Todd S. Purdum

When national editor Todd S. Purdum sought to reconstruct the tumultuous events of eight years of the Bush administration, he wasn’t surprised to break new ground. “However bad you thought things were as the events unfolded,” he says, “you find out later, after talking to the participants, that things were always much worse.” The candid recollections in “Farewell to All That,” page 88, co-authored by editor-at-large Cullen Murphy, were no exception.

Cullen Murphy

History is sometimes teased out of dark crannies—but just as often it lies all but forgotten in plain sight. That was the assumption behind “Farewell to All That,” a walk down not-so-happy-memory lane with some 40 Bush-administration veterans and foreign diplomats. Editor-at-large Cullen Murphy teamed up with national editor Todd S. Purdum to conduct the interviews. “Each big new drama of the Bush administration,” says Murphy, “has a way of pushing the previous big drama into the shadows. The experience of going back to 2001 and marching forward again was an eye-opener—even startling.”

Bethany McLean

Bethany McLean, who joined V.F. as a contributing editor last year, wrote a 2005 article for Fortune called “The Fall of Fannie Mae.” This month, in “Fannie Mae’s Last Stand” (page 118), McLean investigates the mortgage giant’s eventual demise. Given the hard line she took against Fannie Mae in 2005, in the wake of a major accounting scandal, “I was more sympathetic to Fannie than I had expected to be,” McLean says. “Stories are always easier with a hero and a villain, but this one is not so black-and-white— and there are no heroes.”

Todd Eberle

For photographer-at-large Todd Eberle, shooting Andre Balazs and his newest hotel, the Standard New York, was a welcome change of pace from his often far-flung assignments. In fact, Eberle had to venture just blocks from his studio on West 14th Street. The chilly temperatures, however, presented more difficulty. “It was 20 degrees out when I photographed Andre,” Eberle says. As for his impression of Balazs’s latest property, “I think it’s going to become an icon.”