Spiegel Stuff: Presidents’ Day, V.F. Archives Edition

Michael Lewis on the Obama Way
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__OVAL TEAM__ The 44th president and historian Doris Kearns Goodwin share a West Wing tête-à-tête.

The Exit Interview

As his two-term presidency drew to a close, Barack Obama was looking back—at the legacies of his predecessors, as well as his own—and forward, to the freedom of life after the White House. In a wide-ranging conversation with Doris Kearns Goodwin, he talked about his ambitions, frustrations, and the decisions that haunted him.

The Reagan Marriage

From 1985: It’s the most public romance in the world. And the Reagans don’t mind who knows it. William F. Buckley Jr. writes about them and the night and the music.

Clinton and Women

Marjorie Williams wrote this piece at the height of Clinton’s troubles, in 1998, and noted that the president’s sordid entanglements drew barely a squeak of protest from the powerful writers, lawyers, activists, politicians, and academics who called themselves feminists.

The Historic Scoop

Three decades of intense speculation after he leaked key details of Nixon’s Watergate cover-up to Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the man they called “Deep Throat” revealed his identity in the pages of Vanity Fair.

The Flood That Sank George W. Bush

Iraq wasn’t the disaster that deep-sixed Dubya’s presidency; Katrina was. Ten years after the hurricane inundated New Orleans, Douglas Brinkley, the presidential historian and author of The Great Deluge, tallies the cost of an administration’s incompetence.