Culture

The Unknown Known: Interview with Errol Morris

Inside Donald Rumsfeld

March 21, 2014
Morris on Rumsfeld:
Morris on Rumsfeld:

In 2003 Errol Morris made The Fog of War, an extraordinary portrait of Robert S McNamara, who served as US Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War. That film, which won the Oscar for Best Documentary, was based on over 20 hours of interviews that Morris conducted with McNamara. Now he has made a sequel of sorts, The Unknown Known, which focuses on Donald Rumsfeld’s time as Secretary of Defense during the Iraq War. It is, in Morris’s words, “history from the inside-out”—an investigation of the way Rumsfeld sees himself and the chain of events that led to the Iraq war. I sat down with Morris to discuss why Rumsfeld agreed to make the movie, whether he is a “true believer” and his similarity to Humpty Dumpty and the Jabberwock.

 What attracted you to making a film about Donald Rumsfeld, rather than other members of the Bush administration?

Part of the attraction was the salt and pepper shaker idea. Two disastrous wars, two secretaries of defense, separated by 40 years, more or less. I don’t think there was anything more than that. Two individuals who, for better or worse, were the popular faces of these wars—to the extent that you still hear Vietnam referred to as “McNamara’s war,” as if it represented primarily his policies and not Johnson’s, something by the way that I do not believe.

In his unwillingness to admit any error, Rumsfeld reminded me less of McNamara than Fred Leuchter, the execution technician and Holocaust denier who is the main character in your film Mr Death.

McNamara is unlike many of my characters: more self-aware, more guilt-ridden, more despairing. Fred is absolutely convinced of his own rectitude. He has no doubt that what he believes is the truth. He seems to have this interest in empiricism, paying lip-service to evidence, when the reality of it is something very close to the opposite. It’s evidence merely serving to justify prior belief.

Is there any link to the way Rumsfeld approaches the world?

They’re different, but if I’ve made movies about certain kinds of clueless characters, Rumsfeld is certainly among them. People asked me repeatedly when The Unknown Known was first shown whether Rumsfeld was like McNamara, and I said no, he’s more like Joyce McKinney [the subject of Morris’s previous film, Tabloid].

I understand you first made contact with Rumsfeld by sending him a copy of The Fog of War, along with a letter asking whether he might consider making a film with you. How did he respond?

He invited me to come to Washington and meet with him. I spent an extraordinary afternoon with him. He showed me a piece of an anti-ballistic-missile missile, this crumpled piece of metal, and said “Who says you can’t shoot down a missile with a missile?” And he agreed to make the movie.

I should make one thing absolutely clear. Rumsfeld was entirely co-operative. Overwhelmingly co-operative. He made available his personal memos, the “snowflakes.” These have never been shown publically before. I don’t believe I was shown classified memos but I was shown most, if not all, of the unclassified memos. And that became the basis of the film.

What surprised you about Rumsfeld when you first met him?

Everything surprised me. He was extremely charming, incredibly friendly. He asked me to sit in on a series of press interviews. He was on speakerphone and I sat next to him in his conference room.

Why do you think he did that?

His appearances with the press, including his appearance in my film, seem like performances. Since my film is almost all first person, it’s a story about how he sees himself. It’s a story about self-presentation. It makes it harder to tell certain kinds of things but easier to tell that.

To what extent do you think Rumsfeld is consciously performing himself?

It’s hard to know. Someone at the Q&A last night asked was he different when the cameras were turned off. And the answer is no. But I have my hunch. My suspicion is that with Rumsfeld what you see is what you get. It may be performance but the performance is such that it has become who he is.

There are moments where he reveals himself in this movie. I asked Rumsfeld to read the Haynes memo [in which the Defense Department's General Counsel, William J Haynes II, sets out specific techniques for interrogation that can be used on detainees at Guantanamo Bay]. Rumsfeld wrote this infamous comment on the memo, in which he says I don’t see the problem with detainees being made to stand for hours, I stand for hours at my desk at the Pentagon. So in the movie, Rumsfeld goes through this recitation of so-called enhanced interrogation techniques and then he interrupts himself at the end, and says “Good grief, that’s a pile of stuff!”

I thought, what does this mean? Is he reading this memo for the first time? Is he for a moment shocked by what he’s reading? You could ask the question, is he lying? Well, lying would be kind of okay. But what if he’s not lying? That’s so much worse! If he’s telling the truth, that’s the most appalling thought of all. Lying is interesting as a concept, because part of what we consider to be lying is someone knowingly telling a falsehood. But I was left with the feeling of a true believer with Rumsfeld.

So when he says something like the main lesson he took from the war in Vietnam is that “Some things work out. Some don’t. That didn’t,” he means it?

It’s extraordinary in its emptiness. It’s staggeringly vapid, or to use one of my favourite words, jejune.

He can’t really think just that can he?

That’s the central mystery of him and of the movie. Someone asked at another Q&A here, “Do you feel that he’s sincere?” I do. The smile, the infernal grin—is that sincere? Yes! I think it’s absolutely sincere. It registers a level of enormous self-satisfaction. What’s so frightening, distressing even, about him, is that this stuff seemingly is genuine.



One thing that’s particularly disturbing about The Fog of War is that it features a lot of archive footage of bombs being dropped and the subsequent destruction. There is very little of this kind of footage in The Unknown Known, less visible evidence of the effect of Rumsfeld’s decisions. Why is that?

Lots of reasons. If he’s glacially removed from the world around him, perhaps even oblivious to reality, in the end he descends into his own kind of Rumsfeld bubble.

And one of the central images of the film is a bubble of sorts—a snow globe, which is filled with Rumsfeld’s memos, the “snowflakes.”

Oh yes. The sea of words. Alice in Wonderland has been on my mind. Not to say anything remotely interesting or original but Lewis Carroll was a supreme genius. There’s a link between Rumsfeld and Through the Looking Glass. Humpty Dumpty gives Alice a lecture on the meaning of words, and in the end he says that words can mean whatever he wants them to mean.

Although in another way Rumsfeld is nothing like Humpty Dumpty because he is always sending off memos asking his assistants to get him definitions for words. He is keen on referring to the dictionary, and unlike Humpty Dumpty he doesn’t get to re-write it.

Except that you feel this urge— if only I could re-define these words or I could find that dictionary that defines these words the way I’d prefer they be defined, everything would be okay. In some ways, Rumsfeld also reminds me of the Jabberwock. His language is a kind of doggerel: nonsense verse promoted as profundity. I’m fascinated by all of his principles and slogans—the known unknown, “weakness is provocative,” “Pearl Harbor was a failure of the imagination,” “absence of evidence isn’t absence of evidence” and on and on.

I interviewed many of the reporters who were present at the Pentagon press conference where Rumsfeld first trucked out the known knowns idea. I interviewed the astronomer Martin Rees because he was credited, although he insists he was not the origin of the expression, but he was credited with the expression “absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence” in the context of the search for extra terrestrial intelligence. I interviewed Thomas Schelling, Nobel Laureate in economics, who wrote the Foreword to the Roberta Wohlstetter book on Pearl Harbor that Rumsfeld endlessly refers to. And I looked at all of Rumsfeld’s expressions. And in the end, it is close to nonsense talk—a kind of pernicious nonsense talk. The terms are all really vague. They can be interpreted to suit your own purposes. “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” used in the context of whether there’s intelligent life elsewhere in the universe is one thing. When you’re using it to justify the war in Iraq it’s another thing altogether.

How do you feel President Obama’s use of language, which is also obfuscatory in some ways, relates to that of Rumsfeld?

I find them such radically different creatures. Not to say that I believe that the Obama presidency is problem-free but it’s such an improvement on what went before. When Obama talks I have some clue about what he’s saying. Even if it is a kind of obfuscation, at least it’s clear what the boundaries of that kind of obfuscation might be. With the Bush administration often there was a feeling of descending into some black haze. With this film, I wanted to know why we went to war in Iraq. I feel like I have a non-answer. I don’t think they even know.

I’m left with a guilty and sour feeling having made this movie. I’m endlessly asked whether I liked Rumsfeld. The answer is that I did like him and I am appalled and frightened by him. His unbelievable narcissism, vanity, I don’t even know how I would describe it.

The Unknown Known will be in cinemas nationwide from 21st March. Look out for an essay by Ian Buruma about Donald Rumsfeld and Errol Morris in the next issue of Prospect, out on Thursday 27th March