I, HISTORIAN:

'Fog of War' vs. 'Stop the Presses' (ERROL MORRIS, January 7, 2004)

Over the years I have read with avidity various intellectual disputes in The New York Review of Books and other literary journals. But I have never imagined myself being a part of one of them. However, I found Eric Alterman's December 15 "Stop the Presses" column on my recent film, The Fog of War, so devoid of historical scholarship (despite his claim of having worked on his PhD for eleven years) that I feel compelled to respond.

Alterman called me just after finishing the piece, first leaving a message with my office that I needed to be "prepared to answer some difficult questions." I called him. He read me sections of the piece. In particular, the passage, "After the screening of the film...[Morris] argued that the popular view of a 'vacillatory Johnson and advisers like McNamara breathing down his neck' for war was false. Well, Morris is a brilliant filmmaker, but he is not a historian." Of course, I didn't care for his suggestion that the history in the film is flawed. But I am willing to acknowledge my errors and mistakes. I just would like them to be clearly elucidated.

Alterman went on to portray McNamara as the prime mover in the conflict: It is a bellicose McNamara egging on a vacillatory LBJ. This view is widely held and has become one of the central myths about the escalation of the war. McNamara, the numbers cruncher, the statistician, the "IBM machine with legs," goaded LBJ into war, and then cried alligator tears when it was too damn late. (Last year, HBO presented The Path to War--Frankenheimer's last film--with Alec Baldwin playing Robert McNamara. Not surprisingly, it promoted this same thesis: LBJ vacillatory; McNamara bellicose.)

The only problem with this account is that it is not compatible with recently released historical documentation--in particular, JFK's recordings of his Cabinet meetings and LBJ's selective recordings of his phone conversations.

Mr. Alterman's response contains the hilarious assertion: "Since he is not trained as a historian, Morris lacks the ability to weigh the value of one conversation against another, considering context, hidden motives and persons present." This beautifully illustrates the way that the genuine need for specialization in the sciences created self-serving cults of the humanities and arts, so that intellectuals could feel that they too had access to secret knowledge.

Ever wonder why James Joyce is unreadable? It's because he and his literary contemporaries--unlike Goethe in his time--couldn't understand the physics of their day and were jealous.

Posted by Orrin Judd at January 22, 2004 12:20 PM