The following exercise involves selecting from a list of ingredients that make up The Fog of War and deciding where they lie along a line representing their relative truthfulness. If something seems likely to be very truthful then click on the button towards the left-hand end of the scale and if the element seems more vulnerable to manipulation then click on the button at the other end. The descriptions also contain details of the context and sometimes the accompanying soundtrack or interviews. Try to weigh up the truthfulness of these moments as they emerge out of a combination of all these elements.

Once you have decided an order, print this page out and try to explain why you have arranged the elements in this way. Can you think of ways in which the moments you have greatest faith in as being ‘truthful’ could actually be manipulated?

The Fog of War: Truth/Fiction

The pre-broadcast moments before a press briefing showing Robert S. McNamara asking the reporters if a map of Vietnam is high enough for them to see.

Archive footage showing American troops staring out to sea in binoculars.
A series of edited (montage) shots showing articles and magazine covers discussing Robert S. McNamara.

A number of spy plane images showing the sites of supposed missile launchers on Cuba. The documentary re-enacts the kind of scrutiny these images would have received in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. We see magnifying glasses being passed over the photographs.

We see an old-fashioned tape recorder turning and hear the voices of John F. Kennedy and Robert S. McNamara discussing the kind of world it is likely to be if armed conflict over Cuba actually breaks out.

We see McNamara, now in his eighties staring at the documentary-maker's camera and explaining how in retrospect he realises how America and the world 'lucked out' (got lucky) in managing to avoid nuclear war with Cuba and Russia in 1962.

We see a picture of the US air force Chief-of-Staff at the time of the Cuban missile crisis, Curtis LeMay and hear from McNamara now, in voice-over, how LeMay reacted at the end of the Cuban missile crisis. As everyone else breathed a sigh of relief he bemoaned the fact that the USA were missing a golden opportunity to attack Cuba and should still do just that.
As McNamara discusses nuclear war - we see footage of people reflected in shop windows - vast crowds of anonymous people. The images of western crowds give way to shots of crowds of Asian people walking in the streets.

We see a picture of the moon and hear McNamara discussing how the US military Chiefs-of-Staff seriously thought that the USSR were going to get around nuclear test bans by trying out its bombs on the dark side of the moon.

We see archive images of celebrating people while McNamara tells us his first memory: "I remember the tops of street cars crowded with human beings cheering, kissing and screaming - end of World War One - we'd won!"

A film showing numbers instead of bombs dropping onto cities. The sequence is a fanciful representation of the statistical research that McNamara undertook and which culminated in the B29 firebomb raids on over fifty Japanese cities and which killed thousands and thousands of people, including 100,000 civilians in Tokyo in a single night.

A sequence showing a re-creation of a series of experiments that McNamara did at Cornell University, chucking skulls down the stairwell of the main dormitory block. In doing this, we hear, he was testing out various kinds of ‘packaging’ that might protect the skulls from fracturing. It was this research that would feed into the safety design of cars for the manufacturers Ford in the late fifties.

Archive footage of a torpedo used to illustrate accounts of torpedo attacks on American naval shipping in the Gulf of Tonkin in August 1964 - incidents that caused Lyndon Johnson to seek and gain permission to prosecute war in Vietnam using US planes and troops.
The same sequence this time shown in reverse - the torpedo retreating to the sound of an explanation that in fact the second series of alleged attacks, the ones that proved so influential did not occur.

Footage of McNamara crossing a bridge in June 1997 in Hanoi on his way to a critical oral history conference with General Dang Vu Hiep, a leading North Vietnamese opponent of America when McNamara was Secretary of Defence.