The Unknown Known (2013)

In 2003 documentarian Errol Morris won an Academy Award for The Fog of War, his film about former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. A decade later Morris released The Unknown Known a documentary about another former Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. The two films and the two men serve as odd mirror images of one another. While McNamara was deeply troubled and repentive about the role he played in the escalation of American involvement in the Vietnam War, Rumsfeld shows no such signs of regret or introspection about the Afghan and Second Iraq War, save on a few relatively minor points, but on the whole he thinks he did right. While The Fog of War stands on its own I couldn't help but see The Unknown Known (title is Rumsfeld speak for things 'we thought we knew but turns out we didn't) only in relation to the earlier film and its subject. This film is Rumsfeld narrating his life's journey, from Congressman, to Nixon aid, Ford confident and Secretary of Defense, to foreign policy trouble shooter under Regan and a return to the Defense Secretary post just months before the tragedy of 9/11. Through it all Rumsfeld shows his single minded determination, and ability to get himself placed in favorable positions. Indeed much of this was true also of McNamara, but he had a sense of self criticism and introspection that Rumsfeld seems to lack. Not the Donald Rumsfeld, in many ways a very smart man like McNamara, has no ability to self analyze, it's just that he seems capable of doing so only to point, and that point, where I suppose further introspection might somehow risk his sense of self, he stops and will go no further. This is an interesting film, in some ways more interesting then The Fog of War, because its subject is to me less understandable a man then McNamara, so this film is a valuable historical document about how Donald Rumsfeld sees himself, and there is a lot to be learned from that. ***