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 The film, which gets its title from the former U.S. defense
secretary's famous answer about "known knowns" and "known
unknowns" to a reporter's straightforward question, offers the
architect of the 2003 Iraq war and its troubled occupation the
platform to explain his worldview and rationale.
"I thought this would be a way in, a way of investigating that
question of how we ended up in the place we did," Morris said in
an interview ahead of the film's release in U.S. theaters on
Friday after its premiere at the Telluride Film Festival in
Colorado in August.
But Morris, best known for documentaries "The Thin Blue Line"
and "The Fog of War," said he found that when given the chance,
Rumsfeld was able to do little more than articulating shallow
maxims and self-fulfilling generalizations, what Morris termed
"principles you might find in a Chinese fortune cookie."
"Absence of evidence is an evidence of absence," the
81-year-old, who served as secretary of defense for Republican
Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, repeats in the
documentary.
"Some things work out, some things don't. ... If that's a
lesson, yes, it's a lesson," is another statement that Morris
cannot quite get Rumsfeld himself to pin down.
"What really fascinates me is that people were taken in by all
of this — this sea of words," Morris said about the Rumsfeld,
who was known to enjoy speaking with the media at length and
pontificating about his ideas.
"I don't know if he sees himself clearly at all," he added.
"The Unknown Known" is a sequel of sorts to Morris's
Oscar-winning 2003 film "The Fog of War." In that film, Vietnam
War-era Defense Secretary Robert McNamara explains his
philosophies on warfare.
But "The Fog of War" gathers its strength from McNamara's
palpable regret at failing and the war's human cost.
"Many people feel that both Vietnam and Iraq were terrible
disasters, not just for the number of people killed on the
ground, American soldiers, insurgents, civilians and on and on
and on," Morris said. "But because it really changed our idea
about ourselves, about who we are."
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EVADING FOR OTHERS, HIMSELF
Rumsfeld's thousands of memos over the course of his government
career, which began in the Nixon administration, form the core of
the film. Pentagon staffers dubbed the memos "snowflakes" as they
piled up on desks.
Morris said what fascinated him about the memos was how it gave a
first-person narrative to history.
"It's trying to discover what it is that makes him think: Who is he?
Why did he make the decisions that he did? To me there was a great
mystery going into it," he said.
Morris described the memos as a paper trail Rumsfeld could control,
unlike the White House audio recordings of his former boss,
President Richard Nixon, which are a historical testament to the
hubris that brought his downfall.
Rumsfeld supplied declassified memos to Morris in preparation for
the film. The director said he probably read more than 1,000 memos,
well short of the tens of thousands he estimates were written.
"He revised them and revised them again," Morris said. "They're in
many ways a record not of the truth, but of how Donald Rumsfeld
wanted to be perceived by history or perceived by the people around
him."
Yet the memos only tell a portion of the history, and some critics
have raised the point that Morris fails to corner Rumsfeld on
torture during the occupation of Iraq and the weapons of mass
destruction that were used a pretext for war but ultimately never
turned up.
"What I've come away with is Rumsfeld's extraordinary ability to
avoid answering questions, to obfuscate, to misdirect, and what was
most disturbing ... was I felt that he was not just obfuscating,
evading for others but also for himself," Morris said. "I began to
wonder: Is this really a person who's in touch with reality?"
In the end, he cautioned: "I would encourage people to see this
movie as a mystery."
(Editing by Mary Milliken and Mohammad Zargham)
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