I watched The Fog of War on Sunday evening, after having listened to an interview with its director, Errol Morris, on one of my favorite* NPR programs. I must confess a near perfect ignorance of the nuances of the history of American foreign policy, so I couldn’t possibly offer any sophisticated analysis of McNamara’s commentary. I can say that I was thoroughly fascinated by certain aspects of his personality.

He’s literate in a way that seems to be pretty rare among public figures in this country or my own — in one of the deleted scenes on the DVD he refers to a Kipling poem with disarming sincerity and not a hint of self-conciousness or pretension. Literature, philosophy, ethics, statistics, and war are clearly all important and interwoven parts of his vocabulary. He’s terribly smart in lots of different ways — and he comes across as a very moral thinker, despite some of the decisions he’s been responsible for.

He’s astonishingly emotional, both in the present-day interviews, when he is in his eighties, and in the audio and video clips of his term as Secretary of Defense. He teeters on the edge of tears several times, his voice cracking as he talks about choosing JFK’s burial spot and the warm way LBJ spoke about him when he was awarded the Medal of Freedom. He’s obviously deeply in love with his wife (now dead), and he’s completely fearless about showing his love for the presidents he served. It’s totally human, and yet sort of unthinkable. You just don’t see men — politicians — talking like that over here when they’re not on the campaign trail.

The one thing he’s obviously not is humble, or interested in the appearance of humility. He tells a story about how he fought fiercely to be at the top of his class in first grade, and his face still glows with the memory of it. Whenever he is asked a critical question, in those videos of his younger self, a slow smile spreads across his face before he responds — it’s a smile that says, Ah. Ah, I knew you’d ask me that, because you are an unelightened being. If you knew what I knew, you wouldn’t need to pose that question. But I’ll answer it anyway, and I’ll try to bring my answer down to your level of understanding. He’s a cerebral person who devotes a lot of time to thinking hard about what he’s doing, and the overwhelming impression he gives off, in those sepia clips, is that of a man who doesn’t think you can say anything to him that he hasn’t already thought of.

And yet there seems to be a tremendous humility in him of a different kind, a sort of chagrin in the mere fact of his being human, of our being human. He appears to possess a deep sense of shame in the frailty of human goodness.

And then there are those moments when he blames all of the Vietnam War on Lyndon Johnson and refuses to take any responsibility for his role in prolonging it, and then he seems more human than ever.

*Re: “favorite” — Lately I have been having to consciously decide, every time I come to write a word that has both a British and an American spelling, which one I want to use. All through college and during most of my graduate school career I allowed myself the luxury of spelling the way I’ve always spelled, when in Rome be damned — but now that I’m a working stiff (and an editorial working stiff, at that) I need to toe the party line most of the time. And I don’t really want to spell the same word two different ways depending on where I’m sitting; that’s not what spelling’s about for me.

Which, I suppose, suggests that spelling is, in fact, “about” something for me. I have a philosophy of spelling. Huh. Well, there’s a thrilling entry just waiting to be written. And by god I’m the wastrel to write it.