The Unknown Known: Errol Morris on Donald Rumsfeld
Adam Higginbotham talks to documentary-maker Errol Morris about Donald Rumsfeld, the subject of his film The Unknown Known
In May 2001, Errol Morris sat down in a film studio to conduct an interview with former US Secretary of Defence Robert S McNamara. Then 85, McNamara remained a formidable presence. Infamous as the number-crunching architect of the Vietnam War, the former president of the Ford Motor Company had sold an unwinnable war to the American people, and in so doing needlessly fed hundreds of thousands of human beings into the machinery of death. Morris had long been troubled by McNamara’s failure to apologise for what he had done. After agreeing to do the interview, McNamara had called ahead to try to cancel before relenting. When he finally arrived it was not clear he would talk at all.
Yet within 20 minutes McNamara was discussing something Morris had never heard about before: his role in the firebombing of Japan in the closing months of the Second World War. As a young officer in the statistical control office of the US Air Force, McNamara had helped devise the strategy of dropping incendiary bombs on 67 of Japan’s predominantly wooden cities, including one raid in March 1945 that destroyed 50 square miles of Tokyo. “In a single night, we burned to death 100,000 civilians: men, women and children. I was part of a mechanism that recommended that,” McNamara said into the camera, the gaze behind his wire-rimmed spectacles seemingly swimming with a mixture of horror, regret and relief. “I’d say we were behaving as war criminals.”
The moment is one of the most powerful in The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons From the Life of Robert S McNamara, a film that revealed the haunted old man inside the apparently ruthless technocrat, and won Morris an Academy Award for Best Documentary in 2003.
Sitting in his office at his production company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, last month, Morris explains that McNamara’s confession was also a lesson about how to interview politicians and policymakers. A confrontational approach will merely elicit predictable stonewalling and vaporous denials from such well-drilled bureaucrats; there are other questions to ask, Morris says, that may be more revealing than the ones you first wanted answers to.
“Often you find things out in ways that you could never have anticipated, that you simply have to be open to. He wanted to give me that information. These people, in one sense, like all of us, they lie about everything. And then they lie about nothing.”
It was a lesson that Morris hoped to apply when he met the subject of his latest film: Donald Rumsfeld. But Rumsfeld, George W Bush’s Secretary of Defence and a politician closely associated with America’s controversial war in Iraq, has forced Morris to reassess his opinion of those elected to high office. Some, he now thinks, really are as foolhardy, shallow and morally bankrupt as they seem.
Errol Morris has been interviewing people for most of his life. He began when he was a postgraduate philosophy student at Berkeley, by talking to convicted murderers. His first-ever taped interview was with Ed Gein, who killed at least twice, and fashioned lampshades and upholstery from the bodies of women he exhumed from the local graveyard, providing the inspiration for Psycho. Morris avoided asking Gein about the murders, and stuck to less distasteful subjects, including Freud and Radio Moscow, yet reached a predictable conclusion: “Clearly crazy,” Morris assures me. “Obviously Looney Tunes.” Morris was working on a PhD thesis about the insanity defence at the time, but seems equally to have been drawn to such monsters for the same reason he’s sought out his subjects ever since: curiosity.
Now 66, Morris holds court from a dilapidated velvet-covered armchair in a room dominated by a wall of books and grotesque items of taxidermy: the head of a horse, a penguin fledgling, a monkey’s head in a bell jar. His French bulldog, Ivan, snuffles at his feet and eventually settles in his lap, leaving a light thatch of coarse white hair across Morris’s red sweater. Sardonic and erudite, the film-maker draws on an apparently bottomless reservoir of stories and aperçus; he loves to talk.
Forty years ago, Errol Morris intended to make a living as a writer. For a while, he was paid to produce term papers for a company that sold them to students, who passed them off as their own work. “I wrote a paper for a nun, on the Immaculate Conception. I believe she got a master’s degree,” Morris says, and laughs. “God works in mysterious ways.” After being thrown out of the graduate programmes at both Princeton and Berkeley, he moved to the small Midwestern community of Plainfield, Wisconsin – where Ed Gein had lived – with plans to write a book about it. There, depressed, Morris developed writer’s block, not helped by the arrival of his friend, the impetuous German film director Werner Herzog, who announced his intention to shoot a movie in the town. “I was trying to make this story about the place,” Morris says. “I was there, I was struggling. Just going there and making a movie was wrong. I told him not to do it.” His writing derailed, Morris took a job as an assistant on Herzog’s film, which became the 1977 feature Stroszek. It was the beginning of Morris’s career in cinema.
His early films were startlingly offbeat. The first, Gates of Heaven, is a documentary about competing pet cemeteries in California whose proprietors and customers speak directly into the camera for long periods, uninterrupted by either questions or narration; it was not a success. The second, Vernon, Florida – made in a community known as Nub City, whose residents made money by amputating their own limbs and claiming insurance – fared little better. After that, “I just couldn’t get anybody to give me any money to make movies,” he says. So in the early Eighties he found work as a private detective, unhindered by a lack of training. “I think I’m a natural investigator. You unleash me and I start digging and scratching, making holes and pulling up floorboards and talking to people.”
Morris worked on financial and corporate cases: on one occasion, he was delighted to find himself posing as an ultra-suede salesman; on another, he travelled with his new wife – an art historian, with whom he has one son – to London, pretending to be a diamond buyer: “I was put up at the Savoy. Actually, it was sort of our honeymoon.”
Yet his investigative skills proved central to his breakthrough movie, The Thin Blue Line, released in 1988 and partly financed by remortgaging his house. In it, he examined the case of Randall Adams, a drifter sent to Death Row for the murder of a Dallas police officer in 1976. Featuring repeated reconstructions of the crime, each differing to reflect witnesses’ conflicting accounts, the movie again had interviewees talking directly to the camera without interruption. It was dramatically at odds with the prevailing fashion for verité documentary-making and uncovered new evidence that led to the overturning of Adams’s conviction.
Morris says the key to the intimacy of his on-camera interviews is partly that he usually listens, and always makes sure that he looks as if he’s listening. “It’s this weird kind of energy,” he says. “I want to maintain this connection with the person I’m interviewing. They must feel that I’m engaged.” If a subject puts their head down or looks away to think, Morris always keeps staring hard at the place their eyes will be when they look back. “I want the feeling that I am there – there, looking at them when they look up. Eye contact is amazing.”
From the start, he’s recognised the importance of having his interviewees look directly into the camera, to extend that connection to the audience. In his early films, he tried to accomplish this by asking questions while pressing his head hard up against the side of the camera lens. But he found his subjects were still looking at him, and therefore slightly off to the side of the screen in the finished film. So in the early Nineties, he devised an adaptation of the Autocue named the Interrotron, that projects a live video feed of Morris’s face in front of the camera lens. Morris asks questions from out of sight behind baffles in the studio, and the interviewee addresses their answers to his image, directly into the camera. “It creates greater distance and greater intimacy,” he once explained.
The relationships that Morris has developed with his subjects have often continued after filming. He says he’s liked every one of them, including Fred Leuchter, the Holocaust-denying electric chair repair man profiled in Mr Death and the US soldiers photographed grinning over abused prisoners at Abu Ghraib, featured in Standard Operating Procedure. He has described Joyce McKinney, the former American beauty queen who was arrested in the Seventies for abducting and raping her Mormon missionary boyfriend and who is the focus of Morris’s film Tabloid, as a “fabulous, romantic figure”. And, amazingly, he stayed in touch with David Harris, even after The Thin Blue Line revealed Harris to be the real perpetrator of a murder he helped pin on another man and put him on Death Row.
Donald Rumsfeld may be the single exception. “I don’t want to say I don’t like him,” Morris says. “I feel guilty. He gave me so much of his time. He could be unbelievably charming. But the policies really are a stumbling block for me. I didn’t like them to start with; I like them less now.”
The public face of George W Bush’s misadventures in Iraq, like Robert S McNamara, Rumsfeld is a former Secretary of Defence notorious as the pitchman for a disastrous war. His press conferences became infamous for their nonsensical disquisitions on language and the meaning of knowledge, none more so than his explanation of the differences between “known knowns”, “known unknowns” and “unknown unknowns”.
Unnerving: Donald Rumsfeld, in a still from 'The Unknown Known'
When reading Rumsfeld’s 2011 memoir, Morris became curious about the thousands of memos Rumsfeld described dictating during his time in office, first in Gerald Ford’s administration, then under Bush: “Twenty thousand just in the last six years at the Pentagon,” Rumsfeld eventually told him. “There have to be millions.”
Using this blizzard of documents – nicknamed Yellow Perils by Rumsfeld’s first Pentagon staff, and Snowflakes by the second – Morris wanted to recount the events of recent history from Rumsfeld’s perspective. The politician agreed to give Morris access to the Snowflakes, few of which were in the public domain, and then to read them aloud on camera. “It is a movie about a guy who has surrounded himself with words,” Morris says. “Framed by memos, the recitation of memos: the endless evasions, confusions, obfuscations.”
Aside from archival material, The Unknown Known features no other voices but those of Rumsfeld and Morris, interrogating his subject about the content of the Yellow Perils and Snowflakes, which cover everything from the aftermath of Watergate to the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal and the definition of the word “terrorism”.
“It’s my crazy idea that you can do history from the inside out,” Morris explains. “What I’m really interested in is how people see themselves.”
When Morris first approached Rumsfeld, through his lawyer and literary agent Bob Barnett, Barnett assured Morris that his client would never cooperate. Morris sent Rumsfeld a letter anyway, accompanied by a copy of The Fog of War. Rumsfeld replied immediately: he hated the McNamara film – “that man had nothing to apologise for”, he told Morris – but nevertheless agreed to participate in what became more than 30 hours of interviews. The result is a fascinating yet often infuriating documentary that implicitly tackles many issues that preoccupy Morris – lies, self-deception, the way evidence can sink into the quicksand of history – but will disappoint viewers expecting to witness the same agonised mea culpa that emerges from The Fog of War.
Morris found Rumsfeld to be more than cooperative – “unfailingly gracious”, Morris says. “He supplied these memos. He read them. He talked about almost everything we asked him to talk about. Different as an interview subject from McNamara. McNamara could get his back up about a whole number of things. McNamara was not a politician.”
Morris picks the memos with precision, focusing on the failure to respond to intelligence warnings of the 9/11 attacks; the misleading links made between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda; the false evidence of weapons of mass destruction used to justify the invasion of Iraq; and the “torture” at Guantánamo Bay. Yet Rumsfeld’s reflections on these aren’t simply the familiar bromides within easy reach of an ambitious man who has spent his entire career working the hallways of corporate America and Washington DC; his statements reveal an apparently cheerful obliviousness to history, and his role in it. He appears feckless, shallow, disconnected.
Again and again, when confronted with some tragedy, failure or dissembling from the past, Rumsfeld literally throws up his hands, and retreats behind a smile best suited to admiring sunsets and sipping cocktails with umbrellas in them. Asked about the lessons he learnt from Vietnam, he replies: “Some things work out, some things don’t; that didn’t.” He expresses good-natured surprise (“Good grief! That’s a pile of stuff!”) at the list of torture techniques – hooding, stress positions, nudity – that he personally approved for use on Guantánamo detainees.
And, finally, when he is caught in a lie on camera, Rumsfeld simply behaves as if it hasn’t happened. He says that a public report proved that there was no link between those torture techniques he approved for Guantánamo and the abuse at Abu Ghraib. Morris then reads him a passage from that very report stating that the opposite was true. Rumsfeld considers this information for a few beats, and then replies: “I’d agree with that.”
It’s a perplexing moment, made more so because Morris lets it pass without comment in the film: after holding the camera on Rumsfeld’s colourless stare for several long seconds, he simply moves on. It’s possible to imagine that you just misheard the whole exchange. Morris believes that Rumsfeld may be capable of such trenchant self-deception that he simply doesn’t care – or perhaps even realise – that he’s contradicted himself.
Errol Morris during the filming of his documentary about Abu Ghraib, 'Standard Operating Procedure'
“It suggests that he’s not intellectually engaged by the content of anything,” he says. “It’s all some strange performance art. It’s all talking and more talking. It’s all vanity.” Morris insists that this does not reflect a failure in his interviews, a reluctance to press hard enough to reach the real Rumsfeld. “There’s this idea that there’s some hidden Donald Rumsfeld, that it’s all some elaborate façade and that something else is lurking below the surface,” he says. “I believe it may all be a performance, but I’m not convinced that there’s anything lurking below the surface. That may be all there is.”
Morris considers The Unknown Known to be the most disturbing film he has ever made. Because the notion that there may be more to Rumsfeld than meets the eye – that somewhere deep inside he must experience conflict, doubt, or at least a sense of responsibility – is the optimistic view.
“In the same sense that conspiracy theories are optimistic,” Morris says. “Because you’re saying that, instead of chaos, someone is pulling the strings. Somewhere, there is some kind of rhyme and reason to history.”
Morris and I talk for a long time about his films, about Donald Rumsfeld, Robert McNamara, about his fascination with ambiguity and artifice, and his disdain for postmodern ideas that there is no truth.
“I have this core belief as an investigator, as a realist, that there’s a world out there, a physical world. On The Thin Blue Line, I would often say, 'We know that a Dallas police officer was killed by somebody. We should in principle be able to take the evidence and trace it back to that person who had his finger on the trigger. There’s an answer to this. It’s not just some postmodern haze.’ ” Eventually, the sun begins to set. Ivan, asleep on Morris’s lap, begins to snore heavily. “I hope some people go and see the Rumsfeld film,” Morris says at last. “It was really hard to make.”
As well as making documentaries, Morris shoots commercials; he estimates he has now shot more than 1,000 ads, for clients including Nike, Toyota and Unilever and it is this work that pays the majority of his bills. A few years ago, he discovered that his writer’s block had lifted and he has since produced three books, one about Abu Ghraib. He is also making a feature film, Holland, Michigan, a thriller starring Bryan Cranston set during the state’s annual tulip festival.
He is not short of subjects for future documentaries. He’d like to make a series of films about apparently intractable investigations; he’s thinking of calling it Down the Rabbit Hole with Errol Morris. He’s considering something about his friend Josiah “Tink” Thompson, who wrote a brief book about the Zapruder film in 1967 and has remained obsessed with the photographic evidence of the Kennedy assassination ever since.
And the matter of the war in Iraq continues to nag at him. “I would like to interview Blair, I think. I talk to a lot of people from Britain,” he says. “They really, really, really hate Blair.”
The Unknown Known is on Sky Atlantic tonight at 9.00pm