ERROL Morris' masterly documentary about the octogenarian who served as Defense Secretary under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson and later became president of the World Bank.
Presented as a set of lessons he claims to have learned from his rich and varied life, McNamara discusses his involvement in the deaths of million from the Second World War to Vietnam.
As a senior statistical analyst in WW2, he proposed the bombing strategies that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
His findings also saw a policy of court martial introduced for US pilots who returned from bombing raids without dropping their payloads.
His fondness for statistics drove the introduction of seat belts and padded dashboards in Ford motor cars, as well as backed up the decisions to commit some 500,000 American servicemen and women to the jungles of South East Asia.
To some he is a war criminal responsible for countless deaths, to others he was a pioneer of the new science of statistical analysis.
He recognises both views, but now talks about his life in terms of morality rather than graphs and performance charts.
See it at UCI (Sun, Tues only)
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