The Unknown Known & The Fog of War

White House, snow

(photo: wikimedia.org)

The Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known (2013)(trailer) grew from 34 hours of interviews with former White House chief of staff, ambassador to NATO, head of the Office of Economic Opportunity, special Mid-East envoy, and twice Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. “Rumsfeld—in case you’ve forgotten his prominent public persona as a star of Bush-era press conferences—” Slate reviewer Dana Stevens reminds us, “tends to express himself in koan-like platitudes that hover in midair somewhere over the divide between timeless wisdom and obfuscatory bullshit.”

The film’s title is based on one of his better-known riffs, the evasive and insufficiently serious response to a reporter’s question in 2002 about the evidence for Iraq’s link to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld responded that there are “known knowns” (stuff we know that we know), “known unknowns” (stuff we know that we don’t know), and unknown unknowns (stuff we don’t know that we don’t know). The premise of The Unknown Known is there also was stuff Rumsfeld thought he knew, and didn’t. Which sums up the whole stated justification for the Iraq war.

It’s hard to watch this movie without being distracted by one’s own political views, as Rumsfeld, ever the cagey communicator, genially evades and stonewalls where he has to, especially regarding the use of torture. Yet he is capable of showing uncertainty—and would that he’d done so a dozen years ago. The interviews are interspersed with news clips, excerpts from news conferences, and on-the-ground footage of the time, so you do see some misremembering. His then-conviction about whether Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction is quite a contrast to his “I guess time will tell” shrug regarding whether the Iraq war was a good idea or not.

His evasions degrade political language, Forbes reviewer Tim Reuter suggests, and by constantly redefining difficult issues, Rumsfeld erases their meaning, rather than clarifies. In his New York Times review, A. O. Scott says Morris gives Rumsfeld “plenty of rope, but rather than hang himself, Mr. Rumsfeld tries to fashion a ladder and escape through the window.” One problem he couldn’t slip out of was Abu Ghraib, because shocked Americans had seen the terrible pictures. As head of the Department of Defense, he offered President Bush his resignation—twice. But Bush didn’t accept it.

Rumsfeld’s many memos were called “snowflakes,” and he blanketed the Department and his fellow Cabinet members with some 20,000 of them during his six years in the Bush Administration. In the film, he reads from a number of them, now declassified. Yet the viewer, like the recipients of that blizzard of memos sees only the Don Rumsfeld he want us to see. Given his penchant for verbal legerdemain, he must have enjoyed the idea of snowflakes. Of snow. And of snow-jobs. Rotten Tomatoes critics rating: 84%; audiences, 69%.

UPDATE: In January 2015, I saw Morris’s other documentary on a former Secretary of Defense, The Fog of War, created from interviews with Robert McNamara. While, like Rumsfeld, he sees history from his own particular vantage-point, unlike Rumsfeld, McNamara seemed to have learned some significant intellectual and emotional truths from the experience. The film in fact is organized around 11 “lessons.” The difference in affect between the two men is remarkable. Although there were questions (mostly personal) McNamara declined to answer, he wasn’t trying to obfuscate and he wasn’t insufferably smug.