Salon spoke to Morris (before “The Fog of War” won the Oscar on Sunday for best documentary) by phone in Cambridge, Mass., where he works and lives with his wife, art historian Julia Sheehan, and their son Hamilton.

You are responsible, in a way, for rehabilitating Robert McNamara. And yet he still remains a troubling figure for many people, who criticize him for not speaking out during the Vietnam War about his growing doubts about the war — even after he left office in 1968. You must have a pretty good sense of the man by now. What prevented him from speaking out?

It’s a question that I certainly would like to answer, but I’m not sure I can answer. If it was a mystery when I started making this movie, it remains a mystery having finished the movie. McNamara was up in my office yesterday for a number of hours, and the issue comes up again and again and again and again: Why didn’t you speak out back then against the war in Vietnam? You talk to different people, they have different complaints about McNamara, different reasons why they hate him.

I know when I spoke to [Vietnam War correspondent] Frances Fitzgerald while I was making this movie, she said it was the fact that she would get off these transports from Vietnam at Andrews Air Force Base, where there would be crowds of reporters, and McNamara would say over and over again, “Things are improving. We’re winning the war” — when he knew otherwise. Basically, he lied to the American people, and possibly to himself. For other writers, like my friend Ron Rosenbaum, it’s the fact that he didn’t speak out after he left office in 1968. The fact that he continued to serve Johnson despite his doubts about the war, that’s maybe OK, but it’s not beyond the pale. What for him is beyond the pale is that he left in early ’68, and we all know that the war went on and on and on and on — ’69, ’70, ’71, ’72, ’73. And he still did not speak out. Fifty-eight thousand American dead, millions of Vietnamese, and there he was, safely ensconced as president of the World Bank. For him, that is inexcusable.

What do you feel?

You know, it depends on which day you ask me. Someone asked me this earlier today — that I should talk more about my father. My father died when I was 2 years old. I have no memories of my father. McNamara is perhaps the ultimate father figure. He was the father figure in some way for a generation. Maybe that’s making too much of it. But for me, having this relationship with him — and it is a relationship, it would be incorrect to claim otherwise — produces such a range of emotion for me. It’s not as if, say, close to 40 years later, I’ve come to love the Vietnam War, a war which I demonstrated against in the late ’60s and early ’70s. I found the war appalling then, I find the war appalling now, I’ve had no reason to change that view. That has been a constant.

It’s not only people on the left who are deeply disturbed by McNamara, of course. He’s also vilified by the right, who believe that he forced the military to fight with one hand tied behind its back, out of fear of widening the war.

Absolutely. As I point out often, McNamara got the hat trick. He’s hated by the left, the right and the center. Congratulations!

“The Fog of War” focuses of course on McNamara’s career, but I think it’s touched a public chord because the lessons of Vietnam resonate in Bush’s America. Was that your intention?

I started my interviews with McNamara well before 9/11, but as we worked on the film, I would show various sections of the movie, and eventually rough cuts of the movie, to different people, and they would constantly point out, “This is incredibly relevant … The movie should be out today.”

I don’t believe that history exactly repeats itself. That’s not the argument. History’s like the weather — it never exactly repeats itself. And there’s a danger in making inappropriate and false analogies, but it’s really hard to look at this story without seeing parallels, common themes. I think about why I was attracted to doing this movie with McNamara in the first place. One of the reasons most certainly is that his stories, whether he knows it clearly or not, his stories are about error, confusion, mistakes, self-deception, wishful thinking, false ideology. It’s a cornucopia of bad stuff, of human failings. And what’s so interesting is that in some form or another, we see them in play today.

You see in the film the story behind the imagined attack by the North Vietnamese on two U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin on Aug. 4, 1964. Never happened. We imagined it. We imagined something that wasn’t there. Sound familiar?

Another riveting section of your film deals with the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962, when McNamara says we were a hair’s breadth away from nuclear holocaust. It’s startling for people today to realize how close we were, and how hard-pressed Kennedy and his inner circle, including McNamara, were by the military hard-liners to go to war.

There’s an amazing moment if you listen to the recordings when the Joint Chiefs confront Kennedy. And it’s really, really, really frightening.

What do they say?

They’re basically saying that Kennedy should invade and bomb Cuba. And he should do it sooner rather than later. All he’s doing through delay is giving the Soviets more time to get ready to launch an attack on the United States. That delay is unconscionable, and that anything other than a military response is unconscionable. There’s a moment — you listen to the tapes, you can imagine what that scene must’ve been like — when Curtis LeMay [the famously zealous Air Force chief] says to Kennedy, “This is worse than Munich.”

And of course, he knew what a slap in the face that was to Kennedy, whose father, Joe, was considered a Nazi appeaser before World War II.

Yes, indeed. That is part of that story. Thank you very much.

How does Kennedy respond?

Kennedy does not respond. There’s silence. Kennedy says very little to the generals.

One of the things that really fascinates me about that moment, where LeMay says this is worse than Munich, is that it goes right back to a question you asked me at the beginning of our conversation about historical analogies. Iraq, Vietnam, Munich, the Cuban missile crisis, the danger of this sort of thing. But let’s look at the reality here.

First of all, the Kennedy administration had been given faulty information by the CIA. They had been told there were no Soviet warheads on Cuba. OK, so what should the president conclude? Perhaps the Joint Chiefs are absolutely right. Act sooner rather than later. Take out the missiles, take out the missile launchers and the missile sites before the warheads arrive. Although in fact several of those Joint Chiefs wanted to go a little further than Cuba, they wanted to go take out the Soviet Union and China as well. They had big appetites. But we now know that if LeMay and the other Joint Chiefs had had their way, and there was bombing and an invasion, the local Soviet commanders who had autonomy would have used those missiles with warheads against the United States. Can I say this with certainty? No. But was there a good likelihood if we invaded and bombed that they would reply? Yep. So that in this instance, “appeasement” averted a catastrophe. The analogy to Munich isn’t an analogy at all. People often make these analogies. What is Munich? It’s a way of calling a leader like Kennedy a candy-ass. And because of your weakness, because of your policies, everyone will have to suffer. It will lead to an even worse catastrophe than you can imagine. In this instance — wrong! The diplomatic solution proved to be the correct one.

So during the Cuban missile crisis, “The Fog of War” makes clear that the Kennedys and McNamara acted heroically, and by defying the generals, saved the world.

Yes. You know, I worry for many reasons about being seen as a McNamara apologist. But based on the research that I’ve done, I do not see McNamara in the same way I saw him years ago. I see him quite differently. I no longer see him as the chief architect of the war in Vietnam. I no longer see it the way that ["The Best and the Brightest" author] David Halberstam sees the Vietnam War, for instance, that it was the product of a bellicose McNamara and a vacillating Johnson. I believe it was the other way around. And I believe that McNamara, throughout the Cuban missile crisis, was a restraining force on the military. And helped keep us out of war.

Now I also believe that McNamara willingly implemented Johnson’s Vietnam policies. Why? Why is the question. If he was so opposed in Oct. 2, 1963, while Kennedy was still president, not just to the escalation of the war, but to our continued presence in Vietnam past 1965, how is it that he becomes the enabler in the Johnson administration? How the hell does this come to be? I have my answers. Are they conclusive answers? They aren’t. But it does go back to these questions of McNamara’s personal code of honor — if you’re rule-bound, when does loyalty to the public, when does loyalty to the republic, when does loyalty to the truth trump responsibility and loyalty to the president. As one Harvard historian, Peter Hall, very kindly said about my movie, it is one of the very few works of history — and he did consider it a work of history — that shows clearly the complexity of the decisions that people had to make.

Speaking of McNamara’s role as a restraining force on the military, it’s ironic — today, in the Bush administration, the situation is reversed. It’s the military commanders who are the voice of reason, and the civilians like Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz and the others who are the crazies.

They’re like cheerleaders. They’re out there with short skirts and pompoms and letter sweaters, urging the country into war. The one military leader in a civilian post in the Bush administration [Colin Powell] has been marginalized because of his reluctance to go to war. It’s ironic. It’s even funny in a grim sort of way. And it’s goddamn frightening.

But perhaps not as frightening as the Cuban missile crisis, when the entire world was on the brink.

Yes. And you don’t know whether it was a ploy, of course, a way to wring concessions from the Soviets. But in the middle of that crisis, Bobby Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador, Anatoly Dobrynin, that Moscow had to understand that if there is not some kind of resolution quickly to this, there is a risk of a coup in the U.S. The military will topple JFK. I like to say that we have come to realize that “Dr. Strangelove” is not a drama, it’s a documentary.

McNamara speaks most clearly about himself when he’s speaking about others. There’s a moment in my movie when Johnson gives McNamara the Medal of Freedom at his farewell ceremony and he’s unable to speak. And then in the movie he says what he would’ve said to Johnson if he had been able to speak. He would have said that people should understand that he had reasons for what he did. That there were people who wished for a war with the Soviet Union and Red China, and he was determined to prevent it. And if you like McNamara, if you’re sympathetic to him, it’s a key moment. If you hate him, if you dislike him, it is seen as one more pathetic excuse among many. But there’s a reason why General LeMay is in this movie so prominently, because he represents a dark part of American history that was there, it was real. This was not a figment of McNamara’s imagination. He knew all too well what he was dealing with.

The evening will be hosted by Salon founder and CEO David Talbot and will feature a panel discussion, including Dan Siegel, longtime Berkeley activist and former advisor to Oakland Mayor Jean Quan; Rebecca Solnit, author and expert on social movements; Terence Hallinan, former supervisor and district attorney of San Francisco; Matt Haney, executive director of the University of California Student Association; and Melanie Cervantes, activist-artist and co-founder of Dignidad Rebelde.

The evening will also feature stunning images captured at Bay Area occupations and Occupy Wall Street by photographers Mark Murmmann, Mia Nakano, Brian Nguyen, Robyn Twomey, Rafael Roy and Gretchen Robinette.

Admission is free, but seats are limited, and will be available on a first-come, first-served basis, with preference given to Salon Core members and their guests. Salon Core members can reserve seats for themselves and one guest by logging in and RSVP’ing here: https://sub.salon.com/premium.

All across America, the Occupy Wall Street movement has galvanized the long-abused American people. Now the movement is going beyond simply protesting the financial industry’s massive theft. People are taking concrete steps to reverse the historic shift of wealth to the 1 percent. Organizations like MoveOn deserve credit for kickstarting Bank Transfer Day, by declaring that “it’s time to make Wall Street pay in our communities,” and calling for a big day of protests outside local branches of Wall Street banks.

This is a good start. Now we need to extend the Bank Transfer idea, disinvesting not only from oppressive financial institutions, but from corporate politics and corporate media. American democracy has become thoroughly corrupted by the flood of corporate dollars and influence. Propelled by the obscene Supreme Court ruling on corporate campaign financing, spending during the 2012 campaign year will likely double over 2010 expenditures, skyrocketing to nearly $8 billion. The Republican Party is a wholly owned subsidiary of the 1 percent. And the Democrats are close behind, with President Obama charging close to $40,000 a plate on the campaign dinner trail. Real campaign finance reform is impossible, with corporate-controlled politicians in both parties blocking any substantive legislative efforts to clean up the system.

The 99 percent need to counter this deep corruption by withdrawing their campaign dollars from bought-and-paid-for politicians, and channeling these donations to new leaders who pledge to support the new declarations of independence that are now being put forward by the movement. We have seen the power of digital democracy and grass-roots fundraising. A full quarter of Obama’s campaign contributions in 2008 came from small donors. We’re the 99 percent. We need to harness our collective power. We can use this financial clout to punish candidates who are working against our interests, and to reward those who are fighting for us. When a political leader like New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo spits in the faces of the working people, students and Democratic activists who mobilized to elect him by opposing extension of the state’s millionaires’ tax — and has the utter gall to declare it a principled decision — we need to defund him. Our hard-earned money should go instead to those elected officials who regard the 99 percent as their constituency, not the Kochs and Trumps.

Those who want deep change in America also need to support the media organizations that are speaking truth to power and fairly covering the new social movements. Fox News is not the only media mouthpiece that has declared war on OWS. As Salon contributor Gary Kamiya recently pointed out, the daily newspaper in liberal San Francisco, of all places, has also been pounding out a relentless drumbeat of criticism against the Occupy movement. The San Francisco Chronicle has called for the mayors of San Francisco and Oakland to unleash the police against protesters, and when they wisely did not comply, the newspaper’s editorial page prayed for rain to wash out the tenacious encampments in those cities. The Hearst-owned Chronicle has no appreciation for the way real democracy functions. Democracy in the streets can be rough and dirty sometimes. But at long last it’s real. The mainstream media prefers the smooth-oiled machine of corporate-funded bipartisanship. But the times demand rougher strife. The 99 percent are not in a position to fly their congressional representatives to lobbyist-funded junkets in the Bahamas, so we must rely on a scruffier form of free speech to get Washington’s attention.

And now for the shameless self-promotion. Instead of subscribing to newspapers like the Chronicle that are dedicated to snuffing out this exciting experiment in democracy, citizens who want real change should consider subscribing to media like Salon — which demonstrated where its heart was recently by hooking up the OWS site in San Francisco to the Internet. Or donating to web sites like AlterNet, which did the same for OWS in New York. Or contributing to nonprofit online dailies like the Bay Citizen, if you’re looking for a wide and balanced spectrum of OWS coverage in the San Francisco area.

As Salon staff writer Andrew Leonard observed, we are witnessing the birth of an alternative America, with our own new financing mechanisms. We must also find ways to support a thriving independent media, because the fight for a new America will not just be won in the streets or in legislative halls — it will happen in the media clouds, where the battle for hearts and minds clangs loudly every day.

You can make sure that the voices of real democracy are heard. If you appreciate the powerful commentary of Glenn Greenwald and the street reporting of Justin Elliott and the many other columnists, reporters and editors who work hard to bring you Salon each day, then put your money where your heart is. Please join Salon Core today.

Now, six years after leaving Salon, I’ve decided to return as CEO, because I think the country needs a fighting, independent media more than ever.

Americans are deeply worried and dispirited. Three years ago, as the country slid into a bottomless recession, we rallied around a presidential candidate who promised real change, only to see him fall captive to the same forces of greed and endless war that have brought us to ruin. The alternatives presented by the Republican Party would only accelerate this national decline. We’re faced on the one side by a well-meaning but ineffectual leader who has waited far too late in his presidency to rally the people around the powerful themes of jobs and economic justice — and on the other side by GOP leaders who are competing to see how quickly they can dismantle the last decent vestiges of public life in America.

We can no longer wait for the country’s corporate-dominated political system to solve our problems. All of us know friends and family members who are in dire straits; many of us are barely clinging on, struggling to pay the bills and raise our children, while trying to give them a sense of hope for the future. The richest get even richer, the rest of us get poorer. The gap between the powerful and the powerless in America grows wider than ever.

In these increasingly hard times, Salon is dedicating itself to an American revival. Our editorial mission will become more explicitly and aggressively populist. We will be publishing more investigative pieces, exposing the shadow dance of power. And both Democratic and Republican targets will be fair game, since both parties are increasingly under the control of the same corporate forces.

Americans are in desperate need of a true crusader for their interests — not a phony Tea Party. Salon will fight tooth and claw for the beleaguered majority, exposing the machinations of oligarchy with rigorously reported, deep journalism.

For just two examples of this renewed Salon commitment to essential, original journalism, please see Mark Hertsgaard’s “Hellfire!” — on Rick Perry’s faith-based reaction to the inferno that is sweeping his state – and Brad Friedman’s “The $10.50 Voting Machine Hack” – on the frightening security gaps that could corrupt our electoral process.

Salon’s coverage will not be all gloom and doom. We will cover the people who are rebuilding America from the ground up — taking over their local schools, creating community gardens and food barter networks, launching green start-ups.

We’re inspired by Robert Kennedy, who — after failing to convince President Johnson to end the war in Vietnam — came back to his Senate office in a mood of dark despair about the fate of America. “Oh, to hell with it,” RFK told his young staff, with a new fire in his voice. “Let’s start our own country.”

It’s time to start our own country.

Last week I visited the young people who were camped out near the New York Stock Exchange, in protest against Wall Street’s reign of greed. They told me they had little to look forward to in today’s America. No jobs, a crushing load of student debt, and a political system that seems completely rigged against people like themselves. But they had not given up hope. Inspired by the social upheavals in the Arab world and the protests in Europe against rapacious financial elites, these young Americans are calling for their own “American Spring.”

Salon wholeheartedly embraces this process of national renewal. In coming months, we plan to hold a series of American Spring public events in cities near you, to discuss the future of our country. Our goal is nothing less than changing the conversation in America, which is now stuck in endless replay mode between cautious Democrats and zealous Republicans. There is nothing for us in the droning presidential debates and pre-packaged political chatter on TV. Real life is elsewhere. By changing the channel, Salon hopes to finally begin moving the country forward.

We can’t do this without you. To accomplish our mission, we need you to join our revived membership program. We know that the Salon community is the core of our strength. That’s why we will soon be relaunching our membership program as Salon Core.

In coming days, we will announce a compelling package of benefits for our new Salon Core members — as well as our loyal Salon Premium members. You can show your support right now by signing up here to get more information about Salon Core as soon as it’s available.

With your support, Salon will expand its hard-hitting coverage. We will also introduce new creative dimensions like Salon Studio, featuring original video portraits of life in America that you can’t see anywhere else. And next week, Salon E-Books will publish its first offering, the hilarious “A Tea People’s History,” by our own Alex Pareene. By the end of the year, Salon will look and feel like a much more dynamic creature, with a new burst of enterprising journalism as well as an exciting schedule of video and music programs — all offered on the Web and on various mobile platforms.

I look forward to working with you in the weeks and months to come. I know that together we can make a difference.