Michael Mahon Hastings (January 28, 1980 – June 18, 2013) was an American journalist, author, contributing editor to Rolling Stone, and reporter for BuzzFeed. He was raised in New York, Canada, and Vermont, and he attended New York University. Hastings rose to prominence with his coverage of the Iraq War for Newsweek in the 2000s. After his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich was killed in an ambush, Hastings wrote his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008), a memoir about his relationship with Parhamovich and the insurgency that took her life.
He received the George Polk Award for "The Runaway General" (2010), a Rolling Stone profile of General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article documented the widespread contempt for civilian government officials exhibited by the general and his staff and ultimately resulted in McChrystal's resignation. Hastings followed up with The Operators (2012), a detailed account of his monthlong stay with McChrystal in Europe and Afghanistan.
Hastings became a vocal critic of the Obama administration, Democratic Party, and surveillance state during the 2013 Department of Justice investigations of reporters, referring to restrictions of freedom of the press as a "war" on journalism.Uygur, Cenk. (June 23, 2013). "Michael Hastings and The War on Journalism". The Young Turks. His last story, "Why Democrats Love to Spy On Americans", was published by BuzzFeed on June 7, 2013."Why Democrats Love To Spy On Americans", buzzfeed.com, June 7, 2013.Stebner, Beth. (June 19, 2013). "Michael Hastings conspiracy theories: Web goes wild after NSA, CIA reporter killed in crash", Daily News; accessed April 11, 2015.
Hastings died in an automobile crash on June 18, 2013, in Los Angeles, California. The toxicology report showed evidence of THC (level 12 ng/ml) and amphetamine positivity. Blue Rider Press published his only novel, The Last Magazine (2014), a year after his death.Garner, Dwight (June 17, 2014). War's Hell, Especially for Editors. The New York Times; retrieved June 17, 2014.
Early life and family Born in Malone, New York, Michael was the son of Molly (née Mahon) and Brent Hastings. Hastings had two brothers, Jon and Jeff.Michael Hastings obituary, legacy.com; accessed April 11, 2015. Hastings lived in Malone until he was 11 years old. His family then moved to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, where his mother was trained in the field of pediatric ophthalmology at McGill University.Hurlburt, Casey (November 11, 2010). "Vermonter Michael Hastings on the cover of the RollingStone", vermontbiz.com; accessed April 11, 2015. He attended Lower Canada College, a private preparatory high school in Montreal, where he wrote a column for the school's paper.
When he was 16, his family relocated to Vermont. He attended Rice Memorial High School, a Roman Catholic secondary school in South Burlington, Vermont. In high school Hastings was elected as class president, where he ran on an "anti-administration platform". He played lacrosse and soccer, and performed in the school's plays before graduating in 1998.Silverman, Adam (June 21, 2013). , burlingtonfreepress.com; accessed April 11, 2015. After graduating, Hastings wrote for Scholastic, an educational magazine for young adults. He attended Connecticut College before earning his Bachelor of Arts in journalism from New York University in 2002.
Hastings married journalist Elise Jordan in May 2011 in Holly Springs, Mississippi.
Career Hastings began his journalism career as an unpaid intern for Newsweek magazine in 2002, and he was also a regular contributor to Gentlemen's Quarterly and a contributing editor at Rolling Stone magazine.Hack: Confessions of a Presidential Campaign Reporter, GQ, October 2008.
I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story (2008) In 2005, Hastings began covering the Iraq War while living in NATO-occupied Green Zones in Baghdad. Hastings suffered the loss of his fiancée Andrea Parhamovich in 2007. A former spokeswoman for Air America, Parhamovich moved to Baghdad and began working for the National Democratic Institute. She died after her convoy was ambushed by gunmen, killing Parhamovich and her three security guards. Hastings wrote a book on the incident, titled I Lost My Love in Baghdad: A Modern War Story. (interview with the author) Shortly before its publication, Newsweek published an excerpt of the book, in which Hastings recounts the day Parhamovich died.Hastings, Michael. "I'm Sorry We Couldn't Do More", Newsweek, March 29, 2008. The New York Times gave the book a mixed review.Packer, George. "What She Did For Love", The New York Times, April 20, 2008.
Stanley McChrystal interview In June 2010, Rolling Stone published "The Runaway General", Hastings's profile of U.S. Army general Stanley McChrystal, then commander of NATO's International Security Assistance Force in the Afghanistan war. The article reported remarks by McChrystal's staff that were overtly critical and contemptuous of White House staff and other civilian officials. On June 22, news of the forthcoming article reached the attention of the American print media and the White House. McChrystal immediately issued an extensive apology, and Duncan Boothby, the civilian contractor responsible for coordinating the article with Hastings, resigned. U.S. President Barack Obama summoned McChrystal to the White House on June 23, and relieved him of command. Hastings offered his views on relations between McChrystal and the Obama administration.
Hastings was originally meant to have controlled contact, which expanded when he had to catch a bus to Berlin with the general and his entourage after international flights were grounded, because of the air travel disruptions caused by the 2010 eruptions of Eyjafjallajökull, which gave him sufficient time to pick up less discreet remarks. How Hastings got access to McChrystal's inner circles is detailed in a Newsweek article. The Huffington Post named Hastings a 2010 Game Changer for his reporting, along with Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone. Hastings was awarded a Polk Award for his reporting.Greenwald, Glenn (February 27, 2011) The military/media attacks on the Hastings article, Salon.com; accessed April 11, 2015.
Hastings and Eric Bates, executive editor of Rolling Stone, repeatedly defended the accuracy of Hastings's article about McChrystal. In July 2010, the U.S. Army launched its own investigation into whether McChrystal and his team were insubordinate, and concluded that the most inflammatory comments were made by an officer in the Navy Special Warfare Group, according to The New York Times. This was later confirmed in Hastings's book about the war in Afghanistan that was published in January 2012, The Operators, which attributed a number of damning quotes to Lt. Commander Dave Silverman, now CEO of the McChrystal Group. A subsequent Pentagon investigation challenged the accuracy of Hastings's article "The Runaway General" which anonymously quoted people around McChrystal making disparaging remarks about members of President Obama's national security team, including Vice President Joe Biden. The report from the inquiry states "In some instances, we found no witness who acknowledged making or hearing the comments as reported. In other instances, we confirmed that the general substance of an incident at issue occurred, but not in the exact context described in the article." In response, Rolling Stone stated, "The report by the Pentagon's inspector general offers no credible sourceor indeed, any named sourcecontradicting the facts as reported in our story, 'The Runaway General.'"
In an interview with Matt Lauer of NBC's Today show on June 23, 2011, Hastings said "I did not think Gen. McChrystal would be fired. In fact, I thought his position was basically untouchable, I thought it would give them a headache for maybe 72 hours".
In February 2011, Hastings wrote a lengthy article profiling McChrystal's successor, General David Petraeus, and detailing Petraeus's strategy for the war.
The Operators (2012)
In January 2012, Hastings published The Operators, a book that details his travels with General Stanley McChrystal and his team in April 2010. It included extensive quotations from over 20 hours of audio recordings of McChrystal and his inner circle. The Daily Beast called it a "book of great consequence... The Operators seems destined to join the pantheon of great GWOT literature". Reviewer Mark Moyar slammed the book in The Wall Street Journal writing, "In contrast to many of the other correspondents covering Afghanistan, Mr. Hastings has not invested the effort required to comprehend the war's complexities." However, the Journal failed to disclose that Mark Moyar was a consultant for the U.S. military, who worked for General Petraeus and General Caldwell. The book became a New York Times bestseller.
Hastings recounted conversations with some of McChrystal's staff members in the book, when during a party at which everyone was "totally shit faced", one asked him, "You're not going to fuck us, are you?" and another stating, "We'll hunt you down and kill you if we don't like what you write". Hastings interpreted the drunken comments as a joke.
Other reporting
Panic 2012: The Sublime and Terrifying Inside Story of Obama's Final Campaign was released as a downloadable e-book on popular formats and recounted Hasting's follies for access along President Barack Obama's incumbent race for re-election. The account notably includes a profile of press secretary Jay Carney, describing Carney as having "a serious, $10,000-a-day habit of following presidents around the country and the world", along with a published feud with White House aide Philippe Reines, a post-election spat with Rahm Emanuel, and other attempts of gaining deeper access. The script was published by Penguin/Blue Rider Press on January 5, 2013.
Occupy Wall Street movement In February 2012, in partnership with WikiLeaks, Hastings and Rolling Stone reported that the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had been keeping tabs on the Occupy Wall Street movement. An October 2011 report named "Special Coverage: Occupy Wall Street," the DHS wrote that "mass gatherings associated with public protest movements can have disruptive effects on transportation, commercial, and government services, especially when staged in major metropolitan areas." Hastings criticized the DHS report, which concluded, "The continued expansion of these protests also places an increasingly heavy burden on law enforcement and movement organizers to control protesters."
Bowe Bergdahl: America's Last Prisoner of War In June 2012, Hastings wrote an article about the struggles of Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, who was captured by the Taliban when he walked off his Army base in Afghanistan in 2009 after being disillusioned with the war.
In an interview with MSNBC anchor Alex Wagner, Hastings discussed his article and said, "There are elements within the Pentagon who don't want to make the trade for Bowe Bergdahl".
A White House official subsequently responded to these allegations by informing Hastings that "details of Sergeant Bergdahl's capture are irrelevant". Bowe Bergdahl was traded for five Taliban prisoners in June 2014.
President Obama's foreign policy Hastings was a longtime critic of the U.S. drone program. In May 2013, Hastings denounced President Barack Obama's foreign policy and use of drones as an embrace of Bush-era neoconservatism and "total militarism." Hastings said that Obama "enshrines killing people and spying on journalists as the two major tenets of his national-security state." During the discussion, Hastings said that MSNBC contributor Perry Bacon Jr., was acting as a "stenographer" for the White House.
Death