Although former Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara did not initiate The Fog of War, a film about his life and what he has learned, the movie is consonant with McNamara's many attempts to find absolution for policy over Vietnam during the 1960s. He is poles apart from Pete Rose, the former baseball star whose bestselling book about his troubled career has gotten far more publicity than the movie. McNamara was a member of the intellectual élite that came to political power in the Kennedy administration; the ballplayer is a working-class tough endowed only with grit and physical skill. The Secretary has a grasp of world historical affairs, while Rose has little sense of life outside of the card shows where he sells his autograph. Rose is more a liar than a self-deceiver. Yet Rose too, most sensationally in his new book, wants people to forgive him-for betting on baseball.

These two attempts at redemption tell us a lot about modern secular life, and the cultural resources and the rationales individuals use to come to terms with moral failings. Each man owns up to past blunders, but each refuses to admit any character defect; and each tries, in different ways, to deflect serious criticism.

Rose's autobiography, My Prison Without Bars, is a unique piece of baseball writing. The point of the volume is to tell us about his gambling, and through the confession to make possible his election to the Hall of Fame, which Rose wants more than anything else.

Betting on the game is the cardinal sin in baseball, and players are told from day one that they will be declared permanently ineligible if they break the no-betting rule. In Rose's case, when he managed the Cincinnati Reds in the mid-1980s, he always wagered on his team to win but did not wager on every contest. He did not, for example, gamble when Mario Soto pitched for the Reds-he didn't trust Soto's skills. Suppose Rose had a bet on a game subsequent to one in which Soto was pitching. Can we assume his managerial strategy in the Soto game was unaffected by his doubts that the Reds could win and that he had a great incentive to win the next game? Almost certainly Rose could not help having his judgment influenced. Not that he did anything as crude as throwing a game. But, enmeshed as he was in the world of gambling, he compromised the integrity of the sport.

Even in this tell-all book Rose cannot get his mind around this issue. He says that as a betting manager, he "never took an unfair advantage." "I never bet more or less based on injuries or inside information, never allowed my wager to influence my baseball decisions." It is hard to credit this because it is so outrageous, and the problem was clear to baseball's administrators over 15 years ago when they discovered the infraction and moved to banish Rose from the sport. At the time he denied the charges, and continued to lie about them on every occasion that he was queried. He wrote a deceitful book about his betting, Pete Rose: My Story (1989). But probably because of Rose's gifts and enormous popularity as a player, the commissioner at the time of the punishment had given Rose an out: he would be reinstated if he showed a "redirected, reconfigured, or rehabilitated life." Most people who took a hard line against Rose thought that meant he had to make a clean breast of the gambling and show some remorse for what he had done; then he would be reinstated.

Rose thought differently; he believed that baseball's commissioners would budge and that he could wait out the storm by stonewalling. In November 2002, however, after 13 years, Rose privately told the current commissioner that he had bet on games. He thought, he tells us, that the commissioner would do some consulting and reinstate him in a reasonable time.

My Prison Without Bars is ostensibly a public confession, but more a series of explanations designed to excuse Rose's behavior. He has a medical geneticist tell us that his trouble is "brain chemistry": he is a "textbook" case of ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder) with a bit of ODB (Oppositional Defiant Behavior) thrown in. A deficiency of the chemical dopamine has caused his gambling. Rose himself says that when it comes to betting, he is like someone with Tourette's syndrome, a neurological disorder now treatable with drugs.

Don't like that reason? Rose offers another one. He was obsessed, and could not help himself. He quotes from Dostoevsky's "The Gambler": "overcome by a terrible craving for risk." And look who else was obsessed and accomplished something for this great country: the Wright brothers, Henry Ford, Frank Sinatra.

Moreover, a lot of other famous people have engaged in questionable activities and been forgiven, among them Elvis Presley, President John F. Kennedy and his father Joseph Kennedy, and President Bill Clinton. (Rose suggests that major league baseball treated him the way Kenneth Starr treated Clinton.) There is a double standard at work, says Rose. "What happened to the executives at Enron?" Why should he be barred from baseball permanently?

Over and over again Rose describes how unfair people have been to him: the lawyer who wrote the report detailing his betting; sports broadcasters who persisted in asking him about it; the guards at the prison who hassled him when he served time for income tax evasion. And why didn't baseball give him the opportunity to get help for his gambling disorder, the way it does for drug offenders? It's true that he was consorting with gangsters and illegal gamblers, but should he therefore be tainted with "guilt by association"? Anyway, in the contemporary world, gambling is no longer considered the unsavory thing it was when he was discovered in the mid-1980s. Also: he thought his actions "benign."

The reason he wagered as a manager was that he had gotten into so much debt gambling that to re-coup his losses he turned to the sport he knew best, baseball. How did he get into such debt? Since he did not go to college, he did not pay attention to his finances. Don't like that? The medical geneticist tells us that Rose was suffering from an "impulse disorder" and might "not be able to distinguish between sports when it came time to place his bets." Rose himself adds that conduct we can't explain is part of "the human condition."

Rose declares several times that he "takes responsibility," and is sorry. What he means by this is that he understands that he will get to the Hall of Fame only if he apologizes.

The story in this book reminds me of nothing so much as the kid who is told he can't get some candy until he says he's sorry.

Mom: "Say you're sorry." Kid [thirteen years later]: "ok. I'm sorry."
Mom: "No, say you're sorry, and mean it."
Kid: "ok. I'm sorry, and mean it. Where's the candy?"

His ghostwriter notifies us at the start of the book that "Pete, through no fault of his own, is not really capable of emotional exposure." But Rose says at the end, "Well, I've done what you've asked." Now let's move on, and let me in the Hall of Fame. And he concludes with a hymn:

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
that saved a wretch like me
I once was lost but now am found
was blind but now I see.

Robert McNamara is 23 years older than Pete Rose, and an entirely dissimilar type. He had a stunning career as a business manager, culminating in his elevation to the presidency of the Ford Motor Company in 1960. Then President John Kennedy appointed him Secretary of Defense. For seven years McNamara presided over the burgeoning conflict in Vietnam. He embraced the escalation of the war under Kennedy's successor, Lyndon Johnson, especially the bombing campaign, Rolling Thunder, but came to doubt its efficacy. His service ended in 1968 when he left office battered by the 1960s, close to a breakdown, and hated by millions of people around the world. For many years he resisted making any comment about his part in American statecraft during that tumultuous era. But in 1995 he published In Retrospect, a memoir focused on his time in office. He admitted to "errors" of "judgment and capabilities" but not of "values and intentions." Since that book, in other volumes and in many media events over the last ten years, he has worked non-stop to vindicate himself to a distrustful and sometimes still-angry public. At the showings of the movie I attended there were hoots and laughs at various of McNamara's statements from older members of the audience.

Although Errol Morris is an accomplished documentary filmmaker with his own vision, the agenda in The Fog of War, which won an Oscar for Best Documentary in February, is the identical one McNamara has put forward in other venues. While the film covers more ground, the basic idea is the same-to explain the Secretary's role in Vietnam, to explore his responsibility for the decisions made, and to take lessons from his "errors."

While the Secretary is not so agile with pop psychology as is Rose, he has a more subtle language of exculpation. The Secretary likes the last lines of T.S. Eliot's "Gerontion," which he has repeatedly cited, and draws on in The Fog of War:

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
To arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

He tells us that only now, in the twilight of his life, is he getting to this place. Nonetheless, as almost every commentator has noted, the various explorations have fallen short because of McNamara's limitations. He also falls short in the documentary. Here the failure occurs not just because of McNamara himself but because of how Morris depicts him, although Morris may not be fully aware of what he has done.

Those familiar with In Retrospect will already know what McNamara conveys confidently in the film. In his grammar school he was usually placed literally at the head of his class, in front of Jews, Japanese, and Chinese. He and only two others were sophomore-year Phi Beta Kappas at Berkeley. He was the youngest assistant professor at Harvard (in the Business School). The group that reorganized Ford Motors of which he was a member after World War II had "the highest marks … ever … scored" on the standardized tests that were administered to it. He also reminds us that he was one of "the best and the brightest," perhaps not recalling that the phrase was later used about his cadre of policy-makers in Washington in an ironic way-to designate a hubristic group who led the country astray.

The reason he can use the phrase un-selfconsciously is that the Secretary is still a proud man, and he consistently mistakes brainpower for moral virtue. He employs his articulate intelligence to hide from others (or from himself) what he thinks. "In the minds of some people," he says, the United States conducted World War II against Japan in an unjustified way. He informs us that as a statistical analyst during the war, he was "in a sense" part of a mechanism to destroy Tokyo; "in a sense," as Secretary of Defense, he did not know about the various American plans to assassinate Fidel Castro. McNamara must be the only person to describe the Vietnam War as "a Cold War activity." He knew "to some degree" that America was responsible in 1963 for the coup against Ngo Diem (which McNamara helped to plan). In 1965 he was much disturbed by the Quaker war protestor, Norman Morrison, who burned himself alive outside the Pentagon. McNamara personally identifies with Morrison: they were both "sensitive human beings" "caught in a very very difficult situation."

When the film puts McNamara on the spot about his own ethical liability, he talks around the issue. Indeed, he tells us with delight that one of his rules is not to answer questions asked of him, but to answer instead questions that he wishes he had been asked. In the 1960s this trait infuriated many Congressmen, who thought of him as duplicitous, and in the movie, instead of answering, he reminds us of the great issues of human nature and of politics. This is his version of Pete Rose talking about the mysteries of "the human condition." McNamara does say that Lyndon Johnson was accountable for the war, and secondarily Air Force general Curtis LeMay, who for McNamara typifies the mentally thick, blood-lustful military. How about the Secretary himself? McNamara gets teary a lot in public, and in response to the direct query-Was he responsible?-his 85-year-old eyes well up, as they do several times in the course of the film. But he won't answer. He says that war is too complex really to understand. People misunderstand him. He will not say if he feels guilty or responsible.

McNamara is a haunted man. In part it may be that, like Rose, he is driven to occupy public space because it is financially profitable. His talks and books (although I don't know about this movie) have made him a lot of money, and his wealth is another thing that he is proud of. But it is not just the money; he just can't resist any opportunity to tell us his story, like the Ancient Mariner, a graybeard loon with glittering eye.

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne has the scientist Roger Chillingworth work on the mind of Arthur Dimmesdale to lead the guilty minister finally to confess his sins before his congregation. Pete Rose admits to psychotherapeutic treatment, but therapy, it seems to me, will not bring him where he needs to go. If someone with authority were able to tell him that he will never get into the Hall of Fame, maybe that blow would do it. His counterpart, Robert McNamara, has been on the stump with his psyche for a dozen years now, but Errol Morris is no Roger Chillingworth. In contrast to Rose, this is what the Secretary needs-a super-Freud to bring him to the brink.

What makes it so difficult for these two different men to make heartfelt apologies for what they believe they have done wrong? To some degree, of course, they don't feel they have done anything wrong, but this righteousness wars with emotions that are perhaps a product of their dim awareness of how others view them, perhaps a product of a conscience that is not stifled. They want to be forgiven, but at the same time won't admit that they have done anything to forgive.

Readers of Books & Culture will understand more than most how hard it is to achieve the broken will or the searing and sad self-knowledge that usually precedes a genuine admission of guilt. More than anyone else in the American tradition, the great Calvinist Jonathan Edwards stressed that real humility was beyond the reach of unaided man. But Edwards left us with the puzzle of how a man was responsible if only God's supernatural grace enabled an acknowledgement of guilt. In the 19th century, Ralph Waldo Emerson suggested, with less deference to supernatural intervention, that every person might call upon "the gleams of better light" to redeem the soul. Emerson said we could find "the miraculous in the common" if only we were honest enough with ourselves.

In my mind, admission of one's pride is available to unaided human nature, but I recognize that a society like ours, which prizes materialistic worldly success so much and worships at the altar of public acclaim, makes it inordinately difficult. One has to go deep, far deeper than either McNamara or Rose. It is most likely to happen in cases of dramatic trauma-divorce, sudden illness, the death of a loved one, personal tribulation.

My favorite recent expression of the emotional pain that brings about a measure of humility is the maturation of Robert Kennedy. After the murder of his brother the president in 1963, Robert Kennedy was desperate to understand why his family should have been made to suffer. He took to reading the Greek tragedies, and used as a mantra his own rendering of a translation from Aeschylus' Agamemnon. As Kennedy put it, "in our sleep, pain which we cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart until, in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God." I don't know how well Rose and McNamara sleep at night, but they might be better off if they were to spend some nights awake.

Bruce Kuklick is Nichols Professor of History at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author most recently of A History of Philosophy in America: 1700-2000 (Oxford Univ. Press).

Copyright © 2004 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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