{"id":3755,"date":"2014-11-14T07:57:47","date_gmt":"2014-11-14T12:57:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3755"},"modified":"2015-01-03T13:00:53","modified_gmt":"2015-01-03T18:00:53","slug":"the-unknown-known-the-fog-of-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=3755","title":{"rendered":"The Unknown Known & The Fog of War"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"White<\/a>

(photo: wikimedia.org)<\/p><\/div>\n

The Errol Morris documentary The Unknown Known<\/em> (2013)(trailer<\/a>) 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. \u201cRumsfeld\u2014in case you\u2019ve forgotten his prominent public persona as a star of Bush-era press conferences\u2014\u201d Slate reviewer<\/a> Dana Stevens reminds us, \u201ctends to express himself in koan-like platitudes that hover in midair somewhere over the divide between timeless wisdom and obfuscatory bullshit.\u201d<\/p>\n

The film\u2019s title is based on one of his better-known riffs, the evasive and insufficiently serious response<\/a> to a reporter\u2019s question in 2002 about the evidence for Iraq\u2019s link to terrorism and weapons of mass destruction. Rumsfeld responded that there are \u201cknown knowns\u201d (stuff we know that we know), \u201cknown unknowns\u201d (stuff we know that we don\u2019t know), and unknown unknowns (stuff we don\u2019t know that we don\u2019t know). The premise of The Unknown Known<\/em> is there also was stuff Rumsfeld thought he knew, and didn\u2019t. Which sums up the whole stated justification for the Iraq war.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to watch this movie without being distracted by one\u2019s 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\u2014and would that he\u2019d 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 \u201cI guess time will tell\u201d shrug regarding whether the Iraq war was a good idea or not.<\/p>\n

His evasions degrade political language<\/a>, Forbes<\/em> reviewer Tim Reuter suggests, and by constantly redefining difficult issues, Rumsfeld erases their meaning, rather than clarifies. In his New York Times<\/em> review<\/a>, A. O. Scott says Morris gives Rumsfeld \u201cplenty of rope, but rather than hang himself, Mr. Rumsfeld tries to fashion a ladder and escape through the window.\u201d One problem he couldn\u2019t 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\u2014twice. But Bush didn\u2019t accept it.<\/p>\n

Rumsfeld\u2019s many memos were called \u201csnowflakes,\u201d 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<\/a> critics rating: 84%; audiences, 69%.<\/p>\n

UPDATE: <\/strong>In January 2015, I saw Morris’s other documentary on a former Secretary of Defense, The Fog of War<\/em>, 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.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"The Unknown Known & The Fog of War","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[58,35,104],"tags":[278,277,279,129],"class_list":["post-3755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-documentaries","category-real-life","category-the-morgue","tag-donald-rumsfeld","tag-errol-morris","tag-robert-mcnamara","tag-wars-and-conflicts"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-Yz","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3755"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3806,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3755\/revisions\/3806"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}