The Fog of War: Lessons One and Two

Abstract

Through the process of critical oral history, Robert McNamara has re-evaluated his experience as the Secretary of Defense under the Kennedy and Johnson presidencies. Filmmaker Errol Morris shaped his documentary The Fog of War around eleven lessons from the life of McNamara. The first two lessons are “Empathize with your enemy” and “Rationality will not save us.” They are useful to think about for future foreign policy making, even though they have limits. The contemporary issue of terrorism shows how applicable the lessons are.
In the documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara gives a clear definition of empathy: “We must try to put ourselves inside their [our enemies'] skin and look at us through their eyes, just to understand the thoughts that lie behind their decisions and their actions.” Empathy is different from sympathy; it does not imply having feelings, but rather it implies understanding the thoughts and feelings of one's enemy (Ralph K. White). R. White goes further by stating that decision-makers are wrong when they do not see their opponents' fear, anger, and longing for peace .
The Cuban Missile Crisis is the best-known case of empathy. In 1962, U.S. foreign policy makers did not trust Khrushchev. On October 26 and 27, the Kennedy administration received two letters from the Soviet leader: first a private letter offering the removal of Soviet missiles in Cuba in exchange for a U.S. promise of non-invasion of Cuba, then a public letter adding the removal of U.S. missiles in Turkey to the deal. Kennedy concluded that the public letter was the official position of USSR. He felt that the Soviets were likely to attack the U.S. missiles in Turkey if they were not satisfied by the American response. The only member of the ExComm who dared contradicting the President was Llewellyn “Tommy” Thompson, former U.S. Ambassador to Moscow. Thompson, who had lived close to Khrushchev in Moscow, perceived that the Soviet leader was willing to avoid a conflict. He said to Kennedy: “The important thing for Khrushchev, it seems to me, is to be able to say: ‘I saved Cuba. I stopped an invasion.'” Thompson was right; President Kennedy responded to the private letter, and a nuclear war was avoided. After the crisis, the two countries reached the conclusion that more communication and understanding was necessary; therefore, the Hotline linking the White House with the Kremlin was established in 1963. During a discussion in Cambridge in 1987, Robert McNamara learned that the Soviet missiles had been deployed in Cuba because of the fear of an imminent U.S. invasion of Cuba. Twenty-five years later, it was still hard for the former Soviet decision-makers to believe that the United States had no plan to invade Cuba after the Bay of Pigs fiasco. The Soviets, as well as the Americans, had failed to occupy their enemy's mindset.