McChrystal scalp: a return to form for Rolling Stone

The trophy heads of Grub Street do not get much bigger than those of arrogant generals running wars, and the offices of an ageing hippy rag born in the Summer of Love might seem a strange place to be hanging that of Gen Stanley McChrystal.

Rolling Stone magazine first landed on the flower-and-pot strewn streets of San Francisco on November 7, 1967, with John Lennon sharing the front page with a story on the LSD-laced band Jefferson Airplane – headline 'Airplane High' – in a lay-out that looks surprisingly like today's Daily Mail.

To veteran readers with memories both long and intact, the McChrystal scoop is cause to hurry to the newsstands for the first time in years. These days Rolling Stone competes for shelf space among the music magazines with skin and bling, but to the oldsters McChrystal is a return to form.

It was founded by Jann Wenner, who got it going with $7,500 borrowed from his family. Wenner's idea was for a 'counter-culture' magazine. But it was not to be the same as the 'underground' press of the day, with Ramparts boasting exposes of CIA misbehaviour and nurturing Black Panthers in the USA, and OZ magazine cocking a snook in the UK.

It worked. By the mid-70s, Rolling Stone was part of the media landscape, as much a scourge of malefactors on high as the New York Times or the Washington Post in Watergate mode.

Today the circulation hovers at 1.4 million, bi-weekly, and Wenner is still the publisher and editor-in-chief. Its offices long ago moved to New York.

Michael Hastings, author of the McChrystal piece, says he had no idea his story would doom the general. "I thought he was unfireable," he told the Guardian this week. "I honestly thought it would be a three-day headache, maybe at best."

But he also alludes to one of Rolling Stone's original virtues – being outside the mainstream press. McChrystal had got away with it for months because the usual embedded correspondents had "totally drunk the Kool-Aid".

Wenner started from the outside looking in with his biggest star, Hunter S. Thompson. He wrote Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas for Rolling Stone, and followed it with his merciless attack on American politics, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail.

Tom Wolfe wrote The Brotherhood of the Right Stuff for Rolling Stone. Ralph Steadman illustrated with unmatched savagery, and Annie Leibowitz took photographs. P.J. O'Rourke went on his Holidays in Hell, from Beirut to Manilla, Lester Bangs established himself as the doyen of rock criticism, and a teenage Cameron Crowe went on the road with the bands.

Howard Kohn's investigation into the suspicious death of Karen Silkwood, agitator at an Oklahoma nuclear energy plant, put Rolling Stone on the top table of investigative journalism.

All that seems a long time ago. Vintage Rolling Stone was laid in its grave by none other than its most celebrated star, Hunter Thompson, when he reacted to a feature on the dangers of pot-smoking with a tirade accusing Wenner of treachery to the magazine's cultural base.

The days of the American media speaking truth to power were anyway pretty much over by then.

There have been signs, however, that Rolling Stone has been rediscovering its voice. In May, 2008, it went undercover to expose the cynicism of evangelical mega-churches under the headline 'Jesus Makes Me Puke'.

And it returned to the glory days of mud-slinging vernacular when it described Goldman Sachs, just then beggaring the global economy, as a "vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity relentlessly jabbing its blood funnel into anything that smells like money".

Funny how much of America, not to mention the rest of the world, has come to agree. Presidents, as well as their paymasters and generals, should take note.

And today, when the McChrystal story finally hits the streets in old-time ink on paper, I for one will be going out to buy Rolling Stone. ·