Cold War Warrior Fêted by Hollywood

It is hardly the formula for Hollywood success: TV commercial director makes a documentary featuring an 87-year-old man staring directly into the camera lens as he tells the story of his life.

Robert McNamara, US Secretary of Defence in the early years of the Vietnam war and subject of The Fog of War, was not even sure his memories were worth filming. 'When the director first contacted me, I explained I didn't go to movies and asked him how much a ticket costs these days. He told me $8. "What?" I said. "No one will pay $8 for this."'

McNamara couldn't have been more wrong. After limited screenings in New York and Los Angeles, The Fog of War went on general release across the US this weekend amid expectations it will prove to be one of the most successful documentaries of all time. It is a clear favourite to win an Oscar next month.

Reviewers have been unstinting in their praise, although not of McNamara's record at the Pentagon during the presidencies of Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, which saw US involvement in Vietnam escalate from an 'advisory' role to invasion.

McNamara was the public face of this expansion until he was fired by Johnson in 1968 for telling him the US ought to pull out. He wrote the bestseller, In Retrospect, which caught the attention of Errol Morris, producer of 1997 documentary, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control .

'The book came to be described as McNamara's apology - his mea culpa. But it seemed to me very different. It wasn't an apology. It was a tortured examination of his past and that was far more interesting,' said Morris.

The film condenses 23 hours of interviews McNamara gave over two years, interspersed with footage ranging from the firebombing of Tokyo in the Second World War to his position as the head of Ford, the Pentagon and the World Bank.

It's an extraordinary chronicle of the latter part of the twentieth century, drawing its power from McNamara's candidness about his mistakes and the resonance between America's misadventures in Vietnam and the conflict in Iraq.

The film has turned McNamara into a star, much to his chagrin. 'I don't give a damn whether people know me or don't know me,' he said. 'The purpose of my participation was to examine the foreign and defence policy actions of the nation in the last 10, 15, 20 years and to try to draw lessons. The risk of destruction of nations as a result of nuclear weapons should be debated, and it isn't.'