Although not explicitly clarified until the final seconds, this movie's apt title may be no more than a cynical hedging of deadly political bets. No matter how the phrase is meant to be read, Errol Morris' new, seventh documentary, The Fog of War, is so objective that nowhere is today's urgent parallel even breathed. Its small flaws dwarfed by the scope of eighty-five years and three terrible wars, the film is fatalistic in implication and more than striking in its depiction of monstrous errors in highest places.

The subject is Robert Strange McNamara and, of course, the decisions in which he participated. The former Harvard assistant professor, "Whiz Kid" president of Ford Motor Company, Secretary of Defense and president of the World Bank repeatedly downplays human knowledge and reason for their limitations and fallibility, yet is guarded throughout. With a "I'm not going to say anything more," he rejects personal questions though he does reveal deep love for deceased wife Marge and the children, is too moved to respond when a sincere President Johnson awards him the Medal of Freedom after his firing/resignation, and has tears in his eyes describing his choosing President Kennedy's Arlington National Cemetery gravesite.

No wiser about this man who categorizes himself as neither author nor instrument in Vietnam but, rather, helping the White House act in America's interests, we do not see beyond a careful surface and into his heart. The façade never cracking, the patent-leather hair now thin, the man does not --will not -- consider questions of moral guilt while admitting to his own and others' monumental errors of reason. Nevertheless, on the level which he is willing to discuss, that of what did happen in the Second World War and, twenty years later, Southeast Asia, his analyses are cogent and riveting.

Calling to mind, at the same time contrasted to, Jimmy Stewart's George Bailey's situation in It's a Wonderful Life, the interviewee simultaneously accepts and rejects counterfactuals (scholastic questions whether history might have been different), particularly with regard to JFK. His urbane San Francisco-Boston/Berkeley-Harvard baritone impressively overshadowing Morris' occasionally introduced boyish voice, McNamara revisits the past -- "first I have to go back." Black-and-white and grainy early color newsreels and TV footage, plus some reenactments, recall the early years. Ultimately, Wilsonian idealism is cast aside in favor of the "IBM machine with legs'" well-known penchant for facts, as he settles on World War II and soul mate Curtis LeMay. The latter, whose influence carries over to 1960s Vietnam, also dealt with numbers to the exclusion of ethics. Moral concerns and crimes of war are raised as philosophy but not answered -- Castro's history will absolve us -- as we learn of 100,000 civilian dead in a firebombing of Tokyo five months prior to Hiroshima. Who knew of Dresden before Vonnegut and George Roy Hill, and who knew of the Japanese capital and sixty-six other, similarly devastated cities effectively compared here to population-equivalent U.S. counterparts.

Coverage of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis reveals how very close was nuclear Armageddon, although "in the end, we lucked out." Against unwise ultra-close-ups of actual print and of noisy tape reels, there are conversations with Kennedy and, during full consideration of the quagmire of Vietnam, tapes of LBJ-McNamara telephone communication. Mr. Secretary's growing doubts about the latter involvement, subsequently detailed in books such as In Retrospect (1995), culminating in his leaving the position, seem grounded in logistics -- again, numbers, computerizable data -- rather than morality.

Never exactly brought in but hovering there nevertheless is Harvard's Santayana's dictum about learning from, or else repeating, history, on which McNamara obviously has a pessimistic take (which he would call "realistic"). Relevant today, actually timeless, the themes considered might easily lead to such pessimism.

Accompanied by Philip Glass music that is less distracting than usual, tackling a broad, complex sweep of events and personalities, and despite ill-conceived division into eleven titled "lessons" (perhaps from McNamara's own organizational, data-based obsessiveness), The Fog of War is a unified and most sobering lesson on its own.

(Released by Sony Pictures Classics and rated "PG-13" for images and thematic issues of war and destruction.)