A book from beyond the grave, “The Last Magazine,” is haunting a number of Newsweek editors — who will recognize themselves as thinly veiled characters.
The manuscript was discovered in the files of Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings after he died a year ago in car crash in Los Angeles, a tragedy that has sparked growing conspiracy theories. Hastings, just 33 at the time of his death, is the reporter who destroyed the career of Gen. Stanley McChrystal in 2010, when he penned a profile that quoted the general and his staff mocking civilian government officials, including Vice President Joe Biden.
Hastings told friends he was on the verge of breaking another big scoop before his high-speed, post-midnight crash.
Former colleagues at Newsweek, where Hastings began his journalistic career as an intern, will recognize the book’s super-smooth international editor Nishant Patel as Fareed Zakaria, and fictional neo-con managing editor Sanders Berman as Jon Meacham.
The roman à clef chronicles how the two egotistical editors jockeyed for power while promoting themselves.
As one of Hastings’ colleagues told me, “Fareed was doing his TV show and Meacham was doing his books, while Newsweek was going down the drain.”
Zakaria told me he hadn’t read the book and had no comment. Meacham couldn’t be reached. But reporter Adam Piore fully embraces the idea that he is the basis for A.E. Peoria.
“I was slightly unhinged back when I worked alongside Mike — drinking, sneaking naps under my desk, and revealing way too much information about my personal life to anyone who would listen,” Piore wrote on Slate. “(Mike writes in the book that Peoria had a psychological condition called ‘CDD,’ or compulsive disclosure disorder.) I didn’t think anyone was paying attention. But apparently Mike was taking notes.”
Piore said Peoria’s most outrageous behavior came from Hastings’ imagination. “Peoria waves around naked pictures of his girlfriend, drops acid in Bangkok, gets a venereal disease and snorts cocaine in an airplane bathroom on the way back from Dubai … None of that was actually true.”