The real War Machine: how 'the wimps in the White House' took down General Stanley McChrystal

The sensational takedown of a glittering military career by a 30-year-old journalist developed a Hollywood twist after Hastings died in a car crash three years later. 

Hastings’ death fuelled a ton of conspiracy theories, not helped by the revelation – from that other anti-establishment journalist, Jason Leopold – that the FBI had opened a file on him, and a statement by respected former US assistant secretary of state Richard Clarke that his death was “consistent with a car cyber attack”. His friends and family played down any suspicion of foul play, but Hastings’ legend had already been set in stone. 

David Michod’s film is a kind of fun-house mirror of the saga, taking the bones of the story and fleshing it out into a hit-and-miss satire with Brad Pitt playing fictional General Glen McMahon.

Those expecting any new insights into the story will be disappointed – Michod declined to contact McChrystal or his aides, did not have access to any of Hastings’ friends or notes, and does not attempt to tackle his subsequent death.

Instead what’s presented is a reflection of the story, with some scenes lifted wholesale from Hastings’ book, and with Brad Pitt cutting an altogether arguably more sympathetic figure than Hastings’ portrayal of a braying, swaggering General suggests.

“I wanted creative wiggle room,” Michod said. “I also didn’t want it to be boxed into a Stan McChrystal biopic. I wanted the movie to be about a larger machine. 

“One of the things that struck me about Michael’s book, even though Michael’s book isn’t satire, its potential for satirical adaptation seemed incredibly fertile and it was as soon as I knew that that was the road I wanted to take I knew I wanted to build a character that was way larger than any imitation of Stan McChrystal, and I wanted to create a character that carried within him a self-imagining of a World War II General.”

Whether Michod was successful is less certain – reviews have not been favourable to Glen McMahon, his and Pitt’s creation. Telegraph reviewer Robbie Collin described him as “an unintelligible bundle of hollow rhetoric and clownish tics” and said that Pitt “spends the entire film waddling around like a chimpanzee with a congenital squint and a mouthful of walnuts”.

But Michod insisted that there was no legal reason for opting for satire and avoiding naming McChrystal directly.

“I didn’t want to do a personal evisceration of him,” he said. “[And] it’s also for creative reasons. I knew that in order for me to mine the potential for absurdity that was there that I needed to create a character that was very different from the real Stan McChrystal. So often these modern military commanders present as quite buttoned down and they lack the kind of, the bellicosity and the braggadocio of those old [General Douglas] MacArthur [or General George S.] Patten types.”

That the film has received some patchy reviews seems to make Michod’s deviation from reality all the more tricky to justify. McChrystal in Hastings’ hands was already a sufficiently outrageous character, seemingly acting with impunity. 

McChrystal’s appointment in 2009 followed three decades at the Pentagon as a member of the Joint Staffs. He was therefore largely unknown to outsiders, but was heralded as a “true warrior”, credited with hunting down and killing the leader of al-Qaida in Iraq.

He immediately clashed with Obama over Afghanistan policy, requesting an additional 40,000 troops at a time when the president was attempting to wind down the military intervention. When the president refused, McChrystal’s grim August 2009 assessment of the conflict was leaked to legendary journalist Bob Woodward of the Washington Post.

In War Machine Pitt comically implies that McMahon was personally responsible for the leak. This was never established in real life, of course. But it's true that McChrystal followed up the story with a series of incendiary interviews flatly rejecting then-vice president Joe Biden’s preference for drone strikes and special-ops over boots on the ground.

Some of these interviews took place in London. In October 2009, a couple of weeks after the leak, he told the International Institute of Strategic Studies that Biden’s formula would lead to “Chaos-istan”.

As a divide opened up between the military and the White House, a narrative took hold that without a vast ground force, the Afghan mission would fail. McChrystal’s hardball tactics seemed to have worked. Obama committed 30,000 additional troops.

So in many respects the stage was already set for a showdown by the time Hastings showed up to write his profile of Stanley McChrystal.

A volcanic ashcloud during a stopover in Paris provided the crucible for many of McChystal’s most damaging comments, forcing him and his aides to remain in Paris where they become bored and allegedly began drinking heavily. In Hastings’ work, McChrystal is as braying and offensive as the rest of his team – but in the film his portrayal is arguably more sympathetic. A famous scene from the article, for instance, where McChrystal pretends not to know Joe Biden, is absent.

Hastings is a peripheral character, but one scene alludes to a duplicitousness, which subsequently invited much debate of on the record/off the record. Lady Gaga’s Poker Face is playing as Hastings watches McChrystal’s aides make fools out of themselves and chant “USA! USA!” in a bar – at the same time as telling McChrystal what a “privilege” it is to be there.

And although the film never tackles Hastings’ death, one line seems to foreshadow it, when one of McChrystal’s aides tell Hastings: “I better like what it is you’re writing”.

Michod says he has no opinions on the circumstances of Hastings’ death, but adds that he regrets not meeting him. “Even just to have one conversation with him would have been good for me,” he said.

Following the publication of the article, the response was swift. Obama summoned McChrystal to his office and fired him. The mainstream media reacted with a mix of praise and incredulity. Some sniffily panned Hastings’ subsequent book The Operators, such as The Wall Street Journal, stating that Hastings had “not invested the effort required to comprehend the war's complexities.”

But the factual accuracy of the content was never disputed, and the truth is that without Hastings, McChrystal would never have been so exposed. His Rolling Stone article therefore stands forever as a monument to the role of journalists as insurgents, pricking the ego of the establishment. 

In one final blow to McChrystal, the cover of the magazine that would destroy his career was not the four-star General himself after all. It was Lady Gaga, in a bra, wielding two assault rifles.