There’s something especially tragic about the death, in a car crash in Los Angeles, at the age of thirty-three, of Michael Hastings. He was the reporter who leaped to fame in 2010 with his article, published by Rolling Stone,
on General Stanley McChrystal, then the head of U.S. and allied forces
in Afghanistan. McChrystal and his staff were openly disrespectful of
President Obama, who had not been long in office and was still
struggling to assert authority over a military that, following George W.
Bush’s eight years in office and two wars, had been vastly empowered.
In an echo of previous high-profile dismissals of generals by
Presidents—MacArthur by Truman, Singlaub by Carter—Obama fired
McChrystal, and named General David Petraeus, then the head of U.S.
Central Command and McChrystal’s boss, to the job. In the unhappy
chronology that ensued, McChrystal ended up as a professor at Yale, and
Petraeus, soon promoted upward and outward from Afghanistan to the
directorship of the C.I.A., then lost his own job when it was revealed
he’d been having an affair.
Hastings won a George Polk Award for the McChrystal story, and wrote a book building on it, called “The Operators.”
He was also widely vilified by McChrystal’s crowd, and in some media
circles, for what was seen as breaking the unspoken rules about access
and, in doing so, damaging the career of McChrystal, seen by many in the
military-intelligence establishment as the right man for the job of
saving American from itself in the morass of Afghanistan. The question
of the trade-offs reporters make is a real one, though, and worth
confronting.
In any event, the Administration, after first escalating the American military presence in Afghanistan, now seems intent on ending it by 2014. Whether this would have turned out differently had McChrystal remained in charge is a question left to history. One of the many things one would have liked to know is how Hastings himself looked back on that chapter. He went on to write about drones, Petraeus, and Julian Assange, and to cover the Presidential campaign for BuzzFeed (and wrote another book about the experience, “Panic 2012”). There is a sense of loss, now, in thinking about where else his reporting—and his readiness to make noise amid agreed silences—would have taken him.
I met Hastings years ago, in Iraq. The last time I saw him was in 2010, when we were both at the White House for a joint press conference by Obama and Karzai. Just before, outside in the garden, Hastings and I were chatting in a friendly way, and I asked him what he was doing. Stepping forward, he told me in a discreet whisper that he was following General McChrystal around. Later, in the press conference—which proved to be a tense encounter between Obama and Karzai—I sat behind McChrystal, who, I observed, of all the top brass who sat in the front row (including Hillary Clinton, and others), stood out as the image of the earnest soldier, all bristling with nervous energy, back upright, listening intently to every word. It was just a few months before his downfall.
Hastings had also written a book about his experience in Iraq, that other great, disastrous war of the past decade. In “I Lost My Love in Baghdad,” Hastings wrote about how his fiancée, Andi Parhamovich, who had joined him in Iraq, where he was a reporter for Newsweek and she worked for the National Democratic Institute, was killed when a convoy she was in was attacked. For someone who lived so briefly, Hastings took away more than his share of personal suffering from our tragic wars. He found love again, marrying Elise Jordan, and was building a life with her. She and the rest of his family have all of our condolences today.
Photograph by Mikhail Galustov/Redux.
In any event, the Administration, after first escalating the American military presence in Afghanistan, now seems intent on ending it by 2014. Whether this would have turned out differently had McChrystal remained in charge is a question left to history. One of the many things one would have liked to know is how Hastings himself looked back on that chapter. He went on to write about drones, Petraeus, and Julian Assange, and to cover the Presidential campaign for BuzzFeed (and wrote another book about the experience, “Panic 2012”). There is a sense of loss, now, in thinking about where else his reporting—and his readiness to make noise amid agreed silences—would have taken him.
I met Hastings years ago, in Iraq. The last time I saw him was in 2010, when we were both at the White House for a joint press conference by Obama and Karzai. Just before, outside in the garden, Hastings and I were chatting in a friendly way, and I asked him what he was doing. Stepping forward, he told me in a discreet whisper that he was following General McChrystal around. Later, in the press conference—which proved to be a tense encounter between Obama and Karzai—I sat behind McChrystal, who, I observed, of all the top brass who sat in the front row (including Hillary Clinton, and others), stood out as the image of the earnest soldier, all bristling with nervous energy, back upright, listening intently to every word. It was just a few months before his downfall.
Hastings had also written a book about his experience in Iraq, that other great, disastrous war of the past decade. In “I Lost My Love in Baghdad,” Hastings wrote about how his fiancée, Andi Parhamovich, who had joined him in Iraq, where he was a reporter for Newsweek and she worked for the National Democratic Institute, was killed when a convoy she was in was attacked. For someone who lived so briefly, Hastings took away more than his share of personal suffering from our tragic wars. He found love again, marrying Elise Jordan, and was building a life with her. She and the rest of his family have all of our condolences today.
Photograph by Mikhail Galustov/Redux.
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