes of informative footage, aided by archive material and a monotonous, slightly apocalyptic Philip Glass score.
Morris starts by distorting the all too familiar picture of McNamara, “the war-mongerer” by presenting the young McNamara, educated in places like Berkeley and Harvard in subjects like logic, statistics and philosophy before being tapped as the first non-family president of the Ford Motor Company.
The film prepares the ground for the subject of Vietnam by spending its first half on McNamara's previous experience. He played a role in bombing strategy during World War II, developing numerical methods to improve the effectiveness of the bombing of Japan. The faith in numbers becomes a theme in the film, as does the realization that General Curtis LeMay shared with him that if the U.S. had lost World War II they might well have been considered war criminals for what amounted to a mass slaughter in Japan.
McNamara's position to Viet Nam was quite different from the war-mongerer attitude he displayed in public as the recently declassified White House audio tapes reveal which Morris has included in this film. McNamara`s cool head helped Kennedy ignore LeMay's insistence that the US invade Cuba to end the 1962 missile crisis, and McNamara's love for JFK appears on his sleeve as he openly weeps while discussing the slain leader. His admiration for Johnson was rather limited, McNamara pretends he still isn't sure whether he quit or Johnson fired him.
Even tough the film gives McNamara the opportunity to propagate the eleven lesson of his sixty year long career, the moral questions raised are timeless. Director Morris followed his fascination for people who engage in evil but believe in some real sense that they are doing good. Doing so Morris travels deep into the gray zones of human morality.