Errol Morris, known for such offbeat works as the noir essay "The Thin Blue Line" (which resulted in the freeing of an innocent man), "Dr. Death" (about the guy who designed improvements in the electric chair and lethal injections) and "A Brief History of Time" (about Stephen Hawking, a physicist with a crippling disease that confines him to a wheelchair), this time explores the career of a man who is not eccentric or bizarre. He folds into his interview actual clips of the Depression, President Woodrow Wilson, World War II and the Vietnam War and also some reenacted footage about the incidents in the Gulf of Tonkin that led to an escalation of U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War. Morris is particularly imaginative in the way he presents rapid-fire shots of newspaper clippings, a split-second to each item, a technique used with great success but less developed motion picture technology in Orson Welles's "Citizen Kane." The clips are an original contribution of Mr. Morris, perhaps never seen before on U.S. screens.

Morris does not let his ego get in the way: He is not shown at all but comes across as a disembodied voice asking questions. Nonetheless, considering that McNamara had agreed to only a single interview, and had hesitations about even that, Morris must be credited with convincing the man to come back over and over until the film-maker realized he had enough material for a movie.

What makes McNamara an excellent subject is that Americans on the political left may still deride him for being an architect of America's disastrous Vietnam involvement, while those more in the center of the political spectrum take him at his word when he says that he had turned against the war, had advised President Johnson to look into a withdrawal of American forces, and was ultimately fired by a president who feared that such defeatist counsel could mean that the countries bordering on Vietnam would "go communist" if the U.S. suffered a military defeat.

The film, which played the festival circuit at Cannes, Telluride, Toronto and New York, is probably already on the short list for a Best Documentary award when Oscar season rolls around next February. It presents the 85-year-old former secretary as a healthy specimen with a resonant voice and a solid command of the material.

Among the new things we learn is that McNamara was not only an architect of the Vietnam incursion but was a major planner in World War II as a lieutenant colonel under General Curtis "bomb-'em-back-to-the-Stone-Age" LeMay who in the early sixties pushed for an all-out invasion of Cuba. McNamara tells us and Morris shows us how during World War II the U.S. did quite a bit of damage to Japan by firebombing civilians in Tokyo and (count 'em) sixty-seven cities. This, he believes, would have meant a trial for McNamara and LeMay by Japan had the land of the rising sun won the war. LeMay was out-of- control in pushing for an attack on Cuba, but more rational heads, namely McNamara and Kennedy, cut a deal with the Soviets you get your missiles out and we'll not invade the island.

McNamara convinces us as the hawk who became a dove, having visited Vietnam recently and, over dinner with his former adversaries was told that he apparently had read history. Vietnam was not a pawn of China during the sixties and early seventies but was a traditional enemy of the giant to its north, struggling for independence for a thousand years. For his part, McNamara explained that the U.S. never had intentions to be a colonial power like France but wanted simply to intervene to prevent the dominoes from falling in what turned out to be a civil war, not part of communism's struggle for world domination.

McNamara's favorite class in college was philosophy, which he attended as a freshman before he had heard of Aristotle and Plato. Philosophy served him well. He believes that if Kennedy had lived, the history of U.S. involvement in Southeast Asia would have been substantially different. Johnson, who looks like a cowboy in the clips we see, comes across as a vulgar contrast with a bright young Kennedy, a man who apparently chose Johnson as his running-mate to sew up votes in the West but who obviously had little culturally and intellectually in common.

McNamara makes a fascinating subject for this series of interviews, though like Charlton Heston in Michael Moore's "Bowling for Columbine" refuses to answer whether he feels guilty for the deaths attributed to firepower. "The Fog of War" is anything but a talking-heads doc, a beautifully edited drama of American diplomacy from the 1940's through 1975 and, if you want to include our current role in the Middle-East, where our president invokes the concept of falling dominoes to spread democracy, right up to the present day.